Award to Kalla Fakta

At the recent New York Festivals, Sweden’s TV4 won first prize in the international competition for an episode of its popular investigative news program Kalla fakta. The prize was given out at the New York Festivals’ annual awards ceremony, held this past Tuesday in Las Vegas.

Kalla fakta’s documentary, “A Royal Nazi Secret,” about the Nazi connections of Walter Sommerlath, father of Queen Sylvia of Sweden, was a finalist in two documentary categories: History & Society and Social Issues/Current Events. The documentary won first prize in the History & Society. 

This is the first time a Swedish documentary production has won a top prize at the festival. “It’s a fantastic recognition of our journalism,” says Johan Åsard, news chief for Kalla fakta. “It shows that Kalla fakta reaches the highest journalistic standards internationally.”

Kalla faktas program about Walther Sommerlath was broadcast originally in November and December 2010 on TV4. The program revealed that the factory Walter Sommerlath ran during WWII in Berlin had belong to a Jewish engineer, Efim Wechsler, and Sommerlath took over the factory during the so-called aryanization of Jewish companies. Aryanization stripped away all economic rights and ownership from Jews in Germany. 

“This has been a true team effort with many involved, reporters, researchers, editors and more,” says Åsard. “It’s been an unusually advanced journalism project that’s demanded a lot from everyone involved, all of whom have earned the honor that the prize means.”

The program has won and been a finalist for several other major Swedish TV and journalism awards.

“It was an extremely complicated job, in part because we were working with the closed world of the Swedish royal court,” says reporter Fredrik Quistbergh. “But it was also an imortant job, since the public has the right to know the truth. The gold medal is proof that Swedish investigative journalism is in the top world class.”