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In the 1950s she was known as the "Schwedenmädel" (lit: "Swedish girl"), after her first German film of 1954. In Germany she was only known as a schlager-singer ("Ein Mann muss nicht immer schön sein"), but in actual fact Alice Babs had always been much, much more. Born in 1924 in Kalmar, Sweden, the daughter of a silent film pianist, she more or less grew up in the cinema. She learned singing from her mother and recorded her first record when she was 15. At that time she had already discovered Afro-American music: scat and jazz. Just like Louis Armstrong, she u...

Somewhere in Sweden, our conscripted soldiers were waiting for the German war machine. Swedish artists were mobilized and sent to the locations. - The need for entertainment was great, says Alice Babs, who in the winter of 1941, aged 17, celebrated Christmas with the soldiers in a barrack in the Stockholm archipelago. The Swedish soldiers was offered entertainment of sorts - song and dance, drama, comedy, ballet and mime.