Racial Biology and Forced Sterilization in Sweden

Between 1922 and 1975 the Swedish state ran a programme that produced approximately 63,000 sterilizations — 93% of them women, roughly half under conditions of coercion. The programme was not a secret, not a fringe operation, and not an aberration. It was passed by unanimous or near-unanimous Riksdag votes, administered through the welfare state’s medical and institutional machinery, and reached its peak in the late 1940s — the same years the folkhemmet project was being built. This page tracks how that happened and what it means for reading the Swedish model as a whole.

The institute that started it

In 1922 Sweden opened Statens Institut för Rasbiologi in Uppsala, established by a unanimous parliamentary vote the year before. All political parties supported it. Herman Lundborg, its first director, claimed Sweden was “the first cultural state in the world” to establish such an institute; historian Paul Weindling disputes whether it was the very first, but it was demonstrably the first state-funded racial biology research programme. It conducted racial examinations of 100,000 Swedes and published a high school textbook in racial classification — a full decade before the Nazi racial programme began.

The law and its consent bypass

SFS 1934:171 passed on 18 May 1934, under Per Albin Hansson’s government, with broad cross-party support. The government bill stated two grounds: that an individual “through hereditary disposition would transmit mental illness to descendants,” or was “permanently unable to manage care of their children.” It explicitly referenced preventing “inferior offspring.” The consent framework was constructed to be bypassed: for those deemed mentally incompetent, guardian consent plus two physicians was sufficient — no central medical board required. In the same year as Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s Kris i befolkningsfrågan shaped the welfare state’s intellectual agenda, the state acquired the legal instrument to control reproduction.

The 1941 expansion and ethnic targeting

SFS 1941:282 added “antisocial” individuals as an explicit sterilization category. The law was passed by the wartime samlingsregering — all four major parties — in the same year Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the Nazi regime operated its own forced sterilization programme. The “antisocial” category was applied to people with persistent welfare dependency, habitual criminal records, and Roma and Traveller identity. An estimated 600–700 people were sterilized on primarily ethnic grounds. The racial targeting was operationalized through social-welfare language rather than race law — “deviating lifestyle” rather than genetic criteria.

The programme peaked in the late 1940s: 1,747 sterilizations in 1945; 1,847 in 1946; 2,264 in 1948 — six per day. Coercion dominated the 1935–1955 period; voluntary sterilization predominated from 1955 onward as the scientific legitimacy of racial biology collapsed internationally. The programme continued until 1975 under a legal framework whose 1941 structure remained intact.

Why the welfare-state framing matters

The argument Zaremba made in 1997 — and that the SOU reports subsequently corroborated — is that the programme’s driving logic was not primarily racial in the Nazi sense but economic. The aim was to “minimise welfare recipients” by preventing reproduction among those deemed unable to support themselves. This is the connection to the folkhemmet: the same institutional project that promised equality and care also contained an apparatus for removing from the reproductive future those it classified as burdens. The programme was not a shadow of the welfare state; it was housed inside it.

The silence and the reckoning

Recognition came in 1997, fifty-two years after the programme’s peak, triggered not by an official inquiry but by journalist Maciej Zaremba. The Steriliseringsutredningen produced three government reports. SFS 1999:332 paid 175,000 SEK in compensation to approximately 1,600 survivors — roughly 2.5% of those sterilized. The government described the compensation as having “primarily symbolic function.”

The fifty-year silence is as historically significant as the programme itself. While Germany was required to publicly account for its eugenics crimes after 1945, Sweden had incorporated its own programme into the standard welfare-state success story, or simply not discussed it. The institutions that operated the programme — the medical establishment, the Riksdag, the Social Democratic welfare state — did not initiate the reckoning. A journalist did.