Swedish extradition of Baltic soldiers

Latvian and German soldiers being extradited from a detention camp in Eksjö. The Swedish officers in black are militarised police/gendarmerie, and the men in the foreground wearing tan are soldiers of the Swedish army.

The Swedish extradition of Baltic soldiers, or simply the Extradition of the Balts (Swedish: Baltutlämningen), was a controversial political event that took place in January 1946, in the aftermath of World War II when Sweden, a neutral country during the war, extradited to the Soviet Union some 150 Latvian and Estonian soldiers who had been recruited[broken anchor] into Waffen-SS by Germany as well as 9 Lithuanian soldiers who had been fighting against the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states during the war. Many of them were subsequently imprisoned, and five were sentenced to death by the Soviet government, with three executions carried out and two sentences commuted to hard labour.


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