Sweden's Queen Silvia to probe family Nazi links

Queen Silvia and her relatives are set to investigate reports of her father's alleged links with Nazism.

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“The Queen will use her contacts in Germany and Brazil," royal spokesman Bertil Ternert told newsagency TT. The results of this research will be officially published, he added.

According to widely spread reports, the Queen's father, Walther Sommerlath, who died in 1990, joined the Nazi party in 1934.

Last year a TV4 documentary series Kalla Fakta (The Cold Facts) reported a widely rumoured story that on his return from Brazil, as part of the so-called Aryanisation of Jewish assets in Germany in 1939, he took over a factory which was owned by a Jew.

Silvia, who has previously made public her desire to be more open with the press reacted angrily to the revelations in the documentary and replied with a private letter of complaint to Jan Scherman, who was general manager of the television channel at the time.

She denied her father was ever politically active or even in the military and Sommerlath continued to deny the allegations and any membership in the Nazi Party up untll his death.

Silva has been criticised widely in the press for not clarifying the stories which have refused to go away, so the news that she now wants to make a full investigation of the links between Germany and Brazil as well as between the Jewish family and her own will come as quite a surprise.

“The difficulty is that this happened over 70 years ago, there has been a World War in between and so much is incomplete. However the Queen would still like to make an effort to produce as clear picture as is possible,” said Ternert.