Zur Genese des Gesetzes zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (review)

The author's method, broadly speaking, is to summarize his sources page by page, with page references, and either mark them as "false" and "superficial," or accept them in toto. The first chapter lists all the misunderstandings and lacunae in the now very well-established secondary literature on the origin of the Nazi sterilization law; the second chapter is taken line by line from Joachim Müller.¹

Yet the author does have something to say. Through his close reading of the official documents—some of which he reproduces in facsimile in an appendix—he sets up a strict timetable of events and interventions leading to the passage of the Nazi sterilization acts. The legislative history begins with the first American sterilizations, in Indiana in 1899, which led to the first state sterilization bill in 1907. The first attempt at German legislation was the so-called "Prussian Draft," a bill presented in 1923–24 in several of the German Länder under the Weimar government, which was the work of the radical Dr. Gerhard Boeters of Zwickau. But the core of Udo Benzenhöfer's argument deals with the period from mid-1932 to mid-1933, when the final version of the Act for the Prevention of the Propagation of Genetically Defective Offspring of 1933 came to be passed.

Benzenhöfer goes very carefully over the contributions and responsibilities of the different individuals and government departments under both the Weimar and the Nazi administrations, scrutinizing the documents and signatures and the marginal annotations. He sees that the pressure for the Act came again from Prussia, from the Prussian health directorate, led by Heinrich Schopohl and his confidential advisor, the Catholic eugenicist Hermann Muckermann. They based their demands on the earlier "Prussian Draft" with its proposal for the legalization of voluntary sterilization; their draft bill came very close to being passed in 1932. After the Nazi takeover, Wilhelm Frick, Hitler's appointee as minister of the interior, came to power. He called in Dr. Arthur Gütt, an ambitious Nazi who was a supporter of forced, nonvoluntary, sterilization on eugenic grounds. Frick in 1934 celebrated Gütt as "creator" of the sterilization bill, and Benzenhöfer says that "this designation is not to be doubted" (p. 98). The secondary literature, however, implicates various other people—including the jurist Falk Ruttke and the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin—but Benzenhöfer says they all came later to the discussions, and can only be called supporters of the measure: its true creator was Arthur Gütt.

It is difficult to pinpoint an individual "creator" in an area where there was such widespread support for a measure, and though what Benzenhöfer says is clearly accurate, one cannot simply take his claim at face value. In the decade after the war, the eugenicists spoke from a position, if not yet of power, at least of very broad-based support in many countries worldwide, in North America and in Europe, including Weimar Germany. Hitler himself, according to the geneticist Fritz Lenz, read Lenz's authoritative textbook on eugenics² while he was writing Mein Kampf in jail, a book that would later become one of the basic documents of his race policy. Lenz claimed later that much of Hitler's phraseology came from Lenz's text: "The demand that defectives should not be able to go on producing more defectives is only common sense. Carefully planned programs of this kind are a most humane service to mankind," writes Hitler.³

With this kind of political support, Minister Frick needed only to choose a few well-known names from among the eugenicists to advise him on his bill. He had plenty of choice: Arthur Gütt was only one among many. Muckermann had supported the "Prussian Draft," but preferred as a Catholic to stay with voluntary sterilization. Ernst Rüdin, on the other hand, director of the Munich National Center for Psychiatric...