the quest for racial purity - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Schizophrenia and epilepsy were also commonly cited as reasons for sterilization. In
1935, the Nazis amended the law to allow for abortions in cases where the mother or father
was determined to be the carrier of hereditary disease. Whereas Nazi authorities strictly
prohibited abortions for healthy “Aryan” German women, they permitted and often re-
quired pregnancy terminations for those whose medical history raised concerns that a
child would be born with a congenital illness or disability.
By the mid-1930s, Nazi policy grew to include within the concept of “feeblemindedness”
a wide variety of behaviors that were looked down on as social ills. No longer using even
the pretext of a physiological disorder, German doctors diagnosed a condition they called
“moral feeblemindedness” by examining the patient’s lifestyle. They assessed men and
women regarding their behavior in the workplace or in public spaces. Furthermore, they
judged women by their sexuality, and their real and perceived habits and practices regard-
ing housework and child-rearing. Those Germans who failed to conform to the Nazi ideal
of health and productivity—which reflected the social prejudices and mores of middle-class,
suburban, and small-town German society—risked being “treated” for this subjective condition.
Sixty percent of those sterilized for “moral feeblemindedness” were women.
Many of the people targeted by the 1933 law and its amendments were patients
in mental hospitals and other institutions, either public or church run if they were
poor, or private clinics if they were affluent. Still others lived at home, and their family
doctors, social workers, and schoolteachers or directors identified them. Most were “Aryan”
Germans. Doctors sterilized men by vasectomy and women through tubal ligation.
In a small number of cases, physicians used X rays or radium to render their patients
infertile. Of the several thousand people who died as a consequence of sterilization,
women were disproportionately high among the victims because of the risks of tubal
ligation surgery.
The law permitted forced sterilization under certain specific conditions, but its imple-
mentation was often arbitrary. German authorities established more than 200 so-called
hereditary health courts—each with two physicians and one district judge—across Germany
and later in territories annexed directly to the country. As in other areas of the German
judiciary under Nazi rule, the courts provided only a pretext of due process; in fact, they
tended to render routine judgments, usually without examining the patient. Most of the
medical and legal community was implicated in those acts: nearly all well-known geneti-
cists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists remaining in Germany sat on such courts at one
time or another. In addition, ordinary physicians and family doctors became involved
because they were required to register every known case of hereditary disease. Although
courts of appeal existed, they seldom reversed decisions: occasionally, appeals courts
germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 79