Children…

A poster for the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games.
It depicts the “new man”, a physical and hereditary
ideal shared by many Europeans. The growing
importance of sports, racism and nationalism contributed
to the impact of such ideas. Similar depictions
of white masculine power was characteristic of
Nazi propaganda.
Jews in Sweden
For centuries, Sweden has hosted different minority
groups. The first Jewish congregation was established
in Stockholm in the 1770s, after receiving permission
from King Gustav III. The rights and obligations
of Jews were regulated by specific laws. Though the
French Revolution of 1789 led to the beginnings of Jewish
emancipation throughout Europe, Jews in Sweden
were not granted full civil rights until 1870.
By then, many Jews were economically and socially
integrated into Swedish society, and were no longer
legally discriminated against. However, antisemitic
attitudes persisted, and negative portrayals of “the
Jew” were commonly contrasted to all things “Swedish”.
These attitudes were also propagated in literature,
caricatures and film. There was also strong resistance
against Jewish immigration from Central and Eastern
Europe. In particular, many business men felt threatened
by potential competition.
“The Jewish question is
not just a matter of trade
and industry, it’s also a
racial and cultural issue.
(…) Jewry is the ruin of the
European peoples.”
PEHR EMANUEL LITHANDER, SWEDISH
MERCHANT AND MP, 1912
Racial theories in Sweden
during the 1920s and the 1930s
During the first half of the 20th century, concepts of
“race” and the notion that individual nations had to
maintain and preserve their national and ethnic “purity”
were quite influential in the Western world. In Sweden,
these ideas were partly implemented through
the establishment in 1922 of the State Institute for
Racial Biology. The Institute had broad support across
the political spectrum. Research conducted under the
leadership of Herman Lundborg was closely related to
that of leading German “race researchers”, who enjoyed
close long-term contacts and co-operation with the
Swedish Institute.
Notable groups in Swedish society fraternised with
ideas and proposals which would later find their most
radical political expression in Nazi Germany. The idea
of extinguishing “life unworthy of life” was not only
aired in Germany in the 1920s. In a 1922 Swedish parliamentary
debate on the death penalty, leading Social
Democrat and prominent journalist Arthur Engberg said
that society might be forced to “consider extinguishing
the lives of idiots and the physically deformed who are
beyond help, and as such doomed to be a burden unto
society and a curse unto others and themselves”.
Interest in the possibilities offered by so-called
eugenics was even greater. In 1934 and 1941, laws
were passed allowing the Government to sterilise the
“mentally deficient”, “vagrants”, alcoholics and “loose
women”, on either social or hereditary grounds.
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