Eugenics had spread from America to Nazi Germany when their economy fell after world war I and they couldn’t afford to place mentally ill soldiers in asylums
After the 1921 Second International Congress on Eugenics, many prominent eugenicists joined to form a U.S. national eugenics society to promote eugenics to the public. America’s embrace of eugenic sterilization as a progressive health measure had consequences for the mentally ill in other countries as well. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed it constitutional, Denmark passed a sterilization law, and over the next few years, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland did too. America’s influence on Nazi Germany was particularly pronounced, and it was in that country, of course, that eugenics ran its full course.
Prior to World War I, eugenics was not nearly as popular in Germany as it was in the United States. Germany’s parliament defeated a sterilization bill in 1914, and the country didn’t pass any law prohibiting the mentally ill from marrying. However, after the war, eugenics gained a new appeal for the German population. Germany’s economy lay in ruins after the war, and more than 1.75 million of its ablest young men had died in the conflict. How could the impoverished country afford the cost of caring for “defectives” in asylums? Should the unfit be allowed to pass on their tainted genes while so many of its healthy young men had died before having a chance to become fathers? In 1925, Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf, hailed eugenics as the science that would rebuild the nation. The state, he wrote, must “avail itself of modern medical discoveries” and sterilize those people who are “unfit for procreation.”
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 99). New York, NY: Basic Books.