Who is the Brazilian queen of Sweden, who is with Covid-19

BBC News Brasil

The king of Sweden, Carl 16 Gustav, and his wife, Queen Silvia, of Brazilian origin, tested positive for covid-19, according to an announcement made this Tuesday (4) by Swedish royalty.

Sweden is experiencing a high in infections, attributed to the omicron variant, and set a record of new daily cases –11,500– on December 30, according to Reuters.

“The king and queen, both fully vaccinated with three doses, have mild symptoms and are feeling well under the circumstances,” the royal palace said in a statement.

Queen Silvia and King Carl 16 Gustav have three children: Princess Victoria (heir to the Swedish throne), Prince Carl Philip and Princess Madeleine.

Sweden is a constitutional monarchy, in which the royal family has a mostly ceremonial and representative role.

Silvia Renate Sommerlath was born in Germany, in 1943, and is the daughter of German businessman Walther Sommerlath and Brazilian Alice Soares de Toledo.

The businessman had initially left Germany in 1920, heading for Brazil, where he married Alice. A year after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, in 1934, he joined the Nazi Party, while still living in Brazil, where he managed the German subsidiary of a steel company.

He returned to Germany in 1938. There, in 1939, according to the accusation made in the Swedish TV program Kalla Fakta, he assumed –as part of the ”Aryanization” program promoted by the Nazis – the control of a factory whose previous owner it was Efim Wechsler, a Jew.

After the end of World War II, in 1947 (when Queen Silvia was four years old), her family moved to Brazil for the second time and lived in São Paulo until 1957, later returning to Germany.

ROYAL WEDDING

Silvia Sommerlath met her husband, the then future King of Sweden, Carl 16 Gustaf, during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when she was working as an interpreter.

His father was present at his wedding in 1976, but the family did not disclose, at the time, his supposed connections with Nazism.

Walter Sommerlath’s past only came to light more than ten years after the year of his death, in 1990, when the Swedish press published the first reports on the subject. In 2011, the Queen announced that she would carry out an investigation into her father’s past, to be carried out by historians.

At the time, she told the Swedish press that she knew her father had been affiliated with the German Nazi Party, but said he was “not politically active” and had been forced to join the party to save his career. “(Nazis) was a machine, if you protested you would be fighting a whole machine,” she said.

Of her father’s return to Germany at the height of Nazism, she added: ”You need to put yourself in the psychology of the time. Germany was rising from the ashes. The joy of noticing that the motherland was there again all of a sudden convinced my father to support Germany and join the party”.

Analysts interviewed by the Swedish press recalled that this line of argument was used by several Nazis tried for war crimes.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORT

When the investigation into Sommerlath was completed, a report was published, signed by historian Erik Norberg. The report states that, in fact, Sommerlath helped Jewish owner Efim Wechsler flee Germany by exchanging his factory for a coffee plantation in Brazil.

After the publication of the report, Silvia made public a video in which she said she was “relieved” that these documents had come to light.

“Perhaps many have wondered why I didn’t answer questions about my father before. It wasn’t just sensitive, it was difficult to deal with. It takes time. And maybe it’s not easy to do in the public eye.”

The group American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendents (of Holocaust survivors and their descendants) questioned the historian’s report – claiming that, because it was not done independently and had the participation of a cousin of Queen Silvia, it would not be reliable in its conclusions.