The Gunnarsson Nazi Hush

The Gunnar Gunnarsson Center (Gunnarsstofnun) at Skriðuklaustur in East-Iceland is still more or less silent about Icelandic author Gunnar Gunnarsson´s Nazi sympathies.

Icelandic author Gunnar Gunnarsson´s Nazi ties have been dealt with earlier here on the Fornleifur-blog (see articles below on the left side column). A center in the east of Iceland, dedicated to the memory of Icelandic author Gunnar Gunnarsson (1889 - 1975), which should tell the punlic about the life and promote the work of Gunnar Gunnarsson, still chooses to do so by leaving out crucial information about Gunnar Gunnarsson´s naive Nazi sympathies.

Visitors at Skriðuklaustur, formerly the home of Gunnarsson, will only be presented by a small portion of the story about Gunnar Gunnarsson contacts with Nazi organizations and his visit to Hitler in 1940. That is plain and simple a historical distortion, funded by the Icelandic state and the sinister indifference of the director of the center.

To remind the center at Skriðuklaustur and the Icelandic authorities, who run this center, that they are distorting history, Fornleifur is publishing this photograph of Gunnarsson in Germany in the early 1930s. At the far left we see Danish Ambassador Herluf Zahle, who in 1940 loathed Gunnar Gunnarsson´s Nazi sympathies and his activities in Germany.  

On 31 January 1940, Ambassador Zahle reported to the Foreign Office in Copenhagen about Gunnar Gunnarson´s Nazi-friendly activities in Germany, and the one instance when Gunnarsson mistakenly claimed that the 1918 Versailles-treaty definition of Schleswig border of Denmark was "more than just any other border". For this, one daily in Germany, the Niederduetscher Beobachter in Schwerin, defined Gunnarsson statement as anti-German (Undeutsch). However, that single failure on behalf of Gunnarsson, reported on the 4th of February 1938, didn´t destroy his good reputation and popularity in the Third Reich.

In January 1940 Dansih ambassador Herluf Zahle notified his superiors in Copenhagen,that Gunnarsson was visiting Berlin and stated that he was personally not going to support Gunnarsson´s cause by attending the lecture at a seminar held by Die Nordische Gesellschaft, which was a Scandinavian-German organisation highly infiltrated by the SS. Zahle sent one of his junior diplomats to attend. The day after, when Gunnar Gunnarsson was invited to lunch in the Danish embassy, Zahle told Gunnarsson to his face his decision not to attend Gunnarsson´s Nordische Gesellschaft speech.

Please tell all visitors at the Gunnarsson Center at Skriðuklaustur about this, as well as ALL other aspects of Gunnarsson´s contacts with the Nazis. If that doesn´t happen, the Gunnar Gunnarsson Center cannot be taken seriously.

Instead of this rather limited and contrafactual narrative about Gunnarsson´s activities in Nazi-Germany, the center should also tell the visitors how negative Gunnarsson´s attitude towards Nordic States´ collaboration was after the war. That was noted by the Danish Foreign Ministry, which archived the below clipping from the Danish daily Information, written by an Icelandic journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Hamar.

The above photograph shows the following people - from the left: Herluf Zahle, author Clara Viebig, who was married to a Jew, Gunnar Gunnarsson and the Austrian Jewish author Vicky Baum, many of whose books were filmatized. The photograph is taken at a party in the Press Club in Berlin in 1930, before Vicky Baum emigrated to the USA. The Nazis called her a jüdische Asphaltliteratin (Jewish tarmac author).