Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:                         Medical Killing and the                             Psychology of Genocide ©    Page 22   Back     Contents  Index  Home Page       Forward     Chapter 1       Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical Vision        The Führer holds the cleansing of the medical profession far more important than, for example, that of the bureaucracy, since in his opinion the duty of . the physician is or should be one of racial leadership.      — MARTIN BORMANN            The völkisch state must see to it that only the healthy beget children .... Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future .... It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on.      — ADOLF HITLER            First Steps Policies and the Courts    Only in Nazi Germany was sterilization a forerunner of mass murder. Programs of coercive sterilization were not peculiar to Nazi Germany. They have existed in much of the Western world, including the United States, which has a history of coercive and sometimes illegal sterilization applied mostly to the underclass of our society. It was in the United States that a relatively simple form of vasectomy was developed at a penal institution around the turn of the century. This procedure together with a rising interest in eugenics, led, by 1920, to the enactment of laws in twenty-five states providing for compulsory sterilization of the criminally insane and other people considered genetically inferior.   THE NAZI DOCTORS: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide Robert J. Lifton ISBN 0-465-09094 © 1986  Back Page 22 Forward
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