Army Museum
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A military history museum in Stockholm, which concentrates mainly on Sweden’s history in wars long ago but also its role as a non-aligned military power during the two world wars and especially in the subsequent Cold War. Those latter parts I found somewhat surprisingly engrossing and informative, also anything but glorifying, unlike so many stuffy old military museums around the world. This is quite an exception and well worth visiting, not just for proper war history buffs.
More background info: Sweden, once quite a mighty seafaring power in northern Europe, hasn’t actually been in a war for some 200 years. The country managed to remain neutral in both WW1 and WWII, and during the Cold War era it assumed a position of non-alignment, i.e. unlike its neighbour Norway, Sweden (just like its other neighbour Finland) did not join NATO but again remained neutral.
This changed only recently. After Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine started in 2022, both Sweden and Finland reconsidered their position and quickly filed applications for joining NATO after all. Sweden’s application was accepted after some delays (due to a hanging veto from Turkey) and it finally became a full member on 7 March 2024.
During the Cold War era, Sweden developed a state-of-the-art modern military, with much of its hardware produced in Sweden, including highly acclaimed fighter jets manufactured by the well-known company Saab.
The country’s geographical position along the north of the Baltic Sea, right across from the western reaches of the Soviet Union, meant that Sweden was of strategically crucial importance in hose times (just like NATO member Denmark).
The Army Museum, Armémuseum in Swedish, goes back to what started as an artillery museum in 1879 at a site that had been in military use since the 17th century. The name was changed to its present form in 1930 to reflect the much wider focus of the exhibitions. The current premises have been in use since 1943.
In 2002 the museum was closed for a major refurbishing programme, and it reopened in 2005, when it was also given an award for best museum in the city. Since then there have been further modernizations, and additional temporary exhibitions bring it right up to the present day – e.g. through a current extra temporary exhibition about the war in Ukraine as well as about the long history of Ukrainian-Swedish relations.
When I was in Stockholm for just a day in February 2025, I found myself not far from this museum as I explored the modern centre north of the Old Town and even though I had not really planned it for definite, decided on a whim to pop into this museum, not really expecting all that much. Now I’m glad I did, because it was quite a positive surprise, so much better than I had dared to anticipate. See below for details!
What there is to see: As you approach the museum you first come to a large, wide-open courtyard. At the front right by the outer fence are two large open-air exhibits, one an amphibious tank the other a towed anti-aircraft gun.
The museum building at the far end of the courtyard involves an optical illusion: the dome you see in the middle is actually behind the museum building and not part of it … it’s the Hedvig Eleonora Church on the other side of the museum. I completely fell for the illusion when I was there and only realized what the real set-up is when I looked at the location on online maps …
Lined up right outside the front facade of the museum building are rows and rows of ancient cannon barrels (inviting creative photography – see below).
Once you’ve got inside and obtained your ticket, you are advised to start your visit at the permanent exhibition on the third floor – or at the temporary exhibition on the ground floor.
I took the lift up and entered the first hall, which is a kind of general intro to the topic of war. Two large exhibits dominate this part. Firstly a life-size diorama of stuffed chimpanzees in mid fight. It’s quite drastic and reminded me a bit of the opening scenes of the movie “2001 – a Space Odyssey” with its warring clans of apes. Anyway, it is to show that humans owe their tendency towards violent conflict amongst each other to our evolutionary forebears. Chimps are indeed known to be one of only a few higher species of animals that do indeed go on “organized” war raids against other clans of chimps, including brutal massacres …
The other large object in this intro hall illustrates the “other” end, as it were, the contemporary “pinnacle” of the evolution of human conflict: a decommissioned warhead of a former Soviet R-12 intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missile (NATO reporting name “SS-4”). During the Cold War countless missiles like this stood ready for launching inside complexes of underground silos across the edges of the USSR, including the Baltic states (see also Plokstine in Lithuania!). This specimen is on loan from Estonia.
Along the walls of this intro hall are pictures from long-gone times from the Middle Ages through to modernity and culminating in a blow-up of that famous image of the “Baker” nuclear test at Bikini in 1946.
The main parts of the museum then go through the ages of Swedish warfare and military history from ca. the 1500s to the present day. It’s more or less chronologically organized and I expected the older parts to be of little interest to me or indeed relevance to the modernity-grounded concept of dark tourism adopted for this website. So it was, and hence I raced through those parts pretty quickly, only stopping occasionally to take some photos of the often drastic lifelike and in part also life-size dioramas on display, but without taking in any of the explanatory texts – see the photo gallery below for some examples of the displays.
Things got more relevant and interesting for me with the section about the 20th century and WW1. There’s some general coverage of this “Great War” even though Sweden did not directly take part in it, and displays include such new weaponry as machine guns, as well as numerous uniforms from all sides. Gas masks are on display to illustrate the introduction of chemical warfare during WW1. There are some specifically Scandinavian angles, e.g. about a woman called Marika Stiernstedt who was one of the first female war reporters (amongst other things reporting about the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in 1915) and remained a left-leaning activist throughout her life. Another side angle is that on Finland and its civil war of 1918, in which both German WW1 veterans as well as a contingent of Swedish troops participated in the defeat of the “Reds” by the “Whites” under General Mannerheim.
The interwar years are illustrated as having been characterized by disarmament and demilitarization, as well as the development of air defence systems. When WWII broke out with the German aggression against Poland, Sweden found itself underprepared for war. But this quickly changed with a massive mobilization and a programme of rearmament. By 1940 Sweden was surrounded by warring/occupied nations, but it managed to remain neutral throughout the war years.
Initially, this was a delicate balancing act, and the fact that Sweden grudgingly allowed German troops to transfer by train through Swedish territory between occupied Norway and the new front against the Soviet Union was seen by some as undermining neutrality and actually supporting the German side logistically. By 1943, however, Sweden’s military had grown and developed to a standard capable of defending the nation militarily, and put it in a position to refuse any German demands.
The exhibition illustrates how everyday life was affected in Sweden during those years with the German threat right on the country’s doorstep. Amongst the displays to be seen here are various Nazi uniforms and paraphernalia, including a specimen of the legendary Enigma machine (see Bletchley Park) as well as a small remote-controlled unmanned attack vehicle, or tracked mine, with the code name “Goliath” (though size-wise it was more a “David”).
A side section of special relevance from a dark-tourism perspective is that about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who during the later stages of the Holocaust in Budapest, Hungary, managed to save thousands of Jews from deportation to Auschwitz by issuing false IDs and/or Swedish protection papers. The section includes a partial reconstruction of Wallenberg’s office and display cases along the side provide some basic info about other such “heroes”, several of whom were later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by the state of Israel (see Yad Vashem!), including Swedes Nina and Valdemar Langlet, Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz and his wife Gertrud or Red Cross representative Friedrich Born.
Of particular interest is the following section about the Cold War era, in which Sweden played a significant role. Under the threat of nuclear attack by the USSR, Sweden initially even pursued a nuclear armament programme of its own with the original plan being to deploy about a hundred nuclear bombs. Yet the nuclear programme was intensely unpopular in Sweden and by 1968 it had been given up and the nation signed the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty.
A side story here is that of the Soviet submarine U-137 that had entered Swedish waters south of Karlskrona and had run aground. The fact that the sub was carrying nuclear weapons intensified the crisis. Subsequently, the Swedish shores were systematically surveyed for any violations of Swedish territory by the Soviet Navy.
Another section focuses on the civil defence efforts within Sweden under the threat of nuclear war. The exhibits on display are very similar to those of the “Protect and Survive” efforts in Britain that you can see e.g. at Hack Green nuclear bunker.
The end of the Cold War is primarily illustrated with a large replica of a section of the Berlin Wall and text panels cover the developments from Gorbachev’s perestroika to the eventual “fall” of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR.
The largest display in this part of the museum is a whole life-size reconstruction of a dorm in a military barracks, consisting of several two-tier bunk beds, only one of which, however, is occupied, by a mannequin under a blanket reading a book in the faint glow of a bedside reading lamp.
In what follows, Sweden’s military role in the modern age is illustrated, e.g. by means of a large tundra-capable tracked armoured personnel carrier, a border guard atop a ladder, and other things. Covered, too, is Sweden’s participation in international UN missions.
The final section is quite illuminating as it deals with the rather lucrative Swedish arms industry, including for export. On display are various Swedish-built machine guns and other weapons, and the largest display item here is a Swedish “Ugglan” (‘Owl’) reconnaissance drone from the 1990s/2000s.
Back at ground level I also took a quick look at the then current temporary exhibition, which was called “Crossroads” and was about 1000 years of Swedish-Ukrainian relations. While much of this again falls out of the catchment period for dark tourism, the exhibition obviously reaches as far as the current Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and Sweden’s role in it (e.g. as supplier of weaponry). The final object on display in this section was the blue pen used in May 2022 to sign Sweden’s application for NATO membership, which was finally granted in March 2024.
All in all, the museum proved to be a lot more interesting than I had previously anticipated. I expected much more stuffy old-glories kinds of things from Sweden’s older military history. And while there was a certain proportion of that, which I quickly skimmed through, it became quite clear even that early on that this museum is not one of those glorifying military history – quite on the contrary. The gory and problematic aspects are never far away. Especially interesting are of course the more modern sections and the special Swedish perspectives on e.g. WWII and the Cold War as well as the country’s contemporary role in the world of conflict and the arms industry.
Location: at Riddargatan 13 in the middle of Östermalm, Stockholm, just east of the business centre and north-east from the Old Town (Gamla Stan).
Google Maps locator: [59.3347, 18.0802]
Access and costs: quite centrally located and hence not difficult to reach; fairly reasonably priced.
Details: to get to the museum you can walk it from within the city centre or the Old Town (Gamla Stan). Riddargatan branches off from the main artery that is Birger Jarlsgatan, where there is also the nearest metro station, Östermalmstorg, from where it is a 5-7 minute walk. Alternatively you could get a tram (line 7) or a bus to Nybroplan and walk it from there north up Sibyllegatan.
Opening times: daily except Mondays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and until 7 p.m. on Tuesdays (possibly longer opening times in summer).
Admission: 140 SEK (concession 95 SEK, visitors up to 18 years old get in free).
Larger items such as backpacks as well as coats can be left in lockers provided on the ground floor (free of charge).
Photography for private purposes is allowed, but no flash.
Time required: I spent a bit over an hour at this museum, but I skipped quite a good proportion of its exhibitions (all the older stuff). Those who want to explore it all more comprehensively may need two hours or longer.
Combinations with other dark destinations: Several of Stockholm’s other dark spots are within walking distance from the museum, including in particular the birthplace of the ‘Stockholm syndrome’, the Olof Palme assassination spot or also the Vasa Museum – see under Stockholm.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: Given the museum’s fairly central location, it combines well with many of Stockholm’s tourist attractions. The very closest, just two blocks away to the north-west, is the fabulous Östermalms Saluhall – a gourmet food hall well worth a look, especially but not only for dyed-in-the-wool foodies.
In the other direction, to the south, the waterfront is equally close by and from here you can get ferries across the archipelago, or walk on towards the Old Town (Gamla Stan) or the various museums on the islands east of it.
See under Stockholm in general.
