My Grandmother was that good person who saved me. As a child I lived with her for two years in a small flat in Stockholm. It was in 1949-50. At my Grandmother’s I had that stability in life that I needed. I slept in a box bed under a portrait of the Swedish king Karl XII. Before I went to school I was supposed to fold back the bed, to cover up all traces that a boy lived there.

I loved my Grandmother. She was the only one in the entire family who understood children, who realised what a child needed. Grandmother took care of me. She was, from a child’s point of view, a truly good person. She had many friends, arranged bridge nights and family reunions, and strengthened the imperfect unity of our family.

Grandmother was always ready to help. She struggled along the streets with her heavily laden bicycle, cleaned her daughters’ houses, took care of her grandchildren, and fixed everything that the other family members couldn’t cope with. She was energetic and admirable. We children adored her.

Grandmother was also a Nazi. In her hall she kept two thick piles of magazines. To the left, Vecko-Journalen, and to the right, Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich, with a golden swastika on each cover. Albert Speer was the magazine’s permanent artistic adviser. Grandmother had, in the 1930s, lunched with Mussolini on the roof of the Fiat factory. She embraced the memory only with warmth. Mussolini was nice and well dressed and the food tasty.

Not only did Grandmother admire Mussolini, but also Adolf Hitler. She didn’t like to discuss politics. But once she explained to me that the Jews had started World War II and that they had forced for her husband, my Grandfather, to commit suicide in the 1930s...

On Grandmother’s bridge nights with her lady friends she did not hide the magazines with swastikas. She was proud of them. They were laid in a place of honour so that everyone could see them.

I loved aeroplanes when I lived with Grandmother. I read a lot of war stories. Boys like that kind of things. I had many comic books in French, from my time in Belgium. Violence dominated children’s culture at the time.

I also borrowed books from the library. After a year I had read all the Biggles they had. I also used to read Grandmother’s magazines, the ones in her hall. A lot of what I read was about World War II. War seemed to be a gentlemanly occupation between equals.

Biggles’ arch-enemy, von Stalheim, was a bizarre character to whom I became quite attached. But war, cruelty, inhumanity – these things I learnt nothing about.

In 1959, eight years after I had moved from Grandmother’s, when I began studying art at Konstfack, Grandmother said to me: ”Now that you are going to Art School, I’ll give you some art magazines that I have saved.” And she gave me all the volumes (1939-45) of Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich.

I didn’t know I was ashamed of Grandmother. I loved her. After the war other Swedish Nazis got rid of the evidence of their beliefs, but Grandmother didn’t. Hitler’s Germany had collapsed, both as a nation and as an ideology. It wasn’t admiration for Germany that made Grandmother a Nazi. She had ties to the British nobility and was quite fond of France.

Maybe she was a Nazi because she had fallen for Hitler’s personal charm. In 1938 Grandmother wrote a letter to my parents in Canada. My 19-year-old mother was due to give birth to me in a couple of months.

Grandmother wrote: "What do you say about Hitler and Austria? He has accomplished such an incredible number of things with such relatively little bloodshed."

Grandmother used to attend the meetings of the Conservative Party, a party now called “Moderaterna”. Leaving the house one night, she told me that she was going to speak at one of their meetings.

To Grandmother, a lot of things were so obvious that she didn’t bother talking about them. Religion was a given. And her being a Royalist. I don’t just mean it in the sense of her being loyal to the Swedish royal family. She loved all kings and queens. Nazism was in that respect a given to her, but it wasn’t a very well thought through thing, either.

Grandmother! I never understood what went on in your mind... and it wasn’t until a long time after your death that I started thinking about it.

Carl Johan De Geer