Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

In 1898, the Swedish botanist and chemist Astrid Cleve (1875-1968) became her country's first female doctor of natural science. In addition to this pioneering achievement, she also became one of Sweden's most prominent diatom researchers of the first half of the twentieth century. During the second world war, Cleve supported Hitler, and she remained a Nazi for the rest of her life. Cleve gradually became more religious, and she converted to Catholicism in 1949. During the final decades of her life, Cleve argued for an interpretation of rock carvings in Bohuslän as proof for locating the Garden of Eden in northern Germany. Similar work was being conducted by Nazi scholars in Germany, especially by the Dutch historian Herman Wirth. Wirth was associated to the SS research institute Ahnenerbe, headed by Heinrich Himmler. Ahnenerbe tried to identify where the Aryan race had its origins and revive a Ur-Germanic religion. Several movements in Nazi Germany also worked to reformulate Christianity in order to rid it from its Semitic origins. This study examines Cleve's relationship to Nazism and her conception of science within a Nazi context. The analysis concludes that a large part of Cleve's prehistoric research was made in the Gothicist tradition of the 17th century polymath Olaus Rudbeck, rather than in the Aryan tradition favoured by Nazi scholars in Germany. Cleve found her own way of combining research with racial ideology, while at the same time stressing the scientificity of her projects.