``Castration was to prevent sexual crimes, but it quickly took on a much broader scope,'' Per Haave, who has had access to Norwegian health archives, told NRK public radio. In Norway health officials castrated 414 people from 1934 to 1969 in an effort to get tough with rapists, mental patients, homosexuals and epileptics.

More than 100 people were castrated from 1948-50 alone. Health authorities would have the testicles cut off of men and the ovaries removed from women. Sweden sterilized about 63,000 people between 1935 and 1975, many against their will, as part of a campaign to improve racial purity in the Nordic nation.

According to Health authorities a castration was justified in the case of a 15-year-old girl, because she was ''strongly erotically inclined.'' For the most part castration on men was performed to cure them of their homosexuality.

All in all 370 men and 44 women were victims of a policy that peaked in the late 1940s.