On the Far Right Past of Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of Ikea

I once met Ingvar Kamprad, the Ikea founder. It was in August 2010 at Ikea’s head office, in the small town of Almhult, Sweden. (The address is 1 Ikea Street.) I was writing a book about his closest friend, Otto Ullman—a Jewish refugee from Austria hired as a farmhand by the Kamprad family during the war—and had asked for a meeting. Once we’d introduced ourselves, Mr. Kamprad took hold of me by the waist, as if we were on the dance floor and he wanted to check out my figure. Then we sat down, my recorder went on, and an interview of two and a half hours began.

It is hard to overstate the size of Mr. Kamprad’s empire. Stepping off the train at the Almhult station, you have two pedestrian bridges to choose from: one takes you into the town itself, with a population of around 10,000; the other takes you to Ikea—or, to be more precise, to the Ikea Hotel, Ikea Tillsammans (a cultural centre), the Ikea Museum, and the Ikea Test Lab, along with a sprawling complex of corporate departments. And while most of the world knows Ikea solely for its inexpensive furniture and giant blue stores, in Sweden its image is inextricable from the life of Ingvar Kamprad. In the museum, design history intermingles with family snapshots.

As with the bridges at Almhult, there are also two ways into the Ikea story. One is uplifting and inspirational: a young man from a modest background, but with more than the usual dose of business acumen, builds an empire. Although the hero of the story makes the occasional mistake, that is precisely what makes him human and such a treasured symbol of Swedishness. The other way leads from Mr. Kamprad’s childhood and adolescence in a Hitler-loving family, Germans who had immigrated from the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, where both his paternal grandmother and his father were Nazis; his long-lasting commitment to the Swedish fascist movement; and his membership, during the Second World War, of Sweden’s Nazi party, Swedish Socialist Unity. Both stories are equally true.

The 1990s brought two major news reports pointing to Mr. Kamprad’s involvement in the Swedish Nazi party and his lasting affinity for Per Engdahl, who led the country’s anti-Semitic fascist movement after the war. The articles attracted attention at the time, but the whole thing blew over quickly. So strong was the Ikea brand that nothing seemed able to affect it.

But after my interview with Mr. Kamprad, I continued to investigate—and there proved to be more. In the Swedish Security Service’s archive, I found his file from 1943, labeled “Memorandum concerning: Nazi” and stamped “secret” in red letters.

Ingvar Kamprad, then 17 years old, was Member No. 4,014 of Swedish Socialist Unity, the country’s leading far-right party during the war. Sweden’s general security service had apparently kept him under surveillance for at least eight months, confiscating and reading his correspondence.

In November 1942, he wrote that he had recruited “quite a few comrades” to the party and missed no opportunity to work for the movement. The memorandum about his correspondence reached the Sixth Division of the Stockholm police on 6 July 1943. Six days later, Mr. Kamprad sent an application to the county administrative office in Vaxjo to register his new company, Ikea.

When did Kamprad leave the Swedish Nazi Party? No one has so far managed to find out the answer to that question. On the other hand, we know that his involvement in Per Engdahl’s fascist organization, the New Swedish Movement, continued after the end of the war. He invited comrades from the movement to his home in Elmtaryd and was regarded as their benefactor. There are letters where he is asked to donate or thanked for the latest contribution. Kamprad also acted as publisher for one of the fascist leader Per Engdahl’s books. The two had become close friends and called each other “BB”: best brother. Engdahl was invited to Kamprad’s first wedding in 1951, a quiet affair in a church outside Stockholm, at which he gave a beautiful speech.

During the first two years after the war, Per Engdahl received refugees, hid them from their persecutors, and helped transport them to safety—Nazi refugees, that is. By 1945, Engdahl had created a network for Europe’s shattered Nazi and fascist movements, as he was afraid the ideas would die with them. His underground network interlinked Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts, Belgian Flams Bloc, Dutch Nazis, French fascists, Germans who were still loyal to Hitler, Swiss hardcore Nazis, remnants of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement, the Italian MSI, who propagated Benito Mussolini’s ideas, as well as Danish and Norwegian Nazis. They were all there. In 1951, the secret network became official as the participants gathered in the Swedish town Malmö where they, under Engdahl’s leadership, established the “Malmö Movement” (also called ESB, the Europäische Soziale Bewegung, or European Social Movement).

A magazine, Nation Europe, was started in order to give the “Malmö Movement” a platform and a voice. There, the genocide of the Jews was denied and the idea of an undemocratic, white Europe was promoted. Per Engdahl was part of the editorial board. His book, Västerlandets förnyelse (The Renewal of the West), became the movement’s official book.

What could Ingvar Kamprad have known, what did he support? Nobody can really say for sure. All that is certain is that during these crucial years, he and Per Engdahl were friends and kept in touch. In late autumn 1951, Ingvar wrote a letter to Per Engdahl, to thank him for his book, The Renewal of the West. From time to time, Per Engdahl came to visit. Once he bought a sofa from Ingvar Kamprad and his Ikea, but it is unclear if he got a discount.

The company Ikea was innovative in several ways. Being able to see the goods in a catalogue before buying them was an entirely new phenomenon. Shopping in a kind of warehouse outside the city center had not been done before, but motoring and a new lifestyle prioritizing consumption made it possible to suggest the department store as a weekend outing.

In 1955, Ikea started to sell furniture of its own design. Ten years later, when Ikea opened in Stockholm, thousands of people queued outside. The timing was brilliant. The huge new 48,000-square meter department store went up just beside a motorway going through newly built suburbs where tens of thousands families needed to furnish their homes without having a lot of money spare to do so. There was also a restaurant serving meatballs. Ikea began to be associated with “Swedishness.”

In 1973, the first shop outside Scandinavia was established, in Switzerland. The expansion meant that the company became an ambassador for Sweden abroad. Swedish names on the furniture and the staff wearing the so-called “Ikea Costume,” which consisted of jeans, shirt, and jumper, helped to promote the idea of Sweden as down-to-earth-exotic and trendy at the same time.

In the immediate postwar years, people weren’t interested in revisiting their Nazi or fascist past; maybe they still aren’t. Mr. Kamprad has come to symbolize the driven Swedish entrepreneur, the artful trend spotter, the strong, enthusiastic leader—the man who gives the consuming masses what the masses yearn for. He is a role model as well as a reflection of the Swedish image. Ikea markets Sweden, which in its turn markets Ikea, and so nation and company become images of each other, while their respective self-images expand.

When I published my book containing the new information I’d discovered about Mr. Kamprad and his Jewish friend in 2011, news organizations around the world picked up the story. It took a month for Ikea to respond, and when it did it was by way of a $51 million donation to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, the single-largest donation in the agency’s history. The bad news paled in the light of this huge gift.

Sweden still hasn’t answered the question: who was Ingvar Kamprad? How could he remain loyal to the fascist leader and Holocaust denier Per Engdahl, belong to a Nazi party and, at the same time, be so fond of his Jewish friend, Otto Ullman? Otto, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz?

When I repeatedly asked Mr. Kamprad for an answer in my interview with him in 2010, I finally received a shocking reply: “There’s no contradiction as far as I’m concerned. Per Engdahl was a great man, and I’ll maintain that as long as I live.”

Since my interview, neither I nor any other journalist has had the opportunity to ask about Mr. Kamprad’s membership of Socialist Unity or his tribute to Engdahl. And now, with his death in January 2018, no one ever will. The Ikea museum mentions that Ingvar’s grandmother was very close to her grandson, and that she saw Hitler as Germany’s future. That is all.

Ingvar Kamprad’s image and Sweden’s continue to reflect each other: without shadows, without disgrace, and without any ambition to come to terms with their past.

_________________________________

From Made in Sweden: How the Swedes Are Not Nearly So Egalitarian, Tolerant, Hospitable or Cozy As They Would Like to (Have You) Think, by Elisabeth Åsbrink. Used with permission of Scribe Publications. Copyright © 2019.