The Shortest History of Eugenics by Erik Peterson

Author:Erik Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment

Aktion T-4

Historians have written mountains of books and essays on the inhumanities of German National Socialism (Nazism) during the Holocaust. Yet the eugenics movement that preceded the European death camps is still underrecognized. In the summer of 1933, within the first few months of Hitler’s term as chancellor, Germany instituted a Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring law. Written largely by Ernst Rüdin, who attended Davenport’s eugenics congresses, the law closely resembled Harry Laughlin’s Model Sterilization Law. In truth, the German law was less restrictive than the American model; as written and practiced by American eugenicists, criminals and moderate drinkers were subject to sterilization surgery as well. The Nazi judicial system would continue to borrow and modify American anti-immigration and pro-racial segregation legislation throughout the 1930s.3 With their version of eugenics, however, Germany created a streamlined system that American decentralization could never sustain. The propaganda films played a central part in justifying and mobilizing their legal and medical efforts.

“Germany in a few months outdistanced California’s sterilization world record of a quarter-century.… We must study Germany’s methods.”

—Charles M. Goethe, a California real estate magnate and founder of California State University, Sacremento, in a speech to the Sacramento Twenty-Third Club (1938)4

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