Flashback : The Nazis Get Their Inspiration to Write Sterilization laws from American Progressives

Professor Tiffany Jones Miller reports:

In 1923, Fritz Lenz, a German physician and geneticist advocate of forced sterilization–a man who became one of the leading advocates of the Nazi’s “racial hygiene” program–criticized his countrymen for lagging behind the United States in the enactment of sterilization laws. In June, 1933, several months after Hitler became Chancellor of the Third Reich, the Nazis began to catch up in earnest.[1] In consultation with Lenz and other German eugenicists, Dr. Arthur Gutt, a leading official in the Ministry of the Interior, drafted a statute entitled “The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.” This proposal, which became Nazi Germany’s first sterilization law, mandated sterilization for all persons believed to be afflicted with congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, serious physical deformity or chronic alcoholism. The purpose of this law, as Gutt explained, was “‘to prevent …poisoning the entire bloodstream of the race.’”[2]

Both the letter, and especially the enforcement, of the Nazi sterilization law went well beyond existing American precedents. Nevertheless, as historian Jonathan Spiro notes, the Nazi statute was “quite consciously based on the model sterilization law of Harry H. Laughlin and the American Eugenics Society,” a connection readily recognized by American eugenicists.[3]

You'll want to read the entire article.