DN 1997-08-21
The welfare society used forced sterilization to minimize the number of citizens on social handouts, writes Maciej Zaremba.
”It smacks strongly of Nazism”, wrote Gunnar Myrdal in 1938 in a private letter to a party colleague, Disa Wästberg. A startling comment, as it referred to a pet concern of the Social Democrats, one that in fact represented a practical application of Myrdal’s own line of thinking. The 1938 report of the Population Commission, which was what the writer had found so distasteful, had drawn some logical conclusions from Gunnar and Alva Myrdal’s book, ‘Crisis in the Population Question’, published three years earlier. In it, the Mydrals prescribed ‘a pretty ruthless sterilization process’, involving the use of violence when necessary, with the aim of ‘screening out highly degenerate individuals’, and they expressed the hope that in the years ahead, with the aid of racial biology, it would be possible to breed individuals ‘with particularly desirable qualities’. What had happened? Was it Gunnar Myrdal and the Social Democrats who had changed tone or was it Nazism? (At the time, this question could not be discussed. Myrdal’s assessment did not come to light until after his death.)
According to the prevalent historical account, however, the answer is that neither had changed tone. To the extent that the race hygienic actions of the Social Democrats are even mentioned in the history books, the authors would have it that it was largely a question of ‘reform eugenics’, in other words an expressly non-racist ‘population policy’ aimed simply at reducing the incidence of hereditary disease. Thus, it was argued, Nordic race hygiene was completely different from that of Nazi Germany. As we shall see, this interpretation is false. All the same, Gunnar Myrdal had reason to feel a little out of sorts. His ideas on decontaminating ‘the human material’ became somewhat browner in colour when it was time for them to be implemented by Government and Parliament.
Up until the outbreak of World War II, there were few objections in official Sweden to German race hygiene. Nazis were invited to lecture at the Institute of Racial Biology in Uppsala or were consulted as experts when a new director was to be appointed there. As late as 1938, the Swedish State Population Commission still felt unable to dissociate itself from the Nuremberg Laws. It did feel that the Germans had gone too far but contented itself with a reference to the fact that the laws had generated ‘widespread disapproval…in the international community’. Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén conclude: ‘When pluses and minuses were added up, the balance seems actually to have been in Germany’s favour.’
On 2 June 1942, the first report of the Holocaust reached the world via the BBC. In occupied Norway, Vidkun Quisling broadened the scope of the sterilization law (which was similar to the Swedish one) with a section about ‘preserving the race’. In the same year, an undersecretary of state in Stockholm ordered the Board of Health and Welfare to ‘make an inventory of the tattare and Gypsies present in the realm’. (Tattare was, and is, a catch-all Swedish word for wandering vagrants, vagabonds, Gypsies, etc, often used derogatorily — translator’s note.) The decision was brought before the Cabinet on 25 September, signed by social affairs minister Gustav Möller as well as by the young undersecretary, and a copy was sent to the Institute for Racial Biology. The undersecretary’s name was Tage Erlander, future prime minister of Sweden.
What is the purpose of preparing such a list? The cabinet decision does not make this clear. I have taken the trouble to do some research into the material on which Tage Erlander based the decision. In a file labelled ‘The Tattare Question’ there is an analysis of the problem by the Board of Health and Welfare, dated 28 June 1937:
Here, we are presented with a specific racial problem, in which an ethnic element of a disposition and inclination, and a way of life deriving therefrom, alien to our own, cannot profitably be assimilated into our race. (…) The Board is…not convinced that public measures leading to closer assimilation of such alien racial elements would be to the general good in the long term. There is a risk that the alien constitutive characteristics (of these individuals) would live on in forthcoming, superficially assimilated generations and give rise to lifestyles deviating from those of our society. (…) The question should be asked whether, to protect ourselves, it might not be better to use stronger measures, naturally only insofar as these remain compatible with the tenets of humanity. With this in mind, it would seem possible to consider sterilization measures in cases where the persons concerned are incapable of fulfilling even the most elementary duties of a parent, as understood from a Swedish point of view.
The government swung into action. As a first step, racial biologists were dispatched to measure skulls. But this took time, and in 1943, Professor Nils von Hofsten, racial biologist, dean of Uppsala University and a member of the State Medical Board’s committee of forensic psychiatry (which ruled on sterilization cases) became impatient. He sought approval for coercive measures, informing Parliament by letter that ‘to a comparatively large extent the so-called tattare show signs of mental inferiority and thus come under the sterilization laws, which means they may be sterilized without their consent’.
IN SEEKING TO UNDERSTAND the special character of Social Democratic race hygiene, this is a key sentence. Certainly, the origins of these ‘tattare’ is a moot question. Some of these ‘travellers’, as they call themselves, claim that they are an ethnic group in their own right. Genealogist Adam Heymowski felt he could prove that they constituted a subculture of outcasts dating back to the 18th century similar to the ‘travellers’ of Ireland and the Netherlands. But the origins of these people were not what concerned Prof. Hofsten and the Board of Health and Welfare. They were worried about their ‘divergent way of life’. The ‘tattare’, whoever they were, deviated from the norm. Not necessarily by the shape of their skulls but because they lived the lives of vagabonds, with a fierce sense of family, their own customs and above all a disinclination to be absorbed into the living patterns of industrial society. They wanted neither to work in the warehouses, consult the child care clinics nor settle in the beautiful new satellite towns. Like the Gypsies, they rated their comparative autonomy more highly than most of the blessings of the welfare state. (Insofar of course as these social outcasts had any choice in the matter.)
It was this, more than their genes, that Nils von Hofsten along with the Board of Health and the Government found unacceptable and therefore abnormal. It is not difficult to see this racial rhetoric as an incantation: a person who so stubbornly rejects our scientifically-tested way of life must be different by nature, quite simply a different kind of person, mentally inferior and therefore ripe for Sonderbehandlung.
In other words, it was a sort of back-to-front Nazism — instead of ascribing specific qualities to a certain ethnic group (the Jews are this or that) you define socio-politically undesirable qualities as ethnically alien (vagabonds are probably a race). History appears to confirm this suspicion. When in 1945 the racial biologists had completed their measurements and inconveniently declared the ‘tattare’ to be ethnic Swedes, this made little impression on the government agencies concerned. The Board of Health refused to accept the news and well into the 1950s officials of the welfare state would continue to rave about ‘half-breeds’ and ‘tattare blood’ in their publications.
An excerpt from the records kept by a municipal child care committee (1945) on a 28-year-old married mother of four: Mixed-race type, black, typical tattare physiognomy. Healthy and strong. Straightforward and firm, seems to know what she wants. Even-tempered, somewhat short and abrupt in her ways. Seems v. unintelligent, interested in nothing except what affects herself and her family. AI (age of intelligence) 15 years. An emotionally unstable, untrustworthy, unintelligent psychopath. Grounds for authorizing sterilization: unmistakable tattare features, psychopathy, a wandering life. Anti-social lifestyle.
It was probably Unesco’s official denunciation of racialism in 1950 that put an end to this kind of talk. But not necessarily to the practice. The number of people sterilized in Sweden on the grounds of ‘genetic hygiene’ did indeed fall by 200 that year, but at the same time the number operated on for ‘medical reasons’ increased by the same amount.
IN 1945, THE NAZIS’ extermination camps were opened and the ultimate significance of the term ‘inferior races’ stood revealed in ashes. During that year, Sweden set a new sterilization record with 1,747 operations. And a new record of 1,847 the following year. What is one to make of this?
To grasp what was going on, you have to return to the parliamentary debate on the issue in 1941. Per Albin Hansson and his ministers proposed broadening the sterilization law. To ‘hereditary taints’ they wanted to add the grounds of ‘anti-social way of life’. Justice minister K G Westman of the Agrarian Party, it is true, was still going on about ‘decontaminating the Swedish national stock’ but only one Social Democrat openly declared his support for race hygienic measures. The others tended to express themselves more in the spirit of Gunnar Myrdal, darkly referring to ‘an undesirable human material that is propagating uninhibitedly’. Otherwise, they referred mainly to money. The ‘undesirables’ were no longer recognizable by their erroneous genes but by the part they played in the national economy. They cost money.
The sterilization debate of 1941 took the discourse out of the realm of pre-war racism. It focused instead on the mounting obligations and commitments of the emerging welfare state. The number of people on social handouts had to be reduced. This was stated openly in Parliament, but it is made even clearer by the research carried out by Maija Runcis, who alone has had access to the secret archives of the State Medical Board. Diagnoses like ‘psychopath’, ‘debilitated’, ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘anti-social’ were mostly applied to completely healthy persons who were either single mothers or failed to live up to the expectations of ‘correct conduct’ in their community, or both. ‘She is dirty, unkempt, she has a lot of red on her nails but beneath the red they are exceedingly black. Her dress, too, is very singular’ — an excerpt from a 1965 sterilization application concerning a divorced mother of three. To be seen publicly with men or behave defiantly towards those in authority was also seen as a mark of low intelligence or even feeble-mindedness, qualifying the person for the surgeon’s knife.
The fear was that these social deviants would pass on their erroneous lifestyles to their children. It was often the local authority that initiated the sterilization process and the reasons were often financial ones. Male inmates of juvenile prisons, for instance, were frequently sterilized before the summer holidays so that they could work in the fields without the risk of unauthorized propagation. Over 95% of all persons sterilized, however, were women, and according to Runcis the medical journals reveal numerous examples of frightened and disgusted reactions to female sexuality. She even found that one of Sweden’s biggest housing companies, the cooperative HSB, was in the habit of tipping off the authorities about which tenants should not be allowed to procreate. (How should this be termed — mass-movement collaboration?) It was then up to the State Medical Board to clothe trivial grounds like economic necessity or public order in fine-sounding psychiatric diagnoses.
There is much evidence to support Runcis’s theses. During the parliamentary debate of 1941, Gustav Möller argued that if sterilization could help eliminate entire families who burdened the penal institutions generation after generation, ‘no real injustice has been done to any single individual — instead society has gained, perhaps not greatly, but nevertheless to a degree worth considering.’ It is also clear that the MPs championing sterilization had often served on municipal child care committees or workhouse committees dealing with the poor. Thus in 1941 a total of 33 Social Democrats, seven Agrarian Party members, a Liberal and a Conservative expressed their disapproval of the draft bill, which they found too lax. They demanded the forced sterilization of ‘anti-social’ citizens. The editor of Social Democratic Ny Tid, Johan Olsson, felt it was nothing to worry about if amidst all this activity one or two anti-social individuals ‘fit for breeding’ happened to end up on the operating table against their will. ‘I think it is better if one goes too far,’ he wrote, ‘than if one risks…having unsuitable and inferior offspring brought into the world.’ Four of his party colleagues called for police procedures for collecting those who balked. These additions to the bill were not adopted, however.
‘A Swedish law containing such a provision had not differed greatly from the Nazi German one,’ note Broberg and Tydén in ‘Undesirables in the Welfare State’. This is true, but there was, as we have seen, a difference in design that enabled people like Gunnar Myrdal or Nils von Hofsten to indignantly reject all comparisons with Nazism. In Hitler’s Germany, people were forcibly brought under the knife on the basis of little-substantiated theories of heredity or irrational dreams about the Aryan race. In Sweden, the motive for the same activity was the need for a sound, rational municipal budget. To the extent that race theory or arguments about ‘inferiority’ were used, the intention seems to have been to make the victim seem more alien. Originally a racist project, the forced sterilization programme became an economic instrument in the 1940s and was in fact regarded as a prerequisite for certain welfare reforms. In the debate on a general child benefit system (1944), which was to become one of the flagships of the welfare state, Gunnar Myrdal and Alf Johansson (in his capacity as member of the commission inquiring into social housing policy) expressed the fear that child benefits might encourage childbirth among ‘elements with inferior genes’. Indeed, several bodies whose views were officially sought on the matter called for the reform to be followed by an expansion of the sterilization programme’s scope. In the year prior to the introduction of child benefits (1948), 2,264 people were sterilized, or six a day — a new record. In other words, there is reason to suspect that if this progressive, egalitarian reform had not been enacted, the social surgeons would have had less to do.
THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION explains the huge scope of the sterilization programme. Even if far from all who were sterilized were coerced to the operating table (the 60,000 cases included a number of purely medical ones as well as a large group of ‘worn-out mothers’), the Swedish welfare state retained its sombre second place in Europe behind Nazi Germany in the number of surgically sanitized ‘inferior’ citizens.
The most terrifying part of this whole affair is probably the consensus that existed, and the interminable silence that surrounded it. Not just the architects of the welfare society but also whole parliaments found it legitimate to rob tens of thousands of people of their most fundamental right — parenthood — for the alleged good of the community. No ethical misgivings were voiced. I have only once come across the word ‘ethics’ in relation to the sterilization programme and that was in the preface to the 1936 Population Commission report: ‘The question of whether sterilization is legally and ethically justified at all… is not one that we need discuss here.’ And so we are back with our original question: how did Social Democratic race hygiene and Nazi race hygiene differ and how were they similar?
I am inclined to agree with historian Mattias Tydén, who has made a systematic comparison in his essay ‘Racial Biology and Other Racisms’. He asks: ‘Is it possible to talk about a basic qualitative difference between Swedish and Nazi sterilization policies, or between sterilization policies and genocide? Or is it a question of only very minor differences between two occurrences both of which eliminated human rights and human dignity?’ Only in two respects, says Tydén, did the Nazi sterilization programme differ from the Swedish one — in the degree of brutality employed and in the Nazis’ more consistently racist approach. (One might also add: anti-Semitism. Herman Lundborg, the head of the Institute for Racial Biology, was indeed aggressively anti-Semitic, but ‘for tactical reasons’ he refrained from commenting on ‘the Jewish question’, as he disclosed in a letter to Swedish Nazi leader Birger Furugård. Nor have I come across any trace of anti-Semitism in the Swedish sterilization programme.)
The other components were the same: the state’s self-imposed right to intervene in a person’s most private circumstances — the citizen was subordinate to the ‘race’ or the ‘national stock’ (the idea that all individuals should have the right to freely decide over their own bodies was considered ‘an extremely individualistic attitude’ by the Population Commission of the 1930s.) The two also had in common a biological view of mankind, which denies people their equal worth. Instead, your worth depends on your racial origin, your genes or, as in the Swedish folkhem, your usefulness to society. (Alva Myrdal, for instance, expressed regret at the passing of the skivvy system as this deprived lesser beings of ‘a chance to do work, albeit for little pay, that made their lives morally defensible‘ (my italics).
Personally, I would like to add one further component that the two policies had in common — the impassive, unrelenting and bureaucratically unimpeachable way the sterilization programmes were conducted, with everyone from doctors and social workers to housing company officials doing their duty and not asking any unnecessary questions.
IT WOULD BE a healthy sign if the research findings of Runcis, Broberg, Tydén et al were to lead to a thorough examination of the myths surrounding the Swedish welfare state, the folkhem. In 1928, at a time when Social Democratic leader Per Albin Hansson was promising Swedes the Good Society, in which there would be ‘no privileged nor disadvantaged, no favourites and no victims. Where none shall look down upon another…,’ his party colleagues were busy preparing a law for the purpose of weeding out the ‘biologically inferior’.
It is not just a question of historical decency or redress for the abused. At a time of fetal diagnostics, health moralism and care prioritizing it might be worthwhile finding out to what extent and in which respects this kind of thinking is embraced by the present-day heirs of the folkhem. The question is not unreasonable. To my knowledge, neither the Social Democrats nor the Medical Society have dissociated themselves from their achievements in the sphere of race hygiene.
It would be unfortunate, however, if the debate were to be confined to quibbling about the degree of open as opposed to hidden racism that characterized the folkhem pioneers. As can be seen from this account (as well as from Jesus Alcalá’s article in Dagens Nyheter 16/8 about the Nazi doctors), the impersonal goal of ‘the communal good’ can induce the same kind of deeds as aggressive racism.
MACIEJ ZAREMBA
PS On the day I completed this article, I came across a remarkable installation in an Italian restaurant in Stockholm. Books had been glued together to make a wall and sprayed a drab brown. I manage to prise open the first page of the uppermost volume. A motto: ‘You know the tree by the fruit. Citizens wishing to acquire a truly firm foundation on which to base their political decisions would be wise to take close note of the political parties’ actions.’ — Per Albin Hansson, 1932.
Bibliography:
Maria Runcis’s unfinished doctor’s thesis on the establishment of the sterilization laws (disputation in the spring of 1998)
Sterilization Policy in Demark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, edited by Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen. Michigan State University Press, 1996.
Oönskade i folkhemmet (Undesirables In The Swedish Welfare State). Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén, Gidlunds 1991.
Rasbiologi och andra rasismer (Racial Biology And Other Racisms), Mattias Tydén, Folkets historia no. 3-4/96.
Förädlade svenskar (Biologically Improved Swedes), Bosse Lindqvist, Alfabeta 1991.
Statlig rasforskning (Racial Research By The State), a history of the Insitute of Racial Biology. Gunnar Broberg, Ugglan no. 4, Lund, 1995.
Bortom all ära och redlighet. Tattarnas spel med rättvisan (At The Back Of Beyond: The Tattare And Swedish Justice), Birgitta Svensson, Nordic Museum documents 114/1993.
Vägarnas folk. De resande och deras livsvärld. (On The Road: The Lives And World Of The Travellers), Gunborg A Lindholm, the Western Swedish Ethnological Society, 1995.
In the Name of Eugenics. Daniel J Kevles, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1985
Socialdemokratins samhälle (Social Democratic Society), edited by Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin and Klas Åmark, 1988.
Translation: Steven Croall
© Maciej Zaremba. Denna text är skyddad av lagen om upphovsrätt. Eftertryck, annan kopiering eller publicering är förbjudet utan tillstånd.