Eugenics and the master race of the left – archive,30 August 1997

30 August 1997 Forced sterilisations in Scandinavia have shocked the world. But the great founding fathers of British socialism, reports Jonathan Freedland, had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis

They will be searching their souls in Stockholm tonight. And in Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen, too. All over Scandinavia, people are facing up to the stain now spreading across their snow-white self -image, as they discover that their governments spent decades executing a chilling plan to purify the Nordic race, nurturing the strong and eradicating the weak. Each day victims of forced sterilisation, now deep in middle age, have stepped forward to tell how they were ordered to have "the chop", to prevent them having children deemed as racially defective as themselves.

Related: Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's closet | Jonathan Freedland