Sweden: National Socialist Worker’s Party Nordic Youth (Nordisk ungdom) Membership Pin Badge, of 1933-1938 form with swastika symbol, plated medal with needle pin fitting. Scarce.
Condition: needle pin slightly bent, Good Very Fine.
The party was formed in 1933 by Sven Olov Knutsson Lindholm after he left the Swedish National Socialist Party, following a series of clashes over policy and personality. The NSAP initially acted as a simple mirror of the National Socialist German Workers Party, with the party newspaper Den Svenske Nationalsocialisten repeating what was being said in Nazi Germany and the Nordisk ungdom (Nordic Youth) group serving as a replica of the Hitler Youth (albeit on a smaller scale). The swastika was also initially used as the party emblem.
The party members visited the early German NSDAP Nuremberg rallies, carrying Swedish flags and meeting with the NSDAP leadership. They used to provoke political opponents in Sweden, sabotaging legal speeches and demonstrations held by other parties, and spread Nazi and Fascist flyers and posters and similar activities. Lindholm has claimed it was moving away from the Hitler model, abandoning its ties to Nazi Germany in favour of a more Swedish Nazi model. This has been questioned by historians as a post-WWII attempt to distort their own Party history. In 1938, it's said to have ceased to use the swastika and replaced it with the fasces symbol. By the end, of the year the party had changed its name to Svensk Socialistisk Samling (Swedish Socialist Gathering) and had largely dropped all but passing reference to the German Nazis. Nonetheless, the party declined dramatically during the Second World War and was formally dissolved in 1950, five years after WWII. Several members of NSAP/SSS joined the Waffen-SS during the war as part of the few hundred Swedish SS volunteers, and also the Winter War in Finland. Those who returned home afterwards rarely mentioned the war in public out of fear of being investigated or accused of war crimes. In 1943, the party's national congress in Uppsala caused the Easter Riots to break out.
