Facing History and Ourselves

Race and Membership

Eugenics in Germany : "The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring"







Ernst Baur
Ernst Baur

"No one approves of the new Sterilization Laws more than I do, but I must repeat over and over again, that they constitute only a beginning."1
-- Eugenicist Ernst Baur, 1933




Facing History Resources
• Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 8, "The Nazi Connection."

• Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 1994, Chapter 4, "The Nazis Take Power."


Print and Video Resources
• Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene by Gotz Aly (Johns Hopkins University Press) 1994.

• Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany by Horst Biesold, translated by William Sayers (Gallaudet University Press) 1999.

• The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann (Cambridge University Press) 1991.

• By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich by Hugh Gregory Gallagher (Holt Publishing) 1990.

• The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl (Oxford University Press, New York) Chapter 2, 1994.

• Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich by Ingo Müller, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider (Harvard University Press) 1991, Chapter 13.




Overview
Six months after Adolf Hitler took control of Germany, the government passed a compulsory sterilization act. Click here to read excerpts from the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring." American eugenicist Harry Laughlin boasted in the Eugenical News, "To one versed in the history of eugenical sterilization in America, the text of the German statute reads almost like the 'American model sterilization law.'"2 Click here to read excerpts from Harry Laughlin's model sterilization law.

Laughlin and other American eugenicists believed that Germany's new law was an improvement on similar statutes in the United States. American sterilization laws varied from state to state and enforcement was often inconsistent even within a single state. The German measure, on the other hand, applied to the entire nation and promised to be uniformly enforced.

Before long, Laughlin and his colleagues were traveling to Germany to observe "eugenics in action." They visited "eugenic courts" and met with Nazi leaders. After his visit, Frederick Osborn, then secretary of the American Eugenics Society, hailed "recent developments in Germany" as "perhaps the most important experiment which has ever been tried."

By 1937, the Nazis had sterilized nearly 225,000 individuals--about 10 times as many as were officially sterilized in the United States over a 30-year period3--in part because judges on the "eugenic courts" were told not to be "over scrupulous" in their decisions.4 To give the process an appearance of scientific objectivity, intelligence tests were often administered to those brought before the courts. Click here to view sample questions.

The Nazis believed that it was better to sterilize some individuals by mistake than to jeopardize the "future" of the German people by being "over scrupulous." Therefore the courts ordered thousands of schizophrenics sterilized, even though Hans Luxemberger, Germany's leading geneticist, believed that the classification of schizophrenia as a "hereditary disorder" was "no more than a working hypothesis." Yet he supported sterilization on the grounds that it might be too late when "final proof was established."5 Despite signs that Germans were sterilizing individuals with no "hereditary defects," American eugenicists remained convinced that Germany's sterilization law would never become an "instrument of tyranny."




Under the Cover of Law
Just a few months after the new law went into effect, Hitler called for the sterilization of "dangerous habitual criminals." Under cover of that law, the government sterilized individuals who had no physical or mental disability. These children, women, and men were targeted simply because they were "Gypsies" or Germans of African descent. For example, in 1937, the Nazis used the law to secretly sterilize "German colored children"--the offspring of German women and the African soldiers who occupied Germany after World War I.

Connections
1   Quoted in Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 1988, pg. 131.
2   "Eugenical Sterilization in Germany" from Eugenical News, September - October, 1933.
3   Quoted in In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (revised edition) by Daniel J. Kevles (Harvard University Press, Cambridge) 1995, p. 117.
4   Quoted in Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich by Ingo Müller, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider (Harvard University Press) 1991, p. 122.
5   Ibid.



   
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