The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

As early as 1922 the Swedes had an Institute for Racial Biology, in Uppsala. A leading Swedish politician at the time, Arthur Engberg, wrote: “We have the good fortune to belong to a race that is so far relatively unspoiled, a race that is the bearer of very high and very good qualities,” adding that it was about time they protected said superior race. Such views led to the sterilization of “lesser” specimens in a program which, according to one commentator, was “second only to [those of] Nazi Germany.” The two regimes shared the same goal: the purification of a race of tall, blond, blue-eyed people. In 1934, laws were strengthened so that women deemed “inferior” were sterilized against their will, along with male juvenile delinquents. Even in 1945, after the world had become aware of what the Nazis had been up to, 1,747 Swedes were sterilized, and in 1947 the figure had increased to 2,264.