Göran von Otter
Göran von Otter (August 4, 1907, Sörby, Kristianstad, Sweden - December 4, 1988, Stockholm) Baron and diplomat of Sweden, son of Fredrik Edmund von Otter and Elsa Thomassine Wrede and grandson of the Admiral of the Navy Royal, Baron Fredrik von Otter, who was Swedish Prime Minister between 1900-02. (1)
BiographyHe served as secretary of the Swedish delegation to Berlin during World War II. On the night of August 20, 1942, on a train traveling between Warsaw and Berlin, he met SS officer Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein informed him about the extermination procedures he had witnessed in the concentration camps of Belzec and Treblinka, urging him to pass on the information to the Swedish government in order to inform Allied forces.
A dramatization of the fact appears briefly in the film Amen of Costa Gavras based on the novel The vicar of Rolf Hochhuth.
Von Otter wrote a report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden that was dismissed and released just after the war. In May 1945, from Helsinki he communicated with Baron Lagerfelt trying to locate Gerstein. Göran von Otter unsuccessfully attempted to communicate with Gerstein before his death (presumed suicide) in the Cherche-Midi Prisoner of War Prison on July 25, 1945. In 1934 he married Anne-Marie Ljungdahl (1912-1997) with whom he had two children, the sociologist Casten von Otter and Mikael von Otter and two daughters, the writer and politician Birgitta von Otter (1939), married since 1970 with the social-democrat politician and former minister Kjell-Olof Feldt and the famous singer Anne Sofie von Otter (1955) who dedicated one of his works to composers exterminated in the field of Terezín in 2006.
(1) Nordic Family Book (1914) band 20, sp. 1093 (Enciclopedia Sueca online) [1]
(2) Saul Friedländer: Kurt Gerstein or the Ambiguity of the Good, Paris, Casterman, 1967 (205 pp.), p. 123-124
(3) La historia de Göran of Otter y Kurt Gerstein [2] Literature
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