In the first 30 years of the twentieth century, eugenics was very fashionable, nowhere more so than in America. A Society was formed, consisting of many doctors and medical professors, who established that there was indeed a case to be made for the transmission of genetic defects, sensationalized into the idea of the possible production of a population of monsters! The earnest politicians in the State legislatures of, eventually, 35 states consequently passed compulsory sterilization laws. The shame is that, on average, in each state, about 100 operations per year were carried out over a period of about 20 years (in California the figure was about 450 per year), and that isolated compulsory operations were still being carried out into the 1970s!
The point has been laboured in order to show that even in democracies such things can happen, and that in a totalitarian state such things will become routine. Hitler assumed power on 30th January 1933 and by July a bill was introduced to allow for compulsory sterilization, which became law on 1st January 1934. Called the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny, in the ten years between 1933 and 1943 it is estimated that 400,00 men and women were forcibly sterilized. (Remember, the majority of these were ordinary Germans!) The list of defects that were declared due to heredity included, besides the obvious congenital feeblemindedness and severe physical malformation, such things as epilepsy, schizophrenia, blindness and deafness none of which, even today, have proven to be due to heredity except by the empirical evidence of the defect appearing in succeeding generations of individual families. Later, chronic alcoholism was added and even the X-ray sterilization of women of over 38; such is the power of the totalitarian state, with the people subject to the whims of the leaders.
Despite the very active opposition of the people and the lengths they went to, to avoid the arbitrary powers of the Hereditary Health Courts which seemed literally to spring into being in 1934, together with a whole administrative apparatus, Hitler and the Nazis continued to enforce the new law. We must remember that each and every sterilization was a tragedy to the person and his family and that the trauma had long-lasting effect on thousands of men and women, yet still the State pursued its half-baked notions, and still it was able to find the many hands needed to run the whole system. And, although the outcry against euthanasia was of a very much higher order, willing perpetrators were still easily found.
