steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) (01/30/85)
***
San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, January 29, 1985
Page 7.
______________________________________________________________________
Race 'Purification'
Remberance of
Racism in Sweden
Lund, Sweden
The rediscovery of a large collection of skulls once used to
prove that Swedes represented the purest strain of the Germanic race
has reopened one of the darkest chapters in modern Swedish history.
The research was part of a vast Swedish program of racial purif-
ication, including mass sterilizations that continued long after the
end of World War II, according to evidence uncovered by two scholars
at Lund university.
It is a side of Swedish history that most foreigners and many
young Swedes are not aware of. "What is astonishing is that no one
ever criticized the sterilization program," say researchers Richard
Sotto and David Weston.
The Swedish Medical Journal reported in June 1949 that 12,108
women and 3378 men were sterilized in this country between 1935 and
1948. Most were deemed backward. Some were described as sexually
over-stimulated or simply "asocial".
Figures from the Swedish Social Welfare Board show that from 1949
until 1964, when the law was changed that gave the authorities wide
powers to pressure the mentally retarded inot haveing the operation,
26,619 wommen and 1251 men were sterilized.
The two researchers say that although the sterilization program
was "voluntary," those selected had little choice.
A March 1944 law permitted castration of dangerous criminals and
what it described as men with abnormal or exessive sex urges. Prison-
ers could either submit or go to jail.
The law, although much altered, is still on the books. The last
castration of a criminal was in 1970. According to the Welfare board
statistics, seven people were castrated on "humanitarian" grounds.
Today it is difficult to find reference to the laws, which stemed
from Sweden's former obsession with racial purity.
The two say the 2000 skulls they stumbled on in Lund University
had been used to prove a theory that the small, round-headed and
dark-haired original inhabitants of Sweden, such as the Laps and the
Finns, had been driven north by invaders.
According to this theory, they were replaced by tall, blue-eyed,
blond Germans with elongated skulls, the "purest" of whom were from
the Svea trib which gave its name and a "superior" culture to Sweden.
The Lund collection has not been used since 1978 when the
university's last professor of human anatomy dies. Sotto and Weston
wonder why the collectin was not destroyed after the mass murder of
Jews by the Nazis in World War II showed where this type of research
could lead.
Lund was only a small part of the research, which in 1921 led to
a unanimous vote by both chambers of parliament approbing a proposal
by two Social Democratic deputies to set up the State Institute for
Racial Biology in Uppsala.
The institute put in motion a comprehensive program of research
into the problems of degeneration caused by race-mixing that investi-
gated 85,000 cases in its first two years.
The first chairman of the board was fromer prime minister Hjalmar
Hammarskjold, father of the late U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammar-
skjold.
Sotton and Weston said the institute began as a world center for
recial theories but that what it did rom 1935 o 1945 remains obscure.
In 1958 it as absorbed into Uppsala university and renamed the depart-
ment of human genetics.
Racism as a pejorative term only entered the Swedish language
after World War II, according to the two scholars. They say that the
people involved in racial research included some of the most prominent
Swedish scientists and academics f the time.
The 1933 program of the Farmers's League, the forerunner of the
modern center party of former premier Thorbjorn Faelldin, introduced
a commitment to protect the Swedish tribe against "inferior racial
elements".
A typical extract from a 1920's Swedish schoolbook reads: "The
Negros have never created any building, written language, or large
ship to travel the sea....They are for the most part childish amiable
people who love displays, but are also liars and unreliable and have
underdeveloped religious concepts.
Today more than 10 per cent of Sweden's eight million people are
of foreign origin, and such views are anathema for all political par-
ties execpt for a few fringe groups.
"There is a growing racist tendency in Sweden today because of
economic problems, but neo-Nazi propaganda is 99 per cent directed
against immigrents and only one per cent against Jews. says Stefan
Meisels, an officer of a Jewish group.
There were demonstrations with placards reading "Protest Against
Import of Jews" in Sweden in early 1939 but the two Lund researchers
say anti-Semitism was not a real problem.
The pre-war movement to "purify" the breed had wide support.
In 1935, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, two of Sweden's best-known
Social Democratic intellectuals, called fro a strengthening of the
first sterilization law introduced a year earlier, saying:
"Society is interested in a reduction of the mentally retarded's
freedom to breed. . . . Should such individuals be prevented from
coming into the world, it would bring significat social relief quite
regardless of the effect it would have on the future improvement of
the population stock."
The passage is from "Crisis and the Population Issue" by the
winner of the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize and her husband.
Reuters
--
scc!steiny
Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382
109 Torrey Pine Terr.
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
ihnp4!pesnta -\
fortune!idsvax -> scc!steiny
ucbvax!twg -/