The Finns immediately declared independence, waging civil war against the Bolsheviks, and Swedish volunteers enlisted in the White army. But a conflict of interest arose when the Swedishspeaking Aland Islands wanted a return to Swedish rule rather than stay with the victorious Finns. The League of Nations overturned this claim, granting the islands to Finland. After the war, a LiberalSocialist coalition remained in power until 1920, when Branting became the first socialist prime minister By the time of his death in 1924, the franchise had been extended to all men and women over 23 and the statecontrolled alcohol system {Systembolagei set up. Following the Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, conditions began to improve after a Social Democratic government took office for the fourth time in 1932. A Welfare State was rapidly established, meaning unemployment benefit, higher oldage pension family allowances and paid holidays. Sgitsjobaden Agreement of 1938 drew up a contract between trade unions and employers to help eliminate strikes and lockouts. With war aqain looming, all parties agreed that Sweden should remain neutral in any struggle and rearmament was negligible, despite Hitler's apparent intentions. „ J World War II was slow to affect Sweden. Unlike 1914, there was little sympathy for Germany, but neutrality was again declared. The Russian invasion of Finland in 1939 (see Finland's History, p.550) brought Sweden into the picture, providing weapons, volunteers and refuge for the Finns. Regular Swedish troops were refused though, fearing intervention from either the Germans (then' Russia's ally) or the Allies. Economically, the country remained sound less dependent on imports than in World War I and with no serious shortages. The position became stickier in 1940 when the Nazis marched into Denmark and Norway, isolating Sweden. Concessions were made German troop transit allowed, iron ore exports continued until 1943 44 when Allied threats were more convincing than the failing German war machine. Sweden became the recipient of countless refugees from the rest of Scandinavia and the Baltic. Instrumental, too, by rescuing Hungarian Jews from the SS, was Raoul Wallenberg, who persuaded the Swedish government to give him diplomatic status in 1944. Unknown thousands (anything up to 35,000) of Jews in Hungary were sheltered in "neutral houses" (flying the Swedish flag), fed and clothed by Wallenberg. But when Soviet troops liberated Budapest in 1945, Wallenberg was arrested as a suspected spy and disappeared later reported to have died in prison in Moscow in 1947. However, unconfirmed accounts had him alive in a Soviet prison as late as 1975, and in 1989 some of his surviving relatives flew to Moscow in an attempt to discover the truth about his fate. The end of the war was to provide the country with a serious crisis of conscience. Physically unscathed, Sweden was now vulnerable to Cold War politics.