4 - Annihilating Defective Genes: Mendelian Consciousness and the Sterilization Campaign

Summary

Mendelian ideas were transformed from theoretical speculations into social realities after Hitler became Chancellor, informing the attitude the Nazis developed toward the mentally ill and shaping the Nazi sterilization policy. Mendelian reasoning led to the inclusion of certain disease categories (blindness, deafness, Huntington’s chorea) in the Nazi Sterilization Law of July 1933, an inclusion that later helped the Nazis to argue that their sterilization campaign was grounded in Mendelian teaching. In high schools, Mendelian theory was explained as corroborating the sterilization policy, while also posing pedagogic challenges to teachers trying to convey eugenic ideas to their students. When it came to the implementation of the sterilization law and the proceedings held in different hereditary courts, although the sterilization campaign was implemented independent of Mendelian theory, it was still informed by and imbued with Mendelian suppositions. These suppositions empowered state authorities while disempowering the victims of the sterilization campaign – the “feebleminded,” the “mentally weak” and the physically impaired. In rare cases, however, Mendelian logic was used by doctors to rebuke the sterilization of their patients.