Booking a funeral for half a million dead Swedes

Published 14 December 2024 at 13.26

Domestic. After NATO entry, it has become important to arrange so that as many as possible of the Swedish victims can be buried in coffins. The armed forces have now turned to funeral directors to arrange burials for 500,000 Swedes, Aftonbladet reveals.

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The disclosure is the last in a series in which Swedish authorities are planning for a scenario where the Swedish government, perhaps located abroad, chooses to continue the war against Russia on behalf of the United States, even if it leads to large Swedish losses.

However, Aftonbladet is the first to come up with a figure on how many victims the government actually expects for the entire country, at least before they have to start using mass graves.

– If Stockholm is subjected to the kind of attack that we see in Ukraine, many people will die, says Svante Borg, director of cemetery management in the city of Stockholm, to Aftonbladet.

Half a million
According to MSB, the funeral directors' planning assumes that five percent of the population joins the war against Russia, i.e. approximately half a million people.

In MSB's and the Armed Forces' mission to the funeral directors include coffin burying a large number of these in a short time.

Jan-Olof Olsson, manager at the Swedish Agency for Community Protection and Preparedness (MSB), tells Aftonbladet that coffin burials are planned according to how a crematorium is dependent on electricity and gas, which may be in short supply during the war.

Previously wrote P4 Göteborg about how a church in Gothenburg is preparing for 30,000 burial places there alone, and about how the municipality needs to find ten hectares of land, or twenty football pitches, to accommodate all bodies.

Reassuring message
In almost all of Sweden the Church of Sweden is the leader, except in Stockholm and Tranås where the municipalities are responsible.

In Stockholm they say Svante Borg that there is plenty of space before the planned war, above all at Strandkyrkogården in Skrubba, Järva cemetery and Råcksta burial ground.

– In this matter, I know that there is a lot of talk about digging quickly and large to bury many people. We in Stockholm are keen that we cremate as usual, we make sure we have the capacity and reserve power to cremate even under difficult conditions, says Borg to Aftonbladet.