Why did Sweden sterilise up to 30,000 people against their will in the cause of eugenics?

Sweden set up a eugenics plan, grounded in the science of racial biology, between 1934 and 1976. “They wanted to get rid of a certain type of people: The weaker ones”.

Kjell Sundstedt’s family had never talked about the darkest moment in their history.

“It was a secret no one dared to talk about. Society was ashamed that people had been forced to be sterilised in Sweden”, says the 71-year-old filmmaker.

He had not even discussed it with his family, so when Sundstedt discovered that four of his uncles had been forcibly sterilised he was shocked.

“They were sterilised because they were poor. Their crime was poverty”, he adds.