The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

(Grace) #1

man had not mentioned previously was that two other brothers had had similar
careers.


In 1930 Harald and Greger had followed in Richard’s footsteps to Uppsala. The two
had been close, but Vanger was not sure to what extent they had spent time with
Richard. It was quite clear that the brothers all joined Per Engdahl’s fascist
movement, The New Sweden. Harald had loyally followed Per Engdahl over the
years, first to Sweden’s National Union, then to the Swedish Opposition group, and
finally The New Swedish Movement after the war. Harald continued to be a
member until Engdahl died in the nineties, and for certain periods he was one of
the key contributors to the hibernating Swedish fascist movement.


Harald Vanger studied medicine in Uppsala and landed almost immediately in
circles that were obsessed with race hygiene and race biology. For a time he
worked at the Swedish Race Biology Institute, and as a physician he became a
prominent campaigner for the sterilisation of undesirable elements in the
population.


Quote, Henrik Vanger, tape 2, 02950:


Harald went even further. In 1937 he co-authored—under a pseudonym, thank God—a
book entitled The People’s New Europe. I didn’t find this out until the seventies. I have
a copy that you can read. It must be one of the most disgusting books ever published in
the Swedish language. Harald argued not only for sterilisation but also for
euthanasia—actively putting to death people who offended his aesthetic tastes and
didn’t fit his image of the perfect Swedish race. In other words, he was appealing for
wholesale murder in a text that was written in impeccable academic prose and
contained all the required medical arguments. Get rid of those who are handicapped.
Don’t allow the Saami people to spread; they have a Mongolian influence. People who
are mentally ill would regard death as a form of liberation, wouldn’t they? Loose
women, vagrants, gypsies, and Jews—you can imagine. In my brother’s fantasies,
Auschwitz could have been located in Dalarna.


After the war Greger Vanger became a secondary-school teacher and eventually
the headmaster of the Hedestad preparatory school. Vanger thought that he no
longer belonged to any party after the war and had given up Nazism. He died in
1974, and it wasn’t until he went through his brother’s correspondence that he

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