- Headline
-
Edith Johnson's Column
- Sub-Headline
- Hitler Is Right for Once
- Publication Date
- Friday, July 28, 1933
- Historical Event
-
German Law Authorizes Sterilization for Prevention of Hereditary Diseases
This database includes 890 articles about this event - Tags
- Article Type
- Newspaper
- Location
- Page Section and Number
- 8
- Author/Byline
- Edith Johnson
- Article Text
- Hitler Is Right for Once
STRONG, intelligent, useful families are becoming smaller and smaller. Irresponsible, inefficient, diseased and defective parents, on the other hand are not limited their families correspondingly—for the most part. [sic] not limiting them at all. There can be only one result—race deterioration, and from that ultimately, the decline of the nation.
Realizing that the law of self-preservation is as necessary to a nation as to an individual.[sic] Adolf Hitler. [sic] Germany's chancellor, has issued one wise order among many wrong and foolish ones —an order to enforce the sterilization of the imbecile, the deaf, the blind, the habitual drunkard, the bodily deformed and all sufferers from St. Vitus's dance, epilepsy and insanity. Among the latter are included those afflicted with dementia praecox.[sic] paranoia, acute melancholia, the manic-depressive and persons having a persecution complex. The law makes no distinction between the sexes, and decision will rest with an "hereditary court." All persons coming under the above classifications or families having children so afflicted are expected to voluntarily submit. Otherwise, force will be used.
INASMUCH as sterilization is a comparatively new measure, this order of Hitler's may appear to be cruelly drastic one. As a matter of fact, every nation should take some measure to bring about the sterilization of its unfit. For its one effect Is to prevent parenthood—it in no way unsexes the patient.
It is a protection to the individual and to society—it is not a punishment. And therefore it carries no stigma or humiliation. If society but knew what is going on quietly today, it might be surprised to discover how many beautiful, strong and healthy women of the privileged classes have themselves sterilized in order that they may have no children or only one or two. The pity of it is that they do not have four, five or six children, for they are the women who should be prolific.
Sterilization is universally approved by unfit persons who have been sterilized, and by their families and their friends. It is approved, moreover, by countless social workers, physicians, probation and parole officers, and by specialists in mental and nervous diseases.
It makes it possible for many persons who seemingly have recovered from mental illness to return to their homes, when otherwise they would he kept in institutions. It thus keeps many homes together and prevents the breaking up of families.
It prevents the birth of children to mentally deficient parents. If it were practiced generally it would lift a heavy load from the backs of burdened taxpayers. Where it has been used as in California, it has been followed by a marked decrease in sex offenses. It enables many handicapped persons to marry and lead a normal sex life, who without sterilization would not dare to marry if they had any social conscience. The operation is simple, for the male especially. The operation is simple, for the male especially. And so far as science has been able to discover, there is no alternative—sterilization is the only completely dependable method of birth control.
Do you know that there are more hospital beds in this country for the care of the mentally ill than the physically ill, and that you and I, taxpayers, must support the vast majority of them?
Do you know that many of them who are dependent upon public charity are feeble-minded, that so long as they are able to breed, we pay to keep them and to have more children, many of whom will be dependents, themselves?
For some months a check was kept on the mothers in a certain eastern city who went to public, hospitals for child-birth. Investigation disclosed the starling fact that more than one-third of them were feeble-minded.
Most of those low-grade mothers would like to have no more children, and if our laws were what they ought to be, the suite would sterilize them speedily.
In the United Slates there are 18,000,000 persons who now or at some future day will be burdened by some mental disease or mental defect and who.[sic] therefore, will become charges upon their families or on the population at large.
Tremendous as the economic burden is and has been, it is steadily growing worse. A billion dollars a year would be a low estimate of the cost of caring for patients either in or outside of institutions.
Do not these facts challenge every thoughtful person? How do you, for instance, feel about your own personal share of the menace and the tax burden you have to bear?
WHAT kind of society can we look forward to, what sort of progress can we make when we have a growing army of deficient people to take care of?
What kind of a government can we expect to have in the future when so alarming a percentage of our voters are mentally abnormal? And is it any wonder that they often supply that balance of voting power which elects men and women of their own kind?
In time of wat the state demands that the fittest of its men shall give their lives for the common good.
In time of peace, why should not that state call upon the most unfit of its citizens to make the lesser sacrifice. [sic] that of parenthood, not only for their own benefit, but for the saving of society at large? - History Unfolded Contributor
- Carlos G.
- Location of Research
- Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)
Learn More about this Historical Event: German Law Authorizes Sterilization for Prevention of Hereditary Diseases
- The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 1933-1939
- Mentally and Physically Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era
Bibliography
Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Bryant, Michael S. Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005.
Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany c. 1900-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Caplan, Arthur L., editor. When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 1992.
Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Gallagher, Hugh Gregory. By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich. Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press, 1995.
Kühl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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