The U.S. was boadly supportive of the eugenics legislation passed in Germany in 1933
After Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany passed a comprehensive sterilization bill. The German eugenicists who drew up that legislation had gone to school on the U.S. experience, which American eugenicists noted with some pride. “The leaders in the German sterilization movement state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated only after careful study of the California experiments,” wrote Margaret Smyth, superintendent of Stockton State Hospital, after touring Germany in 1935. “It would have been impossible they say, to undertake such a venture involving 1 million people without drawing heavily upon previous experience elsewhere.”
Many in Germany and in the United States also saw the Nazi bill as morally superior to any U.S. state law, as it had elaborate safeguards to ensure due process. German physicians were required to report “unfit” persons to Hereditary Health Courts, which then reviewed and approved patients for sterilization. There were even provisions for appeal. This was an example of how one country could learn from another and push modern medicine forward. Germany, the New England Journal of Medicine editorialized, had become “perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit.” The American Public Health Association praised Germany in similar terms and at its annual meeting in 1934 mounted an exhibit on Germany’s sterilization program as an example of a modern health program. The New York Times, meanwhile, specifically sought to “dispel fears” that Hitler, with his new sterilization law, was pursuing “a discredited racial idea.” Germany, it wrote, was simply following in the path of other “civilized” countries, most notably the United States, where “some 15,000 unfortunates have been harmlessly and humanely operated upon to prevent them from propagating their own kind.”
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 100). New York, NY: Basic Books.