- Headline
-
Germany Institute Official System Of Eugenics; Is To Sterilize All Its Defectives
- Publication Date
- Wednesday, July 26, 1933
- Historical Event
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German Law Authorizes Sterilization for Prevention of Hereditary Diseases
This database includes 890 articles about this event - Article Type
- Newspaper
- Location
- Page Section and Number
- 5
- Author/Byline
- UP
- Article Text
- Berlin, July 26.— (UP)—A stern, far reaching steriliztion law, to improve the German race, became effective today with publication in the Official Monitor.
Both voluntary and enforced sterilization are prescribed for persons whose descendants are held in the light to scientific knowledge to be likely to inherit physical or mental defects.
The tradition or medical secrecy is scrapped. Physicians are required to reveal names of patients who are liable under the law to compulsory sterilization.
Defects rendering a subject liable to sterilization are named as hereditary imbecility, insanity, mania, epilepsy, St. Vitus' dance, blindness, deafness, alcoholism, bodily deformity and schizophrenia.
Under schizophrenia are specified large class of mental cases including paranoia, persecution mania, dementia praecox and acute melancholia.
The law makes no distinction between sexes. It provides that a person may ask for an operation that the legal guardian in the case of a minor or a mentally deficient minor may do so in his behalf.
Application must be made thru a police physician or the director of a hospital; insane asylum or similar institution.
Decision, in the end, will rest with a "hereditary court" to be established, with an appeal branch whose verdict will be final.
Force is provided in the event sterilization will not consent to an operation.
The law has been long considered by members of the Nazi government.
Chancellor Adolf Hitler's ideal is for more but better German babies. To encourage marriages, the government recently decreed that loans would be granted to women who leave Jobs to marry. A percentage of the loan would be marked off for each baby born. - History Unfolded Contributor
- Kris D.
- 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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