Nazi Germany was inspired by U.S. eugenicists to begin killing the unfit
The high rate of sterilization in Nazi Germany encouraged the U.S. and other countries to pick up the pace. And then Nazi Germany took eugenic treatment of the mentally ill to its ultimate end. Eugenic attitudes toward the mentally ill—that they were a drain on society and a threat to its “germ plasm”—inevitably raised the possibility of a more extreme measure. Should a state simply kill its insane? This question was first raised in the United States in 1911, when Charles Davenport published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. Although he generally argued against killing the unfit, he wrote that if a society had to choose between allowing “mental defectives” to procreate and killing them, the latter would be the preferable alternative. “Though capital punishment is a crude method of grappling with the difficulty [of defectives],” he concluded, “it is infinitely superior to that of training the feebleminded and criminalistic and then letting them loose upon society and permitting them to perpetuate in their offspring these animal traits.”
Five years later, Madison Grant, a wealthy New York lawyer and a founder of the American Eugenics Society, pushed this notion a step further in his book The Passing of the Great Race. “The Laws of Nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race,” he argued. “A great injury is done to the community by the perpetuation of worthless types.” The idea that the mentally ill, and other misfits, were “useless eaters” was now alive and loose in the Western world. Grant’s best-selling book went through four editions and was translated into French, Norwegian, and German. Hitler, according to German historian Stefan Kühl, later wrote Grant a fan letter, telling him “the book was his Bible.” Then Support for the killing of the unfit began to slowly spead in the U.S. after 1911.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 101). New York, NY: Basic Books.