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Another notable Swede is Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who issued Swedish passports and sheltered thousands of Jews in Budapest https://en.wikipedia.org/

Another notable Swede is Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who issued Swedish passports and sheltered thousands of Jews in Budapest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg . He disappeared and died in Russian captivity. (Random lighthearted fact: because his exact date of death is disputed, Google's AI summary in the search results tells me his age is 113.) On another scale, Carl Gustaf von Rosen was a Swedish count who defended Biafra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_von_Rosen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_von_Rosen

Podrod 1y ago
I have the AI summary stuff disabled but the regular Google infobox tells me he died in 1947 aged 34. Kinda amusing how the AI disagrees. von Rosen and the Biafran Air Force is quite fascinating.
mamonster 1y ago
The craziest one to me is still that Fridtjof Nansen's main sidekick in helping Armenian refugees was .... Vidkun Quisling.
- vintermann 1y ago
  It's not so surprising. Nansen was conservative-ish politically. Seeing the effects of the famine in Ukraine radicalized Quisling as a fanatical anti-socialist. He also married a Ukrainian woman (bigamously, but that's another story). As a fanatical anti-socialist in the 20s-30s he fell in with the wrong crowd. Who knows if Nansen too would have, if he had lived to see the rise of Hitler. Probably not, as he was usually fairly ambivalent about politics, but it wouldn't have been terribly surprising either.
GardenLetter27 1y ago
Crazy how awful the Russians were - same with Josef Bryks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Bryks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Bryks And yet a lot of young people somehow think they were good guys.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  > And yet a lot of young people somehow think they were good guys. Reality is really context dependent, and with lots of nuance. Obviously being anti-fascist and helped out taking down the Nazis makes you more of a "good guy" than "bad guy" for that specific moment, but obviously that doesn't mean the USSR or Russia is exclusively the "good guys" always, which goes the same for every country out there. Where are you finding these young people praising the USSR though? It always seems like a talking point from conservatives on the internet, as I'm never able to find these elusive USSR-praisers in real-life. There is a ton of people ironically saying they love USSR, but surely these are not the people you're talking about?
  - stefantalpalaru 1y ago
    [dead]
  - Amezarak 1y ago
    The USSR was one of the most authoritarian regimes in world history. They killed millions of people. They invaded Poland together with the Nazis, which was the start of WWII. I have no idea what was bad about the fascists that wasn't equally true of the Soviets - the underlying systems of thought and actions were essentially the same. There is no sense in which I can see the Soviets were the "good guys." They were simply allies of convenience, and the net result of the war was that half of Europe was handed over to them and lived under this horrific regime.
    - hagbard_c 1y ago
      I'd like to hear from the individuals who downvoted this post why they did so as it seems to be factually correct.
    - Hikikomori 1y ago
      >The USSR was one of the most authoritarian regimes in world history. They killed millions of people. They invaded Poland together with the Nazis, which was the start of WWII. Trumps America soon: hold my beer
bjourne 1y ago
Maybe my perspective is slanted, but it seems that nobility was way more badass back then. Nowadays they just hide out in Saint-Tropez, Monaco, or chill on their yachts and don't care much about the world.
- krapp 1y ago
  I think your perspective is slanted. 99% of nobility were materialistic, detached (and probably inbred) sociopaths, just like 99% of billionaires and heads of state today.
southernplaces7 1y ago
"Von Rosen's happiness with his second wife, Hanny, ended with the outbreak of World War II. She joined the resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau in Germany. After the war, she committed suicide[citation needed] in 1949." What a bizarre way of phrasing things. His happiness with his second wife ended with the outbreak of the war? They say this specific thing as if they were referring to some marital breach, not seeing their time together be destroyed through arrest by a genocidally monstrous secret police agency, internment in one of its concentration camps and later suicide, probably from the trauma of surviving those two events. Yes, such a thing will destroy.... marital happiness, to say the least.
- defrost 1y ago
  > What a bizarre way of phrasing things. Given the subject there's a good chance that phrasing was written by someone with English as a second or third language and European 'good enough' pidgin English grammar. If it grates on you excessively there's always the option of editing the paragraph.
  - southernplaces7 1y ago
    grate? Nah, just amusing enough to mention.

Podrod 1y ago

I have the AI summary stuff disabled but the regular Google infobox tells me he died in 1947 aged 34. Kinda amusing how the AI disagrees. von Rosen and the Biafran Air Force is quite fascinating.

mamonster 1y ago

The craziest one to me is still that Fridtjof Nansen's main sidekick in helping Armenian refugees was .... Vidkun Quisling.

vintermann 1y ago
It's not so surprising. Nansen was conservative-ish politically. Seeing the effects of the famine in Ukraine radicalized Quisling as a fanatical anti-socialist. He also married a Ukrainian woman (bigamously, but that's another story). As a fanatical anti-socialist in the 20s-30s he fell in with the wrong crowd. Who knows if Nansen too would have, if he had lived to see the rise of Hitler. Probably not, as he was usually fairly ambivalent about politics, but it wouldn't have been terribly surprising either.

GardenLetter27 1y ago

Crazy how awful the Russians were - same with Josef Bryks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Bryks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Bryks And yet a lot of young people somehow think they were good guys.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> And yet a lot of young people somehow think they were good guys. Reality is really context dependent, and with lots of nuance. Obviously being anti-fascist and helped out taking down the Nazis makes you more of a "good guy" than "bad guy" for that specific moment, but obviously that doesn't mean the USSR or Russia is exclusively the "good guys" always, which goes the same for every country out there. Where are you finding these young people praising the USSR though? It always seems like a talking point from conservatives on the internet, as I'm never able to find these elusive USSR-praisers in real-life. There is a ton of people ironically saying they love USSR, but surely these are not the people you're talking about?
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago
  [dead]
- Amezarak 1y ago
  The USSR was one of the most authoritarian regimes in world history. They killed millions of people. They invaded Poland together with the Nazis, which was the start of WWII. I have no idea what was bad about the fascists that wasn't equally true of the Soviets - the underlying systems of thought and actions were essentially the same. There is no sense in which I can see the Soviets were the "good guys." They were simply allies of convenience, and the net result of the war was that half of Europe was handed over to them and lived under this horrific regime.
  - hagbard_c 1y ago
    I'd like to hear from the individuals who downvoted this post why they did so as it seems to be factually correct.
  - Hikikomori 1y ago
    >The USSR was one of the most authoritarian regimes in world history. They killed millions of people. They invaded Poland together with the Nazis, which was the start of WWII. Trumps America soon: hold my beer

bjourne 1y ago

Maybe my perspective is slanted, but it seems that nobility was way more badass back then. Nowadays they just hide out in Saint-Tropez, Monaco, or chill on their yachts and don't care much about the world.

krapp 1y ago
I think your perspective is slanted. 99% of nobility were materialistic, detached (and probably inbred) sociopaths, just like 99% of billionaires and heads of state today.

southernplaces7 1y ago

"Von Rosen's happiness with his second wife, Hanny, ended with the outbreak of World War II. She joined the resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau in Germany. After the war, she committed suicide[citation needed] in 1949." What a bizarre way of phrasing things. His happiness with his second wife ended with the outbreak of the war? They say this specific thing as if they were referring to some marital breach, not seeing their time together be destroyed through arrest by a genocidally monstrous secret police agency, internment in one of its concentration camps and later suicide, probably from the trauma of surviving those two events. Yes, such a thing will destroy.... marital happiness, to say the least.

defrost 1y ago
> What a bizarre way of phrasing things. Given the subject there's a good chance that phrasing was written by someone with English as a second or third language and European 'good enough' pidgin English grammar. If it grates on you excessively there's always the option of editing the paragraph.
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  grate? Nah, just amusing enough to mention.