David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Seriously. There is another thing that happens in the 90s that we have to talk about on this episode and happened way earlier in Ingvar’s life. But this is the moment where it really intersects the IKEA story. The news comes out that in his youth, Ingvar was a part of a Nazi and fascist movement in Sweden, which in some ways is not surprising. His grandparents had immigrated from Germany, had very strong feelings, had lived this horrible life. Ingvar very much looked up to his grandma and looked to her for political, moral, social guidance. Unfortunately, Ingvar was a part of this Swedish fascist movement. It was provable that he was attending meetings, helping to organize, raised funds, recruited members. He stayed close to this Swedish leader even after the war. In as late as 1950 wrote a letter that he was proud of his involvement. The net of all this is in 1994 when this came out, he immediately came out and said that his fascist activities were a part of my life which I bitterly regret, and the most stupid mistake of my life. He was direct about it. In fact, the first employee of IKEA was a Jewish refugee who had fled Austria in 1943. There’s a lot of complex stuff going around here. But the thing that is definitely admitted to proven is that he was a recruiter-organizer for this Swedish fascist movement during the Nazi regime. The extent of his involvement in the Swedish fascist movement after the war actually didn’t come out then in the 90s, came out later in the 2000s. Ingvar, I think rightly took a lot of flack for not fully disclosing how long that went on. He had a friendship with the Swedish fascist party leader who would go on to be this pretty horrible vocal holocaust denier. Ingvar maintained that friendship and even at the end of his life went on the record and said this person was a great man. On the one hand you want to say, look, he apologized and it was 50 years earlier and he was 17 at the time. Can’t a person make a mistake when they were younger and admit a mistake and move on? On the other hand, you could imagine wanting to give him more forgiveness if he hadn’t continued to stand by the Holocaust, deny or [...] maintain that friendship.…

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