Nils Holmberg

Nils Gösta Holmberg (23 December 1902 – 4 August 1981) was a communist leader in Sweden. He was born on 23 December 1902 in Stockholm. Holmberg was a member of the Young Communist League of Sweden (SKU) from 1926 to 1929. He was a member of the executive committee of SKU. Later on, he became a leading member of the mother party, the Communist Party of Sweden (SKP). In 1933 he was inducted into the Central Committee of the party, a position he held until 1956. From 1933 to 1958 he was a member of the board of the Communist Arbetarkommun of Gothenburg and a member of the municipal council of the city from 1935 to 1944. He was also the editor of the daily newspaper of the party in Gothenburg, Arbetar-Tidningen. During the Second World War the government imposed a ban on transporting the publication. The newspaper was confiscated 34 times by the police, and thrice did the confiscations lead to charges against it. Twice did the court sentence the responsible publisher to imprisonment. However, Holmberg was not jailed as the newspaper had officially registered an individual party member as the publisher of the newspaper. During the war Holmberg publicly criticized, in his function as a municipal councilor, the government policy of putting communists into camps (officially these camps were military units to which the communists were drafted, but practice they were prison camps). Holmberg called them 'concentration camps', and highlighted the fact that the government simultaneously had several Nazis as military officers. In 1944 Holmberg was elected to the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament). In 1946, following the municipal elections in which SKP had won 11.2% of the nationwide vote, Holmberg left the Riksdag to return to municipal politics in Gothenburg. With the SKP strengthened Holmberg became the vice...