Prisoner Exchange

It was while doing research for a guide book that I discovered the first exchange of prisoners in the Second World War took place in Sweden's west coast port city of Gothenburg. If you had been at the right quay on 19 October 1943, you would have seen the swastika and Union Jack flying side by side!

Looking for the exact spot where this ocurred, I asked two elderly gentlemen sitting near the waterfront if they could help me. Miraculously, one of them told me, “I was there!” He had been a small boy living in a building overlooking the quay and saw what was happening.

Gothenburg, in neutral Sweden, was decided on after much bargaining under the good offices of Switzerland, likewise a neutral country. Details were settled between the two sides at a hotel in town, with the Swedish Red Cross given responsibility for the technical arrangements.

The manageress of the hotel told me she had once spoken to a woman who worked there at the time. The staff had not been informed about what was going on and were alarmed to hear men greeting each other with the Nazi salute, thinking the city must have been occupied.

The owner of the hotel was placed in a most difficult position when the German envoy demanded that he fly the swastika together with the other flags on the building. The solution was to take down all the hotel flagpoles so that unlike at the quayside, no flags were flown at all.

In all, more than 5,000 prisoners were exchanged that day, a large majority of them on the allied side. Most were severely injured and many had been in captivity since the earliest action on the western front. The elderly gentleman I spoke to said he remembered it as clearly as though it were “yesterday” as so many of the men were in a sorry state with only one arm or leg. However, they were doubtlessly delighted to be going home.

They arrived by train and boat, the Germans coming from England in a hospital ship and a troop transport, while conferences between officers on both sides were held on board the Swedish-American Line’s ‘Drottningholm’, which in happier times eight years earlier had taken Greta Garbo (whose original name was Gustafsson) across the Atlantic, where she became one of Hollywood's leading, if enigmatic, stars.

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