Editing Compulsory sterilization (section)

===Germany===<!-- This section is linked from January 1 -->
{{Main|Nazi eugenics}}
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 102-15664, Farbiger Junge.jpg|thumb|upright|A young Rhinelander who was classified as a ''bastard'' and ''hereditarily unfit'' under the Nazi regime]]

One of the first acts by [[Adolf Hitler]] after the [[Reichstag Fire Decree]] and the [[Enabling Act of 1933]] gave him de facto legal dictatorship over the [[Germany|German]] state was to pass the [[Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring]] (''Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses'') in July 1933.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jkswAAAAIBAJ&pg=3703%2C266241 |title=Eugenics Courts Named in Reich. The Montreal Gazette. January 3, 1934. |access-date=15 August 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200215090718/https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jkswAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XKgFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3703,266241 |archive-date=15 February 2020 |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ifwtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=hZgFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1639,2526515|title=The Montreal Gazette - Google News Archive Search|website=news.google.com}}</ref> The law was signed by Hitler himself, and over 200 eugenic courts were created specifically as a result of this law. Under it, all doctors in the [[Nazi Germany|Third Reich]] were required to report any patients of theirs who were deemed [[intellectual disability|intellectually disabled]], characterized [[mentally ill]] (including [[schizophrenia]] and [[manic depression]]), [[epilepsy|epileptic]], blind, deaf, or physically deformed, and a steep monetary penalty was imposed for any patients who were not properly reported. Individuals with [[alcoholism]] or [[Huntington's disease]] could also be sterilized. The individual's case was then presented in front of a court of [[Nazi]] officials and public health officers who would review their medical records, take testimony from friends and colleagues, and eventually decide whether or not to order a sterilization operation performed upon the individual, using force if necessary. Though not explicitly covered by the law, 400 mixed-race "[[Rhineland Bastard]]s" were also sterilized beginning in 1937.<ref>Robert Proctor, ''Racial hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Gisela Bock, "Nazi sterilization and reproductive policies" in Dieter Kuntz, ed., ''Deadly medicine: creating the master race'' (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004).</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zzsbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=50wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1710,6396277|title=The Pittsburgh Press - Google News Archive Search|website=news.google.com}}</ref><ref>[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339243252_From_Kraepelin_to_Karadzic_Psychiatry%27s_Long_Road_to_Genocide] "From Kraepelin to Karadzic: Psychiatry's Long Road to Genocide"  Author Robert Kaplan. From book title "Genocide Perspectives IV" (pp.122-165) Page 133. Date 2012.</ref> The sterilization program went on until the war started, with about 600,000 people sterilized.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.dnalc.org/view/15466-The-connection-between-American-eugenics-and-Nazi-Germany-James-Watson.html |title=The connection between American eugenics and Nazi Germany, James Watson :: DNA Learning Center |access-date=2014-02-05 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140221173441/http://www.dnalc.org/view/15466-The-connection-between-American-eugenics-and-Nazi-Germany-James-Watson.html |archive-date=2014-02-21 }} |"The connection between American eugenics and Nazi Germany" [[James Watson]] speaks about Nazi eugenics</ref>

By the end of [[World War II]], over 400,000 individuals were sterilized under the German law and its revisions, most within its first four years of being enacted. When the issue of compulsory sterilization was brought-up at the [[Nuremberg trials]] after the war, many Nazis defended their actions on the matter by indicating that it was the United States itself from which they had taken inspiration. The Nazis had many other eugenics-inspired [[racial policy of Nazi Germany|racial policies]], including their [[T-4 Euthanasia Programme|T-4 euthanasia program]], in which around 70,000 people who were institutionalized or had birth defects were killed.<ref>[[Ian Kershaw]], ''Hitler: A Profile in Power'', Chapter VI, first section (London, 1991, rev. 2001)</ref>