The Swedish Connection – History Of Our Opel
General Motors Nordiska AB
Construction of the Swedish GM Nordiska AB assembly plant in Stockholm began in 1927 on a plot in the Hammarby district. Today, the area is a residential neighborhood, but nearly 100 years ago it was undeveloped land with access to a lake connected by a canal to the Baltic Sea. The Swedish GM facility employed more than 1,000 workers. Cars produced under GM license left the assembly lines, including Cadillac, LaSalle, Pontiac, Buick, Opel, Chevrolet, and Oldsmobile. In the 1930s, GM vehicles were the most popular choice among Swedish consumers. Hence the impressive showrooms and sophisticated presentations — it simply paid off.
The GM Nordiska AB assembly plant was renowned for the excellent quality of the cars assembled there. In 1931, several vehicles were randomly selected from GM assembly plants around the world, sealed, and shipped to the United States. At the company’s headquarters, they were subjected to quality tests, and it turned out that the winning vehicle was the one assembled in Sweden. The assembly plant was closed in 1979. Operations limited to the import of fully built vehicles were relocated to Jordbro.
Cars for the people are not collectables
In the world of classic cars that were originally designed for the masses, there is one fundamental problem: they were used day after day for decades, and very few have survived. Many simply deteriorated slowly somewhere in the quiet corner of a home garden, others were driven into the ground and ended up in scrapyards, and in other cases they were repaired using whatever parts happened to be available at the time, leaving little of their original condition intact. Paradoxically, it is often much easier to find a rare car in good—or at least complete—condition than a popular model in anything resembling decent shape. This stems from a simple fact: the type of customers the car was aimed at, and consequently how much money they had to maintain it.
Tell us your story
We were very eager to find out what had happened to our Opel from the very beginning, that is, since 1939. That’s a long time, and considering that it can sometimes be difficult to trace the history of a two-year-old BMW from across the western border, we realized this could be a rather challenging task. Thanks to the help of many kind people, including GM history researcher in Sweden, Ingemar Lund, we were able to reconstruct the complete (incredible!) life story of our Olympia. It’s a bit like meeting a nearly 90-year-old gentleman on the street who not only remembers his own name and birth year but can also recount the story of his life in astonishing detail.
Let’s start from the beginning
Our 1939 Opel Olympia De Luxe Coach was assembled at the Swedish General Motors Nordiska AB plant. The Olympia was completed in January 1939. In April of the same year, a GM Nordiska official, Walter Elliot, conducted an inspection of the car, which was required for its first registration. The original of this document is now in our possession. Only after this inspection could the car be put up for sale. The first owner of the Opel was Frans Hilding Nyman, a foreman at Skånska Cement AB.
Let’s meet the first owner
Frans Hilding Nyman (1886–1963) purchased the car new from the local GM dealership in Visby in May 1939. The seller, Mr. Sundström, provided written confirmation that the car had not undergone any modifications between January and May 1939, that is, from the inspection to the actual sale. At that time, the car received its first registration number, I2495, and served its owner on the beautiful island of Gotland. The Opel spent nearly its entire life on this island. Until 1940, Hilding worked at the Visby Cementfabrik.
In March 1941, Hilding and his wife Hildur moved to the small town of Köping, located on Lake Mälaren, the third-largest lake in Sweden. There, he took a job as a foreman at Skånska Cement. It was only after the end of World War II that the owner registered the car in his new place of residence, in the Västmanland region. This procedure was related to certain restrictions introduced in Sweden during the war, such as limited access to gasoline. In this way, in 1946, the car received a new registration number, U7812, corresponding to the region to which the first owner had moved from Gotland. In 1951, Hilding retired and returned to his hometown. In 1952, the car’s registration number changed again, this time to I3655. Hilding passed away in 1963, and the car then passed into the hands of his son, Hans Nyman.
That’s how it had to be!
How do we know all this? The details of the family story were told to us by Hilding’s own grandson! Lennart Nyman, Hilding’s grandson and Hans’s son, is now 83 years old, lives in Visby, and remembers his grandfather’s car perfectly. It was his first car in which he explored his native Gotland in it. Lennart was very moved when we managed to reach him and, in addition to telling us about the car, he also gave us archival photos from the period when the Opel belonged to his family.
Discovery of the week!
In 1964, the new owner of the Olympia became Lars Liljeroth, who paid 450 Swedish kronor for the car. Since the car remained on Gotland, its registration number did not change. Liljeroth ran a used car dealership, Bilägarna AB, in Visby. At that time, the car was proclaimed the “discovery of the week” and was displayed on a ramp in front of the showroom as an advertisement.
Liljeroth had a brother-in-law, Henry Fritz, with whom he was restoring a vintage Ford Model T. At that time in Sweden, joint ownership of a vehicle was an unusual legal arrangement, so the two men agreed that, as part of the settlement, Henry would receive the Opel while Lars would keep the Ford. That’s exactly what happened. Henry used the Olympia only very occasionally. In 1968, the car was parked for good in a shed and deregistered. In 1973, when cars in Sweden were assigned a new type of registration, the next owner became Kenneth Fritz—Henry’s son—who received the car as a gift from his father.
At that time, a small plate appeared on the car’s pillar with the name and residence of the new owner. These plates are characteristic of older cars from Sweden, but no one I spoke to could explain why they were installed. The most common answer I heard was: “My father had one on his car, so I made one for mine too.”
Later, along with Kenneth, the car was moved to the town of Lärbro, about 40 km from Visby. There, it received its next registration number under the new system: EUP 930. Kenneth took good care of the car, replacing many parts and even protecting the chassis with anti-corrosion paint. Later, the car spent the next 30 years in a small museum, while Kenneth devoted himself to his motorcycles. When, after such a long time, he wanted to return to the Opel, he realized that not driving the car was worse than driving it—and decided to sell it.
Sentiments
In 2015, Hans Ragnarsson from Linköping bought the Opel. Hans purchased the Olympia out of sentiment. When he was a young boy, his father drove exactly the same car, and the memories of family trips were so vivid that he longed to relive them.
Hans couldn’t find his father’s car, so he decided to buy the same model—and that’s how he came into contact with Kenneth. For almost ten years, Hans formed such a strong bond with the car that, before selling it, he even visited his sister so she could say goodbye to the vehicle that reminded them of their carefree childhood. During nearly a decade in his hands, the Olympia enjoyed a fantastic life—it regularly went on short and long trips, took part in numerous car meets, chauffeured a few young couples to school dances, and even appeared in a film shot in Gothenburg!
A new chapter
Our meeting with Hans was no less emotional, even though we weren’t the first to see the car before buying it. By a miraculous twist of fate, it turned out that my high school teacher had recently moved from Poland to Sweden and settled permanently a few dozen kilometers from Linköping – he’d ended up there from all over the world. Even though I’d graduated from high school years ago, we still kept in touch, so Aleksander quickly joined our mission and went on a preliminary inspection of the Olympia. These things don’t happen by accident! No less emotion accompanied our meeting. Hans could not hide his feelings and even shed a tear at the farewell, expressing the hope that we would take good care of his pride and joy. Along with the car, he passed on invaluable artifacts, such as the original service book received by the first owner, and even the very first registration document from 1939, issued at the GM Nordiska AB headquarters in Stockholm and signed by the aforementioned Walter Elliot.
Over all these years, the Opel has been preserved in an almost entirely original condition. Aside from minor paint touch-ups and routine mechanical repairs over the course of nearly nine decades, the car looks just as it did the day it left the assembly plant in Stockholm. And now… to quote our friend Marian Stoch: „You have to race, not collect”. So it’s high time for the Olympia to write the next chapter of its story and take center stage in the Monte Carlo Tribute 1939 adventure.
