‘Hate is always local’: the Swedish city that said no to neo-Nazis
After a 14-year-old was murdered by neo-Nazis in 1995, Kungälv launched a pioneering project that has changed how people think about tackling racism
On an August afternoon in 1995, John Hron, a defiant anti-racist, was tortured and beaten to death by neo-Nazi skinheads beside a picturesque lake near his home town of Kode in Kungälv, Sweden. He was 14.
Neo-Nazis were gaining a foothold in Kungälv, an industrial borough of 20,000 people on the west coast, for the first time since the second world war. Sweden’s economy had stuttered in the early 1990s after a financial crisis and its politics were in flux.