- Headline
-
400,000 Defectives Listed As Nazis Prepare to Sterlize All Incurables
- Publication Date
- Monday, January 1, 1934
- 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
- Page Section and Number
- 2
- Author/Byline
- AP
- Article Text
- BERLIN, Dec. 31.—Some 400,000 mental and physical hereditary defectives in German asylums and prisons, or still at large, come under the sterilization law with the new year.
This sweeping law promulgated by the nazi government is the most sensational of 26 major measures which go into effect Jan. 1.
Under threat of 150 marks (approximately $55.50) fine, medical authorities in prisons public and private hospitals, nurses, midwives and welfare workers have been racking in their brains to hand in as complete lists as possible of all hereditary incurables in their care so that the 1700 new eugenic courts with power to decree sterilization can begin work at once.
A circular letter of instruction sent by the federal minister of justice to all state administrators of justice makes it mandatory upon judges and others who come in contact with criminals who seem hereditarily endowed with a penchant for committing crimes, to report these forthwith.
New Year's day being a holiday, the courts will begin to function the second— as Koelnische Zeitung puts it, "to prevent characteristics as are only a burden to the nation as a whole, from being inherited from one generation to another."
Disapproval of the Roman Catholic clergy, reflected in a reference to the law by Pope Pius in his recent message to the world, has been allayed following upon representations to the government by Cardinal Bertram.
The government reply promised not to compel any Catholic judge to serve on a eugenic court nor to order the surrender of a criminal to such court, and not to compel any Catholic physician to perform the sterilization operation.
Sentiment in the press appeared favorable. - History Unfolded Contributor
- Katherine V.
- 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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