Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [70]
Blomkvist’s conversation with Vanger the day before had been illuminating on one other point. From the start the old man had talked to Blomkvist about so many members of his family in a contemptuous and denigrating manner. It struck him as odd. Blomkvist wondered whether the patriarch’s suspicions about his family had warped his judgement in the matter of Harriet’s disappearance, but now he was starting to realise that Vanger had made an amazingly sober assessment.
The image that was emerging revealed a family that was socially and financially successful, but in all the more ordinary aspects was quite clearly dysfunctional.
Henrik Vanger’s father had been a cold, insensitive man who sired his children and then let his wife look after their upbringing and welfare. Until the children reached the age of sixteen they barely saw their father except at special family gatherings when they were expected to be present but also invisible. Henrik could not remember his father ever expressing any form of love, even in the smallest way. On the contrary, the son was often told that he was incompetent and was the target of devastating criticism. Corporal punishment was seldom used; it wasn’t necessary. The only times he had won his father’s respect came later in life, through his accomplishments within the Vanger Corporation.
The oldest brother, Richard, had rebelled. After an argument—the reason for which was never discussed in the family—the boy had moved to Uppsala to study. There had been sown the seeds of the the Nazi career which Vanger had already mentioned, and which would eventually lead to the Finnish trenches. What the old 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.
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