THE Nazis were not alone in viewing Nordic peoples as the ideal biological “type”. A lot of Nordics, it now seems, immodestly felt the same way. All four main Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden—brought in eugenics laws in the 1930s. More remarkably, some of those laws stayed on the statute books until the mid-1970s, though apparently they were not latterly used very often. It is a subject which most of today's Nordic folk would rather keep in decent obscurity, but a series of articles in an influential Stockholm newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has been shocking the Swedes to the core and making other Nordics look back nervously at the not-so-recent past.

Between 1935 and 1976, the newspaper says, no fewer than 60,000 young Swedish women deemed mentally defective or otherwise handicapped to a degree “which makes them incapable of looking after their children” were sterilised. More embarrassingly, this happened under laws passed in 1934 by a vigorous new Social Democratic government—a hitherto esteemed forebear of Sweden's present rulers. The laws lapsed only in 1976.

To its many supporters in the 1930s, the policy served three purposes: to prevent the “degeneration of the race”, especially as feeble-minded and insane people were supposed to breed more freely than thrifty and energetic people of “superior” stock; to be kind—yes, that is how it was rationalised—to people who needed “protection” against propagating their own weak genes; and lastly, as the Stockholm newspaper explained, to save the state the heavy cost of welfare for the very dim.

Cases of forced sterilisation were, in fact, rare. But many young women must have submitted to pressure, especially those already in special residential homes who were told they would spend the rest of their lives in institutions unless they agreed to be made sterile.

The odd thing is that the grisly tale has remained dormant for so long. The relevant laws and policies have never been hidden to those who wanted to explore them, but until Dagens Nyheter took up the story few of today's Swedes knew anything about it. Which also explains the sudden interest of the international media, taken aback that a country renowned for its generosity to the weak and needy should until quite recently have subjected its most vulnerable citizens to such demeaning treatment.

The government has been quick to don sackcloth and ashes. Margot Wallstrom, the social-affairs minister, has called the sterilisation policies “barbaric”. The government is already setting up a commission and is expected to compensate surviving victims. So far, only about 30 women have been paid, in cases where there were “procedural errors”: compensation to others has been turned down on the ground that sterilisation took place under the law, however wrong that law seems now.

Sweden seems to have been pretty zealous, though, in applying its eugenics. The 60,000 Swedish women made sterile compare with about 11,000 Danes who met a similar fate between 1929 and 1967. The Norwegians and Finns have each confessed to 1,000 or so of their women known to have been forcibly put out of breeding circulation.

Why did such laws last so long? Inertia is one lame answer. The medical and scientific people who underwrote laws in the 1930s were still active—and apparently untroubled by the horror that accompanied revelations of Nazi eugenics—until the 1950s. Only then did the charms of eugenics fade. The principles on which the early Swedish laws were based have been overturned: people can, of course, be made sterile voluntarily, but the authorities cannot insist that they become so.

The Nordics can point out that the alleged merits of compulsory eugenics were widely touted elsewhere in the West. In the Swiss canton of Vaud, a law allowing for compulsory sterilisation of mentally handicapped people remained in effect until the 1970s. Austria's Greens say their country still follows such practices. In the Canadian province of Alberta, nearly 3,000 women were sterilised between 1928 and 1972, many of them forcibly. A number of well-known doctors in America, too, advocated the policy in the 1930s. According to Philip Reilly, an American historian, about 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilised in that decade, and some 34 states had laws that could impose the practice for much longer.