1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring

It's taken me a few days to actually get around to writing this post. Once you start researching these things you find some of the most horrific stories and pictures. You can only look at these things for so long before you need a break. I have a new sense of respect for the brave people who actually had to live through this. This post was inspired by an article I was reading in Mother Jones the other day. It was about the population crisis and had a specific section on 3,500 years of contraception. It mentioned the forced sterilization the Germans implemented in the 30's. I saw that and decided to research it a little more. This of course opened a floodgate of Nazi experiments, some of which I may talk about at a later time. In order to help create the "master race" and to rid the world of defective people (people with mental disorder, physical deformities, mentally handicapped, blind, deaf, and ultimately entire races) the Nazi's experimented on their prisoners. They tried a variety of methods including surgery, drugs, and X-Rays. When they finally settled on a quick and easy method of sterilization they broadened their procedures from prisoners to these "defective" people with the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. They used deception to administer the treatment. They would ask these people to fill out a few forms in a room. While they were in the room they would emit radiation into the room. This would render the person sterilized and they would leave without any idea what had taken place. The only visible side effects were radiation burns. Aside from the Nazi experiments some 400,000 people were sterilized.

This is a Nazi propoganda poster promoting the law. The top of the poster says "We do not stand alone." The shield the man is holding has the name of the law on it. The couple is standing in front of a map of Germany. Surrounding the edges of the poster are flags of other countries. The ones on the left are of countries who have already implemented similar laws. The ones on the bottom are countries that are considering similar laws. You may be as surprised as me to notice that the United States is on this poster. The Nazi's claimed to have gotten a lot of their ideas about sterilization from the laws passed in the United States. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to enact a compulsory sterilization law. Many states followed in their path. The laws targeted mainly mentally ill patients in homes and prisoners. After WWII the forced sterilization was not looked upon as favorably because of its connection to the Nazi genocides, but it continued at a high rate until the 1960's when it began tapering off and the final forced sterilization occured in 1981. In all the United States sterilized some 65,000 people were sterilized.