Uniformity of thought

became his assistant. Her role involved helping Lundborg with his research, aimed at discovering where the population was at its most ‘racially pure’.

The biography charts how, months after they met, Isaksson joined Lundborg at Uppsala, where she lived in his apartment at the institute and was paid a salary as a cleaner. When she became pregnant she was sent miles away to give birth to their child, Allan, from whom she was briefly separated. But after Lundborg retired from academia in 1935 and his first wife had died, he moved to be with Isaksson and their son, and they spent their remaining years away from the public gaze.

At the time that Lundborg’s research began, many of Sweden’s political parties showed at least some interest in the study of eugenics, the widely discredited theory that people can be sorted into a hierarchy of ‘racial’ groups. In fact, by the 1920s, sorting people into imagined racial hierarchies had become politically and academically fashionable. Lundborg’s work has been linked to a contemporary colonial attitude towards Sweden’s indigenous people, which experts suggest made it possible to appropriate their land with impunity.

Lundborg was also influential outside of Sweden. He was given an honorary doctorate by Heidelberg University in Germany in 1936 for his contribution to the ‘science’ of race biology, and was sympathetic to the aims of the Nazis. He made a speech at a population conference in Berlin in 1935, praising the regime for its approach and stressing his belief that Jews had no place in Europe because he considered them a ‘non-European’ people. Indeed, the cache of papers contains a letter from SS commander Heinrich Himmler detailing his plans for the SS to be made “racially hygienic”, based in part on Lundborg’s work.

His apparent hypocrisy is also interesting because of the impact he may have had on Sweden’s attitude to race – with ramifications that are still being played out today.

Marius Turda, a historian at Oxford Brookes University, said: “I hope this book will be translated into English: eugenicists were real people, living in the real world with real problems. It is vital to know this rather than exoticising them.”

“Eugenicists were real people, living in the real world, and it is vital to know this rather than exoticising them”