DN 1997-08-20

In 1946, Sweden set a world record. No other country had sterilized so many ‘inferior’ people — ‘mixed-race individuals’, single mothers with many children, deviants, Gypsies and other ‘vagabonds’. But in school textbooks, no mention is made of this activity.

In 1953, Sweden’s prime minister was Tage Erlander and the minister for social affairs Gunnar Sträng. In that year, the State Medical Board decided to let doctors sterilize 16-year-old Nils against his will, on the grounds that he was a ‘sexually precocious individual of mixed race’. The latter reference was to show that he was not a racially pure Swede.

How racially pure Swedes were to be distinguished from others was defined in various documents and on illustrated wall charts supplied by the State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala. 

The Institute (which did not become part of Uppsala University until 1958), does not command a reference of its own in the recently-published Swedish National Encyclopædia (NE). Only if you happen to know that its first director was called Herman Lundborg, or if you check under ‘eugenics’, can you find a mention of it in a text. A bit peculiar, you might think, bearing in mind that the Institute, often mentioned in the literature on this topic, was the first of its kind in the world and was also the model for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Race Hygiene in Berlin. (A critical study of the history of Swedish racial biology almost got into the NE along with Prof. Gunnar Broberg’s article about biology in general, but was rejected by the publishers.)

A MENTION under ‘eugenics’ is nevertheless progress of a kind, as in a second major encyclopædia, Bonniers stora lexikon, from 1966, the Institute is only mentioned under Herman Lundborg, while in a third, Focus, from 1974, there is no trace of Swedish racial biology whatsoever. Nor is there any mention of Herman Lundborg, or even Nils von Hofsten, the dean of Uppsala University in the 1940s but, more interestingly, board chairman of the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology in 1945-53 and the man who in 1946 declared that more ‘inferior’ people had been sterilized in Sweden than in any other country in the world. Oddly enough, this achievement is not mentioned in ‘Social Democratic Society 1889-1989’, either. (This was the report of a research project led, among others, by author Sven Lindqvist and economist Rudolf Meidner.) I also note that in describing the exploits of Nils von Hofsten, the editors of both the NE and the Bonniers volume chose not to touch upon his achievements in the field of racial biology.

Since the late 1980s, however, a number of independent researchers and journalists have begun looking into the history of race hygiene. Despite this, even in the most recently-published school textbooks you cannot discover how and on what grounds young Nils and 60,000 other Swedes were deprived of their reproductive capacity. There is not a single word about these activities, which ceased in 1976 as quietly as they had begun in 1935. How is one to interpret this compact silence? 

A PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATION emerges from the research conducted in recent years, especially a forthcoming doctor’s thesis by Stockholm historian Maija Runcis (due next spring) but also from a comparative study edited by Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, ‘Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland’, the rather more dated ‘Oönskade i folkhemmet’ (Undesirables in the Swedish Welfare State), Bosse Lindqvist’s ‘Förädlade svenskar’ (Biologically Improved Swedes) and Mattias Tydén’s essay ‘Rasbiologi och andra rasismer’ (Racial Biology And Other Racisms), printed in the magazine Folkets historia nos. 3-4/96.

When the subject of Swedish race hygiene is discussed, the focus tends to be on ideas and theory rather than on its extensive practice here. Often, people claim that Sweden simply acted in the spirit of the times in the 1930s. Broberg’s and Roll-Hansen’s book shatters this myth. State screening of ‘inferior invidividuals’ may have been discussed in many quarters but it was only put into practice in a few European states, and Sweden was one of the pioneers. The other countries were Denmark, Nazi Germany, Norway, Finland and Estonia. Plus a lone Swiss canton. The most remarkable part of the whole affair, however, is the ideological pattern — in Germany it was the Nazis whereas in the Nordic countries it was the welfare-state parties who were most eager to cleanse the population of ‘racially’ or ‘genetically inferior elements’. In the Nordic area, all initiatives along these lines, from the 1920s and far into the 1940s, came from the Social Democrats. When similar proposals were put forward in Britain, however, it was the Labour Party that ensured they ended up in the wastepaper basket.

YOU COULD ALSO express the matter more brutally: in Sweden, it was only under Social Democratic rule and in Germany only under Nazism that citizens could be deprived of their reproductive functions as a result of their origins or their disabilities. The picture does not improve, rather the opposite, when one also learns that the Swedish sterilization laws were passed by unanimous parliaments, in true democratic order, and more or less with the blessing of the Swedish Church. The circumstances were fairly similar in the other Nordic countries as well.

There are many reasons for studying this hidden dimension in the history of the Swedish welfare state. At a time when a growing number of people are talking longingly about the communal values of the folkhem era, it is worth recalling what surprises that community could spring on some of its citizens. But the most interesting question concerns the strange ideological link involved — what was the connection between the Nordic Social Democrats and the thinking of the National Socialists in Germany?

STATE INTERVENTION for the purpose of improving the quality of a population was originally a US invention. With a mixture of openly racist, economic and medical arguments, several states (beginning, symbolically enough, in Indiana 1907) introduced legislation allowing the forced sterilization of the mentally disabled, certain types of criminals and persons who for other reasons were considered unfit to reproduce. Not surprisingly, a disproportionately large number of these ‘unfit persons’ turned out to belong to ethnic minorities. On several occasions, such state laws were rescinded by the Supreme Court on the grounds that they were incompatible with the idea of everyone’s equality before the law.

For reasons that would seem to require further research, but which Broberg and others associate with the combination of Protestantism and agrarian social structures, the biological view of man was embraced with particular enthusiasm at the turn of the century in northern Europe. Apparently without a murmur, the latest scientific findings from farm cultivation and animal breeding were transplanted to human societies. In the Nordic countries, the ‘danger of degeneracy’ became one of the greatest threats of the day. Most things could be blamed on heredity — criminality, rapist tendencies and mental disabilities of course, but also a lack of caution in financial matters, a dissipated lifestyle, masturbation or vagabondism.

SWEDEN BECAME the first country in the world to bestow official recognition on this pseudo-science. In 1921, Parliament ordered the founding of the Institute for Racial Biology, at the initiative of the Social Democrats. MPs backed the initiative unanimously, and the motion was signed by both Social Democratic leader Hjalmar Branting and the leader of the Right, Arvid Lindman. Arthur Engberg, who was later to become minister of education and ecclesiastics, set the tone of the day: ‘We are fortunate to have a race that is as yet largely untainted, a race that possesses very high and very fine qualities.’

The groundwork had already been done. As early as 1910, Swedish researchers made up the largest foreign group in the German International Society for Racial Hygiene. Two years before that, the Swedish liberal and Good Templar Edvard Wavrinsky (who soon afterwards converted to Social Democracy) had proposed banning marriages involving people with ‘hereditary taints’. But public opinion was not yet ready for this. The Standing Committee on Civil-Law Legislation turned the proposal down — on the grounds that it would constitute illegal interference in the personal sphere.

ALVA AND GUNNAR Myrdal, who from time to time are portrayed as the true advocates of race hygiene in the folkhem era, were still studying at university when the Social Democrats in 1922 proposed sterilizing the mentally disabled because of  ‘the race hygienic perils of allowing the feeble-minded to reproduce’. The motion was signed by Social Democrats Alfred Petrén and Ernst Wigforss (soon to become finance minister) along with a group of Liberals and Agrarians.

It is sometimes argued that it was not until after the Holocaust that the world became aware of the moral connection between the forced sterilization of the sick and the genocidal murder of entire ethnic groups. But at least one Swedish MP understood this as early as 1922. Social Democrat Carl Lindhagen did not feel capable of standing alone against the proposal at the voting-box, but he did put a protest on record. You wish to solve a social problem with violence, he said. You will not stop there, you will press ahead and sterilize other sick people as well. And then? What is to stop you from finally killing them? (Upper Chamber, 1 June 1922.)

Maciej Zaremba

© Maciej Zaremba. Denna text är skyddad av lagen om upphovsrätt. Eftertryck, annan kopiering eller publicering är förbjudet utan tillstånd.