Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-02-13/Serendipity

"He was a Nazi" — never before had that statement filled me with so much satisfaction.

Bertil Anzén was born in 1912. He studied art and was part of the Young Artists exhibition at the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts in 1938. He sold his paintings. They can be found at the Swedish Museum of Modern Art, the Stockholm City Museum, the Malmö Museum, the Uppsala University Library. Over time, he was forgotten. Three of his paintings had been offered at an auction, clumped together. By being willing to part with 75 SEK – roughly 7 USD – I had ended up with the winning bid.

In February 2021, I biked to pick up a couple of other pieces from the auction house. Two normal-sized paintings: a bit unstable on the bike, but it works. I pedaled the five kilometers to the auction house, gave them my customer number, and received my five works of art, three of which the system had not yet indicated as delivered when I left home. That's how I ended up wobbling home through Malmö with five paintings on two wheels. I wrote a short social media status update about my adventures to amuse my friends.

"Is this the same Bertil Ragnar Anzén as the Nazi?" asked my friend Eric Luth, who had found a very short news item in the archives of the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper — the Anzén who in 1945 was prosecuted for illegal intelligence activities, as an agent for Svenska socialistiska partiet, one of the Swedish Nazi parties at the time?

It's a question one so rarely gets about the paintings in one's kitchen. Wikipedia didn't have much to tell — his parents, his wife, his apprenticeship. He painted portraits, cityscapes, and landscape paintings with motifs from eastern Skåne, as well as drawings done in red chalk and charcoal, the Swedish biography said. A year of death was missing, even though he was presumed to be deceased. But how many Bertil Ragnar Anzéns could there be?

I decide to try to update the Swedish Wikipedia article: year of death and possible Nazism. He was employed by a National Socialist party in the 1940s — that's enough to be relevant for a somewhat-public figure, regardless of whether they were prosecuted for those activities. And I couldn't find any signs of there having been two Bertil Ragnar Anzéns.

Among the search results I found Håkan Blomqvist's Gåtan Nils Flyg och nazismen ("The Enigma of Nils Flyg and Nazism") from 2000, now freely available as a PDF. Here, a Bertil Anzén is mentioned as an agent in the Svenska socialistiska partiet, but without any more details. I emailed Blomqvist to ask if he possibly knew more about Anzén. He didn't, he replied, but perhaps Tobias Hübinette would know. So I tried that, but Hübinette didn't know either.

I started reading through books about Swedish Nazism in the 1940s: ''Nazismen i Sverige 1924–1979. Pionjärerna, partierna, propagandan ("The Swedish Nazism 1924–1979. The Pioneers, the Parties, the Propaganda") and Hakkorset och Wasakärven: en studie av nationalsocialismen i Sverige 1924–1950 ("The Swastika and the Wasa Sheaf: A Study of National Socialism in Sweden 1924–1950") by Heléne Lööw, and Hitlers svenska förtrupper'' ("Hitler's Swedish Vanguards") by Armas Sastamoinen. Once again, Anzén was important enough to appear — but not important enough for anyone to have written anything substantial about him.

At the same time, I tried to figure out when he actually died. Vem är det, a Swedish biographical lexicon published from 1912 to 2007, stated in 1967 that Anzén was at the time residing in Málaga, Spain. After 1981, he disappeared from Vem är det, without being listed among the dead. I turned to a help page on the Spanish Wikipedia to see if they could help me. They couldn't. The Church of Sweden in the Costa del Sol didn't reply. Still, I was encouraged: a Swede moving to Francoist Spain in the 1960s didn't exactly contradict a Nazi background.

Eric Luth tried to email the Swedish Museum of Modern Art. They didn't know and couldn't do any further research. I contacted the Maglehems kulturförening ("Maglehem Cultural Association" in the village of Maglehem), which had had a painting by Anzén as part of an exhibition as recently as 2014. The owner of the painting told me that Anzén lived in Knäbäck in the the 1950s and was hit by depression when the village had to be moved. He painted only "black paintings", and it was that disappointment that would have driven him to Spain. But he couldn't say anything about a year of death, nor about any National Socialist tendencies (or lack thereof).

I went back to Blomqvist's work and read the footnotes. Suddenly, it struck me: Anzén had been prosecuted. There was a reference to the material from a trial, sure to be available at the Stockholm City Archives. With biographical details therein! I emailed the archives, but didn't have a case number, and was told that Anzén wasn't mentioned in the criminal register in court records. Through the names of others who were prosecuted at the same time as Anzén, a civil servant eventually found the documents in the auxiliary section for classified espionage cases. Did I want the archive office to scan them? It would cost four Swedish kronor — around forty US cents — per page. The material, I was told, covered roughly a thousand pages. I decided I could wait.

It took a few months. There was a pandemic going on, and I felt like getting vaccinated before I got on a train to head north. Come autumn, I had other errands in the vicinity of Stockholm, and requested the documents to be retrieved — only to be told that they had been digitized and made accessible where they could now be accessed from the Malmö City Archives. As I sat down in front of the archive's computer, ten months had passed since I started digging. It took me a little while to skim through all the photographed pages to find the right case, but there, in the margin, I found it: April 14, 1912. The birth date of the Nazi was the same as that of the artist. Sweet victory. The protocol from June 23, 1945, also mentioned that Anzén had received a scholarship to study painting.

Having, at last, found conclusive proof, I needed to do something with it: publish.

Eric Luth, who had instigated the entire thing by asking an innocent question, happened to be not only a fellow Swedish Wikipedian, but also the cultural editor of the Swedish magazine Liberal Debatt. He would be happy to publish a piece on the hunt for the truth about Anzén, he told me.

I still don't know when Anzén died. But so, about a year after I started looking, I had created a reference and could — Swedish Wikipedia allows you to refer to your own work, provided that it has been published in a reliable source — add a couple of short sentences to the Wikipedia article.

We can't write about the things we can't reference. But we can't let such insignificant details stop us.