Ekström enlisted on the 1st of May 1941 at the SS-Office in Oslo. The reason for volunteering for the Nazis was political–he believed that if Germany won the war, it would help the Nazi movement in Sweden to gain momentum. After signing up for the Waffen-SS he went with the so-called ‘German Trains’ from Oslo to Germany via Sweden. The German Trains were a concession that the Swedish government had given to the the Germans in fear of an invasion. A massive amount of German soldiers and materiel passed through Sweden during the war.

We know quite well what kind of propaganda work the SS-Hauptamt, the SS-Main Office, produced during the war. A lot of pamphlets and other printed material have survived, given the huge quantities that were printed. Most infamous is the Der Untermensch pamphlet, which is 50 page document that shows the Nazi ideology in its essence–depicting Jews and other unwanted people in a racist manner and German ‘aryans’ in a glorified way. Such documents as Der Untermensch were translated to several languages and spread all over occupied Europe via the local SS-Germanic Liason offices. We cannot tell exactly which material Ekström worked on, but Ekström and some 150 or so people did this kind of propaganda work for the SS. And it’s important to remember how crucial this propaganda was to justify the Nazi murder of the Jews. Ekström also served in a propaganda detachment with the 6th Waffen-SS division ‘Nord’ in Finland for a short period; as he said in a later interview, he wanted to do his “part against the Bolsheviks.”

Ekström was helped by the Swedish consular general in Nuremberg, Sven Helander, to secure a seat on the Red Cross’s ‘white buses’. Thus, in April 1945 he was ferried out of Germany with the help of the Swedish rescue effort, avoiding internment and questioning by the U.S army. As an example, Sven Helander was incarcerated by the U.S occupation for almost two years. In Sweden there was just a plain questioning and two weeks quarantine. Then Ekström travelled home to his mum in Lindesberg. And later that same year he does his follow-up military service, and then he starts to work as a cartographer at a local Office in Stockholm.

Actually, this is the reason why we wanted to write this book. It turned out that once we started to scratch the surface of Ekström’s work for the SS the Holocaust was always present, just a page away in the address book of Berlin. He worked out of offices that were once welfare institutions for the Jewish population in Berlin–the buildings were stolen by the SS and the people who lived there were murdered. And Ekström worked on propaganda that justified all this. Perhaps the book could be written from the perspective of these buildings, but Ekström was our way to find this, and also he was the link to the present, as were the relatives of the handful of survivors from these buildings. We wanted to show that what happened during the war matters today. After the war Ekström played an active part in planting the seeds for future neo-Nazi movements, like so many other former SS-volunteers did and still do, and this was how he came to be one of the founders of the Sweden Democrats.

The only time Ekström was disturbed in pursuing his Nazi goals was during the early 1950s in West Germany. He was active in the Nazi Socialist Reich Party in the Nuremberg region, taking part in meetings and gatherings. He was nearly expelled from Germany due to these activities, and was saved by a Professor at the Nuremberg Institute of Technology. In the SRP Ekström had contact with Otto Ernst Remer, the officer that crushed the attempted coup against Hitler. The SRP was banned in West Germany in 1952. After this Ekström continued his political career in various other extreme neo-Nazi organisations, such as the NPD in Germany. He is one of the 23 people that attended the first documented Sweden Democrat meeting in Malmö (we have a copy of the protocol). Ekström was elected auditor to the first party board and was active in building up the regional Sweden Democrat party organisation to one of the strongest in the country. Back then, the Sweden Democrats openly used Nazi terms such as “Sweden Awake” (from Deutschland Erwache), or “Don’t Defile Your Race” on stickers and in magazines. It is easy to understand why an outspoken Nazi and SS-volunteer like Ekström would feel at home in this organisation. Given the early commitment made to the Sweden Democrats by people like Ekström, statements like those the Sweden Democrats’ leader Björn Söder have repeatedly made–that Jews and Sami people cannot be Swedish–can be seen in a historical perspective as well.

There are several kinds of response that have come from leading Sweden Democrats, like downplaying–”Ekström was just an old man,” missing the fact that he was a very active and convinced Nazi throughout his entire life. “Ekström didn’t have any influence,” which doesn’t take into account that his name is documented in print to have taken part in the founding of the party. Or “the Social Democrats are the real Nazis.” The Sweden Democrats produced an entire hour long film that was in part a response to our book, which stated that the Social Democrats are the ones with a dark, Nazi past. This film was heavily criticised by several historians and compared to the work of David Irving.