I'm watching a Swedish portrait interview with Queen Silvia (Queen Silvia at 75 looks back, with Claes Elfsberg from STV) with discussion about her background, and I'm getting a more nuanced picture of her family's infamous past:
The factory in Berlin which her father Walther Sommerlath bought very cheaply in an Aryanisation process in the late 1930s, belonged to a Jew called Efim / Ernst Wechsler, who was born as a subject of Alexander III, in the pogrom-ridden Chișinău / Kishinev in Bessarabia, modern Moldovia, and who emigrated to Germany ca. 1900. He was able to emigrate to Brazil before WW2 and escape the Holocaust with his family, perhaps partially because (not Silvia's claim, but my speculation) he was compensated for his factory with Sommerlath's parts in a Brazilean coffee plantation and other land in Brazil. Here is
his Swedish Wikipedia page.Queen Silvia's two homelands, Brazil and Germany, were actually at war during WW2. Her mother's brother served as a surgeon in the Brazilean expeditionary force in Italy, who fought on the Allied side in the Battle of Monte Cassino etc. He survived, but never talked about it. (In general, Silvia's upper middle class family never talked about anything "bad".) Her mother suffered from severe depression during Silvia's childhood and youth, partially from the stresses brought on by WW2, when her land of birth and the adopted homeland she came to live in, were at war.
