The aim of Sweden’s refugee settlement policy is that refugees should be offered an             initial place of dwelling in a municipality with available accommodation and a good             labour market within commuting distance. Refugees risk long-run unemployment, if             initially placed in a municipality with bad labour market opportunities (see Edin et             al., 2004 and Åslund et al., 2006). It is therefore important to know to what extent             the state of a municipality’s labour market (and not only availability of apartments)             drives the willingness to receive refugees. No such study has previously been con-             ducted. This paper thus aims to bridge this gap in the research by analyzing data             between 2006-2010 for all 290 Swedish municipalities and their contracts with the             Swedish central government regarding refugee reception. The main findings are,             when accounting for municipality-fixed effects, that neither unemployment nor             available apartments affect the probability of signing a contract. Additional govern-             ment grants, on the other hand, has a positive effect on the likelihood of signing a             contract. Among municipalities which do sign contracts, the agreed number of refu-             gees is negatively affected by higher municipality unemployment and positively             affected by additional available apartments.

German industrialization in the nineteenth century had brought forward a variety of conflicting ideas when it came to the agrarian community. One of them was the agrarian romantic movement led by Adam Műller, who feared the loss of the traditional German peasant. Műller influenced Reichdeutsche Richard Walther Darré, who argued that large cities were the downfall of the German people and that only a healthy peasant stock would be able to ‘save' Germany. Under Darré's definition, “Geopolitik” was the defense of the land, the defense with Pflug und Schwert (plow and sword) by Wehrbauern, an ‘Űberbauer-fusion' of soldier and peasant. In order to accomplish these goals, new settlements had to be established while moving from west to east. The specific focus of this study is on the original Hegewald resettlement ideas of Richard Walther Darré and how his philosophy was taken over by Himmler and fit into his personal needs and creed after 1941. It will shed some light on the interaction of Darré and Himmler and the notorious internal fights and power struggles between the various governmental agencies involved. The Ministry for Food and Agriculture under the leadership of Darré was systematically pushed into the background and all previous, often publicly announced re-settlement policies were altered; Darré was pushed aside once the eastern living space was actually occupied.