The Casablanca of the North. Walking among spies and Mata Haris, Stureplan – Blasieholmen

Stage 1: Stureplan- Blasieholmen

”See you at the Sponge”. With three tram stops around the triangle, Stureplan was an obvious meeting place, more than today. Stureplan with its restaurants during the war was a watering hole for refugees, journalists and spies – in what is called the Nordic Casablanca, named after the agent film with Ingrid Bergman.

Several thousand in the intelligence services scouted for each other. Everything could be obtained for money, even women paid by the Swedish state to lie with diplomats.

The celebrity spot Spy Bar in the iron house between Birger Jarlsgatan and Biblioteksgatan did not exist then. The only exciting thing about the Danielska house is that Mari Lang wrote murder in the house’s library. Address Birger Jarlsgatan 20 and now also Stureplan 10. Google view .

Track Plan 10 . Scandic Anglais on the other side of Biblioteksgatan in 1959 replaced the house with Hotel Anglais which was built in 1885 after drawing by Hugo Zetterwall. At the bottom of the cinema Anglais with entrance from Biblioteksgatan 26. The new house (Stureplan 10, then number 1) houses an office. Scandic Anglais faces Humlegården, formerly the picking place for homosexuals.

About a hundred in the Norwegian artist collective were in Anglai’s Spanish-inspired cellar restaurant, as in Casablanca. It is sop and fought in the establishment, christened the Theater Café in exile. Worst was the authors, Ivar Lo Johansson said, who himself went to the beat of Danish-Norwegian writer Axel Sandermose – both with the heart to the left.

Route 6 . The refugees took heed to visit restaurant Regnbågen on the other side of Sturegatan (Stureplan 6, then number 2). The owner, Norwegian German Nazi Helge Johnsen, welcomed people from Gestapo and Waffen SS. It is unclear if he led a Gestapo network in Stockholm. A rainbow adorned the sign at the bottom of the neon advertising.

Norma Stureplan was next door at Stureplan 6, today at the entrance to the mall with Hedengren’s bookstore. Considering the visitors called Gangster-Norma, a label that also stuck to Norma on Kungsgatan and Sveavägen. Frequently frequented by refugees, despite the Nazi ownership.

The chain competed with cheap food fetched at a counter and telephone cabins. Therefore, Norma Stureplan was popular with the swallows of the Secretaries Club before picking up spies and diplomats in better places. Captain Helmuth Ternberg of the C-office, the Defense Staff’s spy center, paid the visits to reveal secrets. Swallows got hot after Russian models. See excerpts from the book Secretaries Club. Teddy Ternberg, Stockholm’s James Bond, shows up in several places.

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Plan 4

From the 12-room floor on Stureplan 4 (organized by insurance director Alvar Lindencrona, who for a couple of decades after the war organized Stay Behind , a Swedish resistance movement that would act in the event of a Russian occupation.

The apartment was a meeting place for a network with friends Tage Erlander, business peaks, military and CIA employee William Colby for the CIA and during the war operating OSS Open strategic Service on Strandvägen 7.

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Biblioteksgatan 5 . Snobbish Cecil on snobbish Biblioteksgatan attracted the people who wanted to hit the ceiling, diplomats from warring countries not least. Norwegians present at checkout gladly went here.

Later guest by Hasse Ekman and at the housed nightclub Alexandra by Crown Prince Carl Gustaf’s gang. In the house built by Ivar Kreuger there is an auction company. But no longer Cecil and the cinema Red Mill. Google view .

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Birger Jarlsgatan 12 .

After Master Samuelsgatan, Birger Jarlsgatan 12 can be seen on the corner towards Riddargatan. There, during the war, the British intelligence service SIS, Secret Intelligence Service (later MI6) hid behind a passport office.

The fact that the Germans in 1944 with Andresen could roll up the SIS / MI6 organization in Stockholm indicates the same naive amateurism as was the case with Kim Philby at MI6 in London. A gentleman’s snob cannot be suspected of treason, as little as the honor of a Swedish officer, type Wennerström.

At Ian Flemmings Casino Royal , SIS agent James Bond executes with a knife a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm.

Ambassador en Mallet at the British legation in Diplomatstaden was probably happy to have Secret Intelligence Service at arm’s length, hidden behind a passport office at Birger Jarlsgatan 14. Admittedly, SIS was more room clean than the saboteurs at SOE he later got in the house. SIS was badly seen by the Swedes after Alfred Rickman’s unsuccessful attempt to blow up the ore loading in Oxelösund. During the first half of the war, the General Security Police diligently searched the English operations.

 

In 1942, CIS’s Cyril Chesire and Victor Hampton on Birger Jarlsgatan made a real cut. Aage Andresen represented IB Farben in Denmark and was therefore able to travel in Germany and Sweden. In Vienna he learned from the Hungarian engineer Szenasky that the Germans were developing a new rocket weapon. As the C-agency’s agent R34, he reported from his German network about the V1 project, about the ramp at Peenemunde among others. Photos of a crashed V1 on Bornholm in 1943 also contributed to the British investment in countermeasures.

 

And even more so when in 1944 they received parts from a faulty V2 in Småland’s Bäckebo two months before these rockets rained over London. But then Andresen was captured by the Germans and, after questioning, sat in concentration camps. Not sure if he was a double agent, as Ebbe Munk, a Danish military attache on Riddargatan, said.

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Riche Birger Jarlsgatan 4

In September 1944, the police called for Swedish

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. At Riche, spies exchanged information, dancing to get acquainted with crazy ladies. Or vice versa for military C-office swallows. Better food was there since 29-year-old Tore Wretman took over. Google view .

“The tick” Ida Lindebräkk / Manus used to comfort Norwegian SOE agents at Riche when they returned from actions in Norway. She worked under the codename Auntie for SOE Special Executive Service at the British Legation. In addition to writing reports to London included providing the agents with weapons and cyanide potassium.

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Hamngatan 2 . If floats were offered at Cecil and Riche, they instead attracted the oak roach in a cozy Spanish environment on Bäckahästen at Hamngatan 2. German uniforms were mixed with actress Julia Caesar and equally lesbian composer Kai Gullmar .

Gay was forbidden by law until 1944 but here it was OK. The headmistress, wearing a Spanish dock, walked around and puzzled the couple. Google view .

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Berzelii park opposite the brook horse. In Bern’s basement, the German legation hid automatic weapons to use in a German invasion. Zum Franziskaner on Skeppsbron 44 was better suited for Germans who wanted to raise a beer.

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Näckströmsgatan. On April 19, 1940 , the police arrested English Director Alfred Rickman and his clerk as well as fiancee Elsa Johansson at the firm Dentalmaterial on Näckströmsgatan 1 (between Berns and Chinateatern). There, as in the home on Gärdet and a basement in Östermalm, 200 kilos of explosives with ignition devices were found. In addition, weapons and propaganda material. The purpose was to blow up two loading cranes in Oxelösund to prevent ore export to Germany. The clients were British SOE ( Special Operations Executive ) and SIS ( Secret Intalligence Service ). About thirty in the league were arrested. Rickman received eight years in prison.

In the park closest to Dramaten is the memorial on Raoul Wallenberg’s square.

NK Hamngatan .

With gifts from German major films, Zarah Leander traded furniture at NK and sewed clothes in the French department. In the autumn of 1942, she lunched with her friend Jules Berman and NK’s Ragnar Sachs, a Jew himself. Before 1936, Zarah was the revue primadonna of Karl Gerhard, for whom Berman handled the advertising. After the Horse from the Troja 1940, the Reich King is a red badge in Berlin.

That led to the interrogation of Mrs. Leander at the torture-infested Gestapo headquarters in Berlin – finally with propaganda minister Goebbels and a warning. Damn it, the first victim of war is the truth. Leander was suspected of being a spy for both Hitler and Stalin by SÄPO , who shadowed her combined with mail and phone checks.

In the cellar’s cellar on Malmskillnadsgatan 26 (near the bridge over Hamngatan), the Swedish security police with telephone interception. Dozens of tracking devices out on the town tried to capture agent transmitters, mainly communists who sent coded to the Soviet Union. One was Comintern trained Solveig Hansson, who had a transmitter in Västerhaninge. The radio control facility sorted under the General Security Service. With thousands of people under Secretary of State Tage Erlander censored, the post read business post among other things. One mail reader was Astrid Lindgren, who in 1941 lived on Dalagatan 46 near Vasaparken.

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Hamngatan 5

Few believed during the war that Intourist was located below NK on Hamngatan for the sake of the tourists. The head with the cover name Vasilij Sidorenko was, in fact, an officer of the military intelligence service GRU. In the telegram that the Swedes decrypted he was called Stege. The young couple Siderenko came here in 1940 and settled in an apartment on Erik Dahlbergsgatan, also where called by the Public Security Police. He was arrested for espionage on Vasagatan in September 1942 and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Foreign Minister Vyatjeslav Molotov initially had no success with the repeated demands to get Sidernko released. Instead, the sentence was extended by twelve years at Långholmen. The government first pardoned him on February 25 – three days after the Russians dropped bombs on Södermalm and in Strängnäs. At the same time, the British released Alfred Rickman, who failed to blow up the harbor of Oxelösund. The Russian got a ticket to the Soviet and Rickman was flown home to Scotland.

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Kungsträdgårdsgatan 8 ,

During the war, a branch of the German Dresdner Bank under the leadership of Olof Palme’s German-Baltic uncle Ottokar Knieriem was located here in connection with the Wallenberg Stockholm Enskilda bank family. In addition to business, for Himmler’s SS, among other things, the bank is said to have washed art and other assets stolen by the Nazis in occupied countries. Knieriem was similar to Himmler’s patient to the masseur Felix Kersten. To save Jews, Knieriem in the apartment on Kungsträdgårdsgatan Kersten joined forces with Jewish World Council representative Gilel Storch and the SS people. A rumor says that teenager Olof Palme made a bid between the meeting and the American legation.

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Blasieholmen Grand Hotel

Rick’s cafe in Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman was not in reality. A fiction as much as James Bond’s knife murder in Stockholm. At the Grand Hotel on Blasieholmen, on the other hand, was a meeting place for diplomats and spies where war was better fought with champagne than with guns. The C-agency’s James Bond, Captain Helmuth Teddy Ternberg, offered better ladies at large if they could be picked as spies.

At Grand’s dance restaurant, love-destroying intelligence men met equally love-loving women, or they were in the bedding looking for military secrets.

Actresses who were able to move among dignitaries were loud. One was Norwegian Swedish Sonja Wigert who until Expressen revealed her in November 1944 was a double agent for the Germans and the Swedish C-office.

She was the star of the Grand hotel, in the Expressen acclaimed “Sonja Wigert stepped into the luxury tavern in an exotic scent of Shalimar, the silk dress shining, and since the star was only 160 centimeters, she had high heels for the party. As soon as the orchestra saw her, the musicians broke the song played, they got up and switched to Cole Porter’s ”Night and Day”. It was a tribute that was always repeated when she swept in under the glass dome of the Grand Hotel ”.

She was also a star on the Grand Royals dance floor. Although few knew that it was to make contacts as an agent. She moved freely between Stockholm and Oslo where her family was locked up at the camp Grini.

At a wet party, she charmed Deputy  Commissioner Terboven  so that she then received a love letter from him – and the family was released. Another of her conquests was  US Colonel Bernt Balchen , who led the OSA (forerunner to the CIA) in the Nordic countries and then the operation against Northern Norway. Before she  was revealed as a double agent  , everything was reported to the Defense Intelligence Service.

Grand was good for the neighboring German legation. Hermann Göring stayed at the hotel in 1932. Three years later  , Hitler’s replacement Rudolf Hess talked about ”New Germany” for the German colony at the Grand Hotel.

2,000 allegedly listened to it and afterwards Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film ”The triumph of the will” from the party days in Nuremberg in 1934 was shown. Zarah Leander sang in Grands Winter Garden.

The war was fought on many fronts. Peter Tennant, the head of British SOE sabotage organization Peter Tennant, got cleaning shoes at Grand to pepper German guests’ underpants and condoms with powder. Not even Tennant’s fictional colleague James Bond at MI6 had the same sense of humor.

Stockholm was the playing field for Lord Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde in The Persuaders! 1971. Sinclair wakes up in his hotel room at the Grand Hôtel in Stockholm and realizes that he has brought a married woman with him after a wet evening.

In the roles of Roger More and Tony Curtis.

At Ian Flemming’s Casino Royale, Bond received his 00 status for having knife-killed a double agent in Stockholm.

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Hovslagargatan 2 .

The German legation in the Edenstamska house grew during the war with several hundred people, with room for both the Gestapo and the military intelligence service Abwehr. The head of the legation was the prince of Wied , who scarcely held the position for his ability but because he was related to Gustaf V. The prince could see from the private floor of the house. The power was on floor two with Werner Dankwort, a legation council of Swedish Foreign Affairs respected for its distance to Berlin.

Doctor Wagner at Abwehr’s War Organization Schweden hired German Erika Wendt to pay agents and handle secret material. The C agency had snatched, presumably from decrypted telecommunications traffic, that she was an anti-Nazi.

Admittedly, she was not allowed to meet Swedes, but still fell for the invitation when a taxi stopped with Captain Helmuth Teddy Ternberg , beautiful as the Gösta Berling she admired. During the car ride, she accepted a supper and there were more expensive dinners with the charming captain. She became Agent Onkel who provided the C-Bureau with a list of n Gestapo agents. There were secret meetings where Erika gave Ternberg a secret code.

James Bond a pale imitation? At the Berlin Tempelhof Erika first turned in a code-prepared handkerchief that was handed to Ternberg. Gestapo’s shadow did not worry about them he had a thumb with. Although there were separate rooms in the hotel to her disappointment. Without Wendy’s espionage , mathematics professor Beurling may not have cracked the German cipher as quickly.

When Hitler died in the shift of April / May 1945, the leg of the leg of the leg was hoisted on a half-bar. The four hundred who remained in the German representation were interned at a castle to be milked for information. Allied representatives took over the premises which later became libraries. And since 2008 hotel Lydmar .

Read how the Germans murdered 70 Stockholmers at Blasieholmen .

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Blasieholmsmsgatan 3 . At that address, Raoul Wallenberg managed the company Central European Trade Company Company July-December 1941 , which imported products from Hungary. Probably with connection to the relatives Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg as they had foreign trade companies at the same address. Google view .  The company then moved to Strandvägen 7A, adjacent to the American legation.

Wallenberg, who lived on Odengatan, trained homemakers and was summoned as a sergeant at Svea Livgarde Linnégatan on Östermalm. The business was then handled mainly by Hungarian partner Koloman Lauer , whose Hungarian relatives were interned by the Nazis.

In the then neighboring house Blasieholmsgatan 5 lived the US diplomat Herschel Johnson, who, as responsible for humanitarian issues, was pressed from the US by the War Refugee Board to save the Jews of Hungary. The idea of ​​sending Raoul Wallenberg had existed before, but the rabbi Ehrenpreis in the synagogue near Berzeli park was initially opposed. Svea Livgarde fought against in advance laying off capable pluton commander Wallenberg. Johnson participated in the persuasion , finally in a meeting with Wallenberg at Bellmansro just before the trip to Budapest in July 1944. At the same zoo restaurant , Wallenberg celebrated that he had to muck up for his new mission prematurely.

Earlier in the spring of 1944 he  was hanging out with the future TV-palace Jeanette von Heidenstam . The age difference probably contributed to her rejection of marriage.