On July 14, 1933, the Nazi regime passed the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases.” In his anniversary speech before the Reichstag in January 1934, Adolf Hitler expressed great pride in this law, which was pivotal for Nazi eugenic policy. The German press described it as corresponding “to the biological way of thought that National Socialism adopted as the foundation of its system and worldview.”Footnote 1 The first paragraph of the law stated the following:
(1) Anyone who is hereditarily ill can be sterilized by surgical operation if, according to the medical science, it is to be expected, with high probability, that their offspring will suffer from severe physical or mental hereditary damages.
(2) Hereditarily ill refers in this law to anyone who suffers from any of the following diseases:
1. Congenital feeble-mindedness
2. Schizophrenia
3. Manic-depressive insanity
4. Hereditary epilepsy
5. Huntington's chorea
6. Hereditary blindness
7. Hereditary deafness
8. Severe hereditary physical deformity.
(3) Furthermore, anyone suffering from severe alcoholism can be made infertile.Footnote 2
Why was hereditary blindness included in this list? This question has rarely been posed, because—so goes the prevailing consensus among historians—it was only natural that blind people would be targeted by racial hygienists. The “blind, deaf, and dumb” were seen by eugenicists as “useless eaters” who were an economic burden to the healthy, hard-working members of German society; plans to prevent the blind from procreating were, accordingly, integral to eugenic discourse. From a medical perspective, certain forms of blindness had a decisive genetic component, and, given that the Sterilization Law was intended to eradicate hereditary diseases from the German Volkskörper, the inclusion of blindness made perfect sense from the point of view of its protagonists. Indeed, aspiring to eradicate hereditary blindness could even be said to have been more realistic than the targeting of some of the other disease categories, such as “feeble-mindedness” or schizophrenia, which were much more loosely defined and whose hereditary nature was much less clear.Footnote 3
This argumentation is flawed. Prior to the passing of the Nazi Sterilization Law, the overwhelming majority of eugenic campaigns aimed at preventing the socially or medically “inferior” from propagating centered on the feeble-minded, the mentally ill, the “asocial,” and criminals; they targeted the blind only peripherally. Practically speaking, the blind, despite being regarded as hereditarily impaired, were usually (if not always) excluded in the various proposals eugenicists circulated about the prohibition of certain classes of individuals from marrying or procreating, or about the need to allow for their voluntary or coerced sterilization. Outside Germany as well, none of the existing sterilization laws named the blind as candidates for sterilization. The inclusion of blindness in a sterilization law was exceptional, not trivial; it demands explanation.
Searching for one reveals additional, hitherto neglected aspects of the development of Nazi eugenic thinking and of the motivations underlying the drafting of the Sterilization Law. At present, the prevailing view among historians is that the main novelty of the Nazi Sterilization Law lay in its compulsory character, as opposed to the voluntary nature of all earlier legislative proposals. The content of the law is usually seen as according perfectly with ideas that had pervaded eugenic circles in Germany and elsewhere prior to the Nazis’ rise to power.Footnote 4 If this were true, there would be no need to inquire about the precise reasons that prompted the Nazis to include one category of disease in the law while excluding another. But that is not the case. And, given the immediate and long-term consequences that the Sterilization Law had on the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals—including several thousand visually impaired—any insight into the motivations that prompted the Nazis to shape the Sterilization Law as they did is of great historical and moral weight. By problematizing the inclusion of hereditary blindness, this article helps us better understand a key feature in the development of Nazi eugenic policies.
Since the argument presented here runs against the existing historical consensus, the article begins by substantiating the claim that the place of blindness in the Nazi Sterilization Law should not to be taken for granted and that it indeed demands explanation. To that end, it highlights trends and nuances in eugenic discourse about the mentally and physically inferior in German society prior to 1933, while also analyzing the rare cases where blind people had previously become a target of sterilization campaigns. After exposing the anomalous nature of the inclusion of blindness into the Sterilization Law, the article addresses three simple and seemingly intuitive—but ultimately unpersuasive—explanations for that decision. It then offers a fourth explanation, which argues that targeting blindness was part of a rhetorical strategy frequently used by eugenic activists to lend their work scientific legitimization. Besides blindness, two other categories of disease—deafness and Huntington's chorea—were included in the law for similar reasons. An understanding of the development of research on “hereditary burdens,” and of the place that blindness, deafness, and Huntington's chorea had in such research, helps us to grasp the nature of this “scientific-rhetorical” strategy. In short, the article argues that it was not the eugenic threat posed by the blind that warranted their sterilization, but rather the utility of using blindness as an indisputable example of the genetic nature of pathological traits that made blindness attractive to Nazi legislators and eugenicists in general. Put crudely, the blind were not sterilized in order to combat the spread of hereditary blindness, but rather to provide scientific legitimization for the larger campaign against the mentally-ill and feeble-minded.
It is important to state, at the outset, that the details of the final processes that led to the formulation of the Nazi Sterilization Law are unknown. The available published and archival materials nevertheless make it possible to paint a rich picture of the worldviews and intentions of the protagonists of the law. Speeches, statements, correspondence, prior legislation efforts, and academic publications allow us to identify the major figures who were involved in the drafting of the law and to get a good sense of their aspirations. The three authors of the official commentary on the law—Ernst Rüdin, a psychiatric geneticist; Arthur Gütt, the head of the Department of Medical Affairs at the Interior Ministry; and Falk Ruttke, the chairman of the Reich Committee for National Health (Volkgesundheitsdienst)—were likely the ones who, relying on relevant professional consultation, finalized the wording of the law itself. The extent to which they integrated into the law whatever advice they had received from members of a working group convened precisely for that purpose by Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick—the so-called Expert Committee for Population and Racial Policy (Sachverständigenbeirat für Bevölkerungs- und Rassenpolitik)—is unknown.Footnote 5 There is also little information about the discussions that Gütt, Rüdin, and Ruttke had among themselves during the two weeks between the first meeting of the Expert Committee and the proclamation of the law.Footnote 6 Despite this gap in the sources, the following interpretation, which is based on a careful analysis of the extant published and archival materials, allows for a reassessment of several historiographical assumptions about the shaping of Nazi sterilization policy and about the path that led to the sterilization of the blind during the Third Reich.
See No Evil
In 1904, the right-wing medical publishing house J. F. Lehmann published an 850-page edited volume titled Diseases and Marriage. Following an introduction in its first section on the relationship between marriage and disease, the second section of the book surveys the state of knowledge on every conceivable human malady, from neurological disorders and the malfunction of internal organs, to venereal diseases, skeletal deformities, and mental illnesses. Each chapter is devoted to a different category of disease, and each was written by an expert in the relevant field. But, despite this diversity, the structure of the chapters is strictly uniform: each begins with an overview of the disease and its effects, moves then to an exploration of its hereditary aspects, and concludes by calling on physicians to advise patients who carry the disease to abstain from marrying and procreating. A sweeping avoidance of marriage is not recommended in several cases, but it is nevertheless suggested that patients be informed about the effects of the disease before considering marriage and children.Footnote 7
There is one exception, however: a chapter on eye diseases that is conspicuously different from all the others. The difference is apparent already in its title. Without exception, the titles of all the other chapters have a uniform template that takes its cue from the name of the book itself: “Skin Diseases and Marriage,” “Syphilis and Marriage,” “Kidney Diseases and Marriage,” “Mental Illnesses and Marriage.” Only the chapter on eye diseases has a different title: “The Relationship of Marriage to Eye Disease, with Special Consideration of Heredity.” The content of the chapter reveals why either the author of the chapter or perhaps one of the editors felt obliged to deemphasize marriage and to stress instead the “special consideration of heredity.” Although the chapter discusses in great detail the hereditary nature of various malfunctions of the eye, nowhere does it refer to its potential relevance for marriage counseling. The author does not even bother to argue that the prevention of marriage for people with visual impairments is unnecessary; the entire issue of marital decision-making is simply ignored.Footnote 8
This peculiar treatment of blindness is representative of a general trend in eugenic discourse in Germany, one that remained more or less stable throughout the first third of the twentieth century. That trend had two main features. First, in terms of frequency, intensity, and overall tone, blindness occupied a marginal position in the field of eugenic concerns. As heirs of the nineteenth-century anxiety about degeneration, eugenicists were principally preoccupied with the feeble-minded, the insane, and criminals, not with the physically handicapped.Footnote 9 Second, although blindness was not absent from eugenic literature, and although it was frequently mentioned in discussions of hereditary and economic burdens, when it came to taking action against the reproduction of certain groups of people, the blind were usually exempted. These features are clearly discernible in the many articles, pamphlets, textbooks, and government correspondence on marriage counseling, marriage prohibition, and sterilization produced by eugenicists both before and after the enactment of the Nazi Sterilization Law. Eugenic literature in Germany (and elsewhere) was awash with references to the mentally and neurologically deprived, the feeble-minded, criminals, alcoholics and epileptics, but only took sporadic note of the mute and the deaf, and referred even more peripherally to the blind.Footnote 10
There were several exceptions to this rule. Their importance has been overemphasized in a 1986 study by Gabriel Richter, who presents an argument opposite to the one developed here. Richter claims, in fact, that although it may seem as if the focus of the sterilization (and later euthanasia) project was on the mentally ill, it was actually the blind, who stood at the forefront of eugenic campaigns. In support of his thesis, Richter draws on pre-1933 works by eugenicists who mentioned blindness as grounds for sterilization.Footnote 11 But his examples do not stand up to closer scrutiny. For one, as Richter himself acknowledges, the blind disappeared from the later works of those scholars who had earlier mentioned them. The Austro-Hungarian eugenicist Geza von Hoffmann, for instance, whom Richter brings forth as his first example, initially defined the blind as socially inferior, but did not name them again in a catalogue of diseases and disorders he later published.Footnote 12 More important, as will be shown later, Richter's evidence does not effectively call into question the basic pattern of eugenic discourse, which generally excluded hereditary blindness from sterilization bills, despite the clear hereditary nature of certain forms of visual impairment.
The sterilization proposals of one physician from Saxony, Gustav Boeters, whose work in this area is central for Richter's thesis, are telling in this regard. An avid supporter of legal measures to hinder the propagation of the mentally and physically inferior, Boeters published his own draft for a sterilization law (“Lex Zwickau”) in 1923. He called for the sterilization of children who, at the time they began elementary school, were blind, “deaf-mute,” or “idiotic” (blödsinnig)—congenital deficiencies that allegedly prevented them from taking part in the normal course of studies. Boeters's explicit motivation was an economic one: their inability to take part in school life hindered such children from becoming productive citizens and rendered them a burden to the rest of society. Boeters's campaign attracted considerable academic and public attention, but the responses to the content of his proposed law were mostly negative, even among his like-minded colleagues.Footnote 13 In a 1926 article surveying the scientific arguments for and against sterilization, Erna Kohls called Boeters's proposals “very far-reaching” because “inborn blindness and deaf-mutism do not imply mental inferiority” (the latter, in Kohls's eyes, did provide reasonable grounds for sterilization). Without exception, all the other plans for sterilization legislation mentioned in Kohls's extensive review excluded the blind and the deaf.Footnote 14 Two years later, in a revised draft of his law, Boeters reacted to this peer pressure and omitted the blind and the deaf-mute from his list.Footnote 15
This tendency to make a distinction between blindness and other forms of “hereditary burden” should come as no surprise. As many scholars have shown, ever since the mid-nineteenth century, the real menace in the eyes of eugenic thinkers was the feeble-minded, the “socially inferior,” and the mentally ill; the blind were never considered to belong to any of these categories.Footnote 16 In this respect, the blind also had an advantage over the deaf-mute, who were often associated with mental disability because of their speaking impairments. Moreover, blindness and deafness as such did not—and, in political terms, could not—signify a person's inferiority in German society after World War I. War veterans who suffered from eyesight or hearing loss were omnipresent, and blinded soldiers, in particular, aroused great public sympathy.Footnote 17 In such an atmosphere, treating blindness (and deafness) as degrading to a person's worth was problematic at best.Footnote 18
It is noticeable that those who exhibited mental instability as a result of their wartime experience encountered a different attitude. The hysteria or depression of veterans were commonly portrayed as stemming from, or testifying to, an innately weak character. Many psychiatrists shared the view that “some endogenous element must play a dominant role” in the fact that certain soldiers became hysterical or depressed, whereas others who shared similar experiences did not.Footnote 19 War-related mental deterioration thus came to be seen as a testimony to an individual's mentally unsound character. The inability to see or hear, both of which were most commonly the result of injury on the battlefield, were not portrayed in a similar fashion. War-induced blindness, unlike hysteria, was a sign of a soldier's bravery, not his inferiority.
This difference in attitude toward the mentally and physically impaired found clear expression in a discussion of a draft sterilization law conducted by the Prussian Health Council in 1932. Most historians regard this draft, which was never enacted, as the direct antecedent of the Nazi law passed a year later.Footnote 20 Blindness and deaf-mutism, along with hereditary female hip dislocation, were mentioned in a keynote address by the Catholic eugenicist, Hermann Muckermann, but they were presented as less significant than tuberculosis, syphilis, and gonorrhea. Muckermann claimed, furthermore, that “all these, and other diseases, are of no small importance from the viewpoint of national welfare, [but] of incomparably greater influence are those diseases that affect the organs of the higher psyche. I am thinking of mental diseases in the true sense and of ones that dispose one to moral digressions.”Footnote 21
The ensuing discussion revolved, as a whole, around the burden placed on society by schizophrenics, the feeble-minded, psychopaths, criminals, and alcoholics. During the entire session, reference to blindness was made only three more times (in contrast to psychopathy and criminality, which were each mentioned roughly thirty times; there were at least fifty references to schizophrenia and more than sixty comments on feeble-mindedness). The second speaker to mention blindness was Eduard Kohlrausch, a prominent law professor in Berlin. Kohlrausch referred to a vague passage in the proposed draft emphasizing the need to prevent the birth of “severely burdened descendants”: “I will not deny that I personally hope that a more fundamental, meaningful formulation will be found, which takes into account social adaptability. There is something too relative about the phrase ‘severely burdened.’ We have heard that congenital blindness, deaf-mutism, six-fingeredness, etc. are also hereditary burdens”—yet, Kohlrausch wondered rhetorically, “Are they ‘severe’? This [question] cannot be answered unless we specify some kind of [social] purpose.”Footnote 22 Like others before him, he acknowledged that blindness was a hereditary burden, but he questioned whether it was advisable to include in the proposed law a category that could be applied to blind people while, at the same time, ignoring their “social adaptability.”
The result of these discussions—the Prussian draft of a sterilization law—targeted those who suffered from “hereditary mental illness, hereditary mental depravity, hereditary epilepsy, or similar hereditary ailments,” as well as “carriers of pathological hereditary dispositions.”Footnote 23 “Severe physical defects” were also mentioned, but left unspecified. The economic strain resulting from the need to support, maintain, and look after the physically and mentally disabled provided the explicit justification for the proposed law: “the number of mentally ill, feeble-minded, epileptics, psychopaths, hereditary criminals, and other [hereditarily] afflicted, who are a burden to public care services and the penal system, is growing.”Footnote 24 The blind (and deaf) may have been on the minds of some of the conveners (the phrase “carriers of pathological hereditary dispositions” may have referred to them as well), but they were not explicitly mentioned.
A year later, Interior Minister Frick spoke to the Expert Committee for Population and Racial Policy, whose declared goal was to formulate the Nazi sterilization law. After reminding his audience that the “feeble-minded and inferiors” were reproducing at a much higher rate than the “talented” and the “worthy,” Frick addressed the “extremely heavy burden on our nation of taxes, social levies, and payments.” He added that the burdens imposed by the high cost of care for “inferiors and asocials”—“4 reichmarks (RM) daily for the mentally ill, 3.50 RM for the criminal, and 5-6 RM for the cripple and deaf-mute”—had to be reduced, but he made no mention of the blind.Footnote 25
The Sterilization Law was published two weeks later, and it came into effect on January 1, 1934. It included the category of blindness. Available statistics on the implementation of the law (i.e., on the actual number of sterilizations performed between 1934 and 1945) nevertheless reaffirm the marginality of hereditary blindness in the overall eugenic project. Out of an estimated total of roughly 400,000 sterilizations, only 2,400-2,800 persons were designated for sterilization under the category of blindness during these eleven years. In other words, the blind comprised fewer than 1 percent of the total number of sterilization operations. In1934, the first year of the law, only 201 out of a total of 17,070 sterilizations (i.e., 0.6 percent) were performed on individuals designated as blind. The number of visually impaired was much larger—the census of 1925 counted 33,192 blind individuals—but the impairment of most of them was not considered hereditary. According to other statistics, when appearing before the newly established “hereditary courts” that oversaw the implementation of the law, blind individuals had a higher probability of evading sterilization than those who suffered from other “diseases.”Footnote 26 In short, as these data clearly indicate, hereditary blindness only occupied a marginal position on the list of illnesses that concerned physicians, eugenicists, Nazis, and German society at large.
The Inclusion of Blindness in the Nazi Sterilization Law: Three Explanations
If the blind were peripheral to the anxieties of German eugenicists, why, then, did legislators choose to include them in the 1933 law? More to the point, even if the legislators thought that the blind should be sterilized, why did they not simply apply to them the inclusive category of “hereditary physical defect” or “pathological hereditary disposition,” as previous legislation proposals had done? What additional benefit did the explicit inclusion of blindness as an independent category represent for the lawmakers? Three seemingly intuitive explanations might have accounted for the introduction of blindness into the law: “Nazi extremism,” “economic considerations,” and “imitation.” Each of these explanations has some merit, but none of them provides satisfactory answers to these questions.
An explanation for the inclusion of the blind in the Sterilization Law that points to Nazi extremism would argue that the legislation reflected the views of the most radical faction in the German eugenic community. For figures like Ernst Rüdin and Arthur Gütt, the argument would go, it was only natural to include the blind in a sterilization law, and it was precisely the work of the Nazi government to turn such extremist views into reality. In 1933, when Rüdin and Gütt had an opportunity to shape eugenic policy as they saw fit, they could finally fulfill their long-standing goals. That is why they went beyond what previous sterilization bills had done and included blindness in the law.Footnote 27 This explanation is, on the face of it, simple and seemingly persuasive. Rüdin and Gütt were indeed instrumental in the formation of the law. But, to account for the inclusion of blindness solely on the basis of their extremism, assigns too great a role to individuals as historical agents. The Sterilization Law, like other major racial-hygienic laws of the Nazis, was not a one- or two-man show; it only took shape after considerable administrative back-and-forth. We know that, in other racial-hygienic policies advanced by the Nazis, the most radical viewpoints did not necessarily prevail.Footnote 28 This also held true for the Sterilization Law: Rüdin, Gütt, and other Nazi racial hygienists continually complained that the law failed to deal adequately with healthy (heterozygous) carriers of deleterious genetic dispositions, despite the expressed wish to limit their propagation as well. But legislators were forced to acknowledge the regrettable fact that “the majority of the German people would not yet understand” the need to take measures against healthy carriers, which was why such measures were indefinitely postponed.Footnote 29
Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that there were many other potential disease categories, such as cleft palate or hemophilia, that appeared in eugenic discourse prior to 1933, but that were not specifically mentioned by the law. Some of them surfaced later in the official commentary on the law, and thus became integral to its practical implementation. In theory, the same could have happened with blindness—but it did not. This suggests that the inclusion of the blind in the law might have been radical, but that radicalism alone cannot explain it. And it certainly fails to explain why it was important to list blindness as a separate category and not instead be content with the less precise and more inclusive category of “physical defect.”
A second explanation for the decision to include the blind in the sterilization bill would focus on economic considerations. As noted earlier, economic arguments were prevalent among eugenicists, central to Boeters's targeting of the blind, and also prominent in the Prussian Health Council's discussion in 1932, about hindering the reproduction of “inferiors.” Yet, this explanation is problematic in two respects. First, in financial terms, the hereditarily blind represented only a marginal burden. Because of their small numbers, both in comparison to the non-hereditarily blind and to other categories of “dependents,” their additional economic strain was practically negligible.Footnote 30 This may explain why Frick failed to mention them in his speech to the Expert Committee, even as he addressed the financial aspects of the problem.
At a more general level, it is true that economic argumentation was frequently mobilized by the Nazis to convince the public of the necessity of taking action against the mentally and physically frail. But one should not overestimate the significance of such considerations in the worldview of those who advocated a sterilization policy. In essence, what was at stake for eugenicists was not money, but rather the biological (im)balance of “superior,” as opposed to “inferior,” individuals, and the negative impact of different reproductive rates by these two groups on the nation's hereditary substance.Footnote 31 As Theo Lang, a psychiatrist and early adherent of Nazism, wrote in an analysis of the costs of caring for the mentally frail, “the pure economic line of argumentation needs to play only a subordinate role in the demand for eugenic action; the essential issue must always be the moral requirement to prevent much greater losses of ethical values”—a loss that, in Lang's view, resulted from prioritizing the care of the mentally unfit over the cultivation of valuable, hard-working citizens.Footnote 32 Moreover, even in financial calculations related to the dangers of different reproduction rates, the blind remained marginal because, unlike other categories of “inferiors,” they were not reproducing at an especially high rate.Footnote 33 In short, then, the (marginal) economic burden associated with the blind may have contributed to the decision to include them in the sterilization bill, but the role of economic considerations should not be overestimated.
A third potential explanation for the inclusion of blindness in the Sterilization Law might be that the legislators simply borrowed this category from earlier drafts of sterilization laws that had not come into effect. Boeters's Lex Zwickau (from which the blind were ultimately withdrawn) was one such potential predecessor. Another was the so-called Model Eugenic Sterilization Law, presented by American eugenicist Harry Laughlin in 1922. It listed the following “socially inadequate classes” as candidates for sterilization:
(1) Feeble-minded; (2) Insane (including the psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug-habitués); (6) Diseased (including the tuberculous [sic], the syphilitic, the leprous, and others with chronic, infectious, and legally segregable diseases); (7) Blind (including those with seriously impaired vision); (8) Deaf (including those with seriously impaired hearing); (9) Deformed (including the crippled); and (10) Dependent (including orphans, ne'er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps, and paupers).Footnote 34
Whether Rüdin, Gütt, and Ruttke took Laughlin's Model Law into consideration when working out the details of the Nazi law is unknown. They were certainly aware of it, and they were also aware of the fact that, despite the appearance of the blind and the deaf in Laughlin's model, neither found their way into any of the sterilization bills adopted by the American states. (In fact, their inclusion was a novelty, even for Laughlin himself: he had explicitly excluded them in his earlier writings.Footnote 35) More important, however, is the fact that there were at least as many differences as similarities between Laughlin's Model Law and the German one. In terms of similarity, both gave pride of place to the feeble-minded, which reflected their centrality in eugenic thought. But what Laughlin termed “insane” was divided by the Germans into two separate mental diseases (or, disease “complexes”): schizophrenia and manic-depressive insanity. Criminality, which is in third place on Laughlin's list, does not appear in the German law at all—though, judging by the legislators’ worldview, it was obviously high on their list of concerns. Laughlin's fifth item, the “inebriate,” appears in the German law but not as an integral part of the listed diseases; rather, it is a clearly differentiated addition: “Furthermore, anyone suffering from chronic alcoholism can be sterilized.” The tubercular, syphilitic, and others suffering from infectious diseases were not included in the German law; Laughlin's final category of “dependent” was not either.
These differences suggest that, even if the German legislators had indeed consulted the Model Law, they were not beholden to it but instead chose and rejected what they saw fit. In addition, they ordered the diseases differently and even added a new category: Huntington's chorea. In short, the Model Law may have provided the Nazis with some inspiration, but that does not explain why certain categories, such as blindness, were included and others left out.
There is nevertheless one common thread that runs through all the differences between the two laws. The splitting of “insanity” into two separate categories by the Nazi legislators; their decision not to mention criminality, dependency, and infectious diseases; as well as their listing of alcoholism as an addition to (not an integral part of) the list of diseases, all testify to their deliberate attempt to “medicalize” the content of the law. The Nazi legislators clearly avoided adopting what contemporaries saw as explicitly socially determined categories, favoring instead the naming of illnesses that, by the standards of the time, could be regarded as hereditarily determined medical conditions. In fact, the legislators explained later that “the law intentionally limits itself to those diseases about which the hereditary mechanism has been sufficiently researched scientifically.”Footnote 36 Replying to critics who complained about the exclusion of criminality, they argued that “the relevant authorities refrained from including criminal dispositions to avoid departing from the law's pure medical foundation.”Footnote 37 A law that legitimized the sterilization and castration of “habitual criminals” came into force at the same time as the Sterilization Law—but it was legislated separately. That second law and the Sterilization Law were both informed by similar assumptions (e.g., that criminal tendencies were inherited and related to mental depravity), but the legislators consciously set them apart.Footnote 38
Why were the Nazi legislators so careful to base the law on (seemingly) medical concepts, not on (overtly) social ones? Grounding the law in medical science was crucial for the Nazis primarily because they anticipated that the law would arouse criticism and possibly even resistance, both home and abroad. The radical component of the law was its compulsory nature, not its list of diseases. That was why it was better to choose the latter in a manner that would ease the law's implementation, not hinder it. As Gütt later acknowledged, a law that targeted the entire population and that saw consent as superfluous was no trivial feat, even under Hitler.Footnote 39 “Scientizing” the law was therefore essential for fending off potential criticism. As we will see in the next section, it was precisely in this respect that blindness, together with deafness and Huntington's chorea, acquired a special role.
The Advantage of Including Blindness in the Sterilization Law
To appreciate the advantage of including blindness as an independent category, it is useful to examine first the number of individuals who were expected to fall under each category of disease listed in the law. According to official estimates published before the law was enacted, it was expected that it would affect roughly 200,000 “feeble-minded” in the entire German Reich, 80,000 schizophrenics, 60,000 epileptics, and 20,000 who suffered from manic-depressive insanity. These four categories were not only among the most prominent ones in eugenic discourse, but also the major ones in quantitative terms, ultimately comprising around 95 percent of the sterilizations that were actually carried out. It was also estimated that 20,000 Germans suffered from serious physical deformities, and that there were 16,000 (hereditary) deaf, 4,000 (hereditary) blind, and just 600 suffering from Huntington's chorea.Footnote 40 In competing assessments published by leading eugenicists, the numbers of the blind and deaf-mute were similarly smaller than those in the other categories; Huntington's chorea was negligible and thus hardly ever mentioned.Footnote 41
Yet, despite their minor quantitative significance, it was precisely these last three disorders—Huntington's chorea, certain forms of deafness, and certain forms of blindness—that possessed a quality that the major mental diseases lacked: they were all considered to be inherited in a simple Mendelian fashion, and therefore served as an unambiguous demonstration of the applicability of Mendelian theory to humans. As a result, naming these three categories became part of a rhetorical strategy that psychiatrists often used in order to frame their eugenic ideas in a way that provided them with some modicum of scientific legitimacy. It was, in fact, this very element that the three “diseases” had in common that probably prompted Nazi legislators to include them as independent categories in the law.
The rise of Mendelian genetics is crucial for understanding this turn of events. Soon after the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's model of dominant and recessive hereditary factors in 1900, breeders of plants and animals, as well as doctors and racial anthropologists, began to investigate human and animal pedigrees, and to identify Mendelian patterns of heredity in their genetic materials. For medical, social, and scientific reasons alike, the hereditary manifestations of physical disorders were, as a rule, easier to follow than those of “normal traits,” and it was therefore pathological phenomena that became the focus of Mendelian research in humans.Footnote 42 Before the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, Huntington's chorea had already been characterized as a simple dominant trait by leading proponents of Mendelism: William Bateson in England and Charles Davenport in the United States.Footnote 43 Immediately afterward, “deaf-mutism” was also shown to conform to a simple, recessive Mendelian hereditary mode.Footnote 44
Research into the heritability of vision disorders had already preceded these studies. The Mendelian nature of eye malfunctions attracted the attention of Mendelian researchers as early as 1905, when English physician Edward Nettleship began publishing his studies on cataracts, glaucoma, and retinitis pigmentosa.Footnote 45 As this line of research progressed, fascination with vision disorders increased as well; this stemmed less from their deleterious influence than from their unique hereditary character, namely, sex-linked inheritance. This curious hereditary pattern came to be recognized, after simple dominance and simple recessiveness, as the third basic category of Mendelian teaching, and it was one that was especially captivating for those researching heredity.Footnote 46
Supported also by studies on polydactyly (i.e., the growth of additional fingers and toes) and on hemophilia, the notion that Mendelism provided the key for studying and combating degenerative phenomena in humans seemed to have been proven beyond doubt. In 1911, in the wake of these successes in the medical study of the heritability of physical (and mostly pathological) traits, Rüdin made his first major attempt to show that mental disorders could also be explained on the basis of Mendelian teaching. Five years later, armed with an improved set of statistical methods, he demonstrated that schizophrenia was probably caused by two independent recessive Mendelian genes.Footnote 47 In 1917, Rüdin was appointed head of the Department of Genealogical and Demographic Studies at the newly founded German Institute for Psychiatric Research (soon to become a “Kaiser Wilhelm Institute”) in Munich, where he achieved increasing influence over the study of the heritability of mental illnesses in German-language, and later also international, psychiatry. Acknowledging by this time that Mendelian research methods had failed to supply the key for deciphering the inherited patterns of various sorts of mental aberrations, Rüdin established a new school of genetic psychiatry, which he later called “empirical hereditary prognosis.” No longer relying solely on Mendelian assumptions, Rüdin's primary goal was now to calculate the hereditary risk that mentally ill individuals posed to their potential family members.Footnote 48
Throughout the 1920s, Rüdin and his followers applied statistical methods that clearly diverged from the Mendelian approach propagated earlier. Yet, since Mendelian theory remained the core legitimization of studies about the heritability of human traits, German psychiatrists continued to couch their results in Mendelian terminology and to interpret their empirical findings in light of Mendelian theory. “Under the influence of Rüdin, psychiatric heredity research, in general, stands completely under the banner of ‘Mendelism,’” Josef Berze, a Viennese psychiatrist observed in 1923.Footnote 49 That was important for psychiatrists favorably disposed to eugenic theory, precisely because the methods they used to investigate mental illness no longer relied on Mendelian assumptions. As the acknowledged framework for the study of heredity, Mendelism was indispensable for legitimizing the genetic work of psychiatrists and also for substantiating their claims.
The association of research findings with Mendelism became orthodoxy in the professional publications of eugenically-minded psychiatrists; it was especially salient whenever they appeared in public.Footnote 50 For example, at a meeting held at the Prussian Ministry for People's Welfare in 1921, to discuss the “eugenic indication” for sterilization, Dr. Max Hirsch proudly announced that “we know that the most important psychic diseases, such as dementia praecox, epilepsy, [and] feeble-mindedness, are inherited recessively in the Mendelian sense.” The same held true for “atrophy of the optic nerve, retinitis pigmentosa, deaf-mutism, familial juvenile glaucoma, [and] hemophilia.”Footnote 51 By pointing to an alleged similarity between psychic disorders and physical disorders that were widely acknowledged to follow Mendelian laws, and by referring to psychic disorders as “recessive in the Mendelian sense,” Hirsch attempted to boost the scientific status of existing knowledge about the hereditary nature of mental diseases.Footnote 52 A similar strategy was used ten years later in a speech made before the Bavarian County Assembly (Kreistagsverband). The speaker, Dr. Friedrich (Fritz) Ast, the director of an institution for the mentally ill, claimed that a full understanding of their hereditary basis was essential for dealing eugenically with mental illnesses; he also described Rüdin's efforts to identify the hereditary mechanisms of mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. “The results of his research seemed to provide the proof that schizophrenia, like all other hereditarily determined diseases and traits, is inherited according to biological hereditary laws, whose discovery we owe to the Augustinian priest Mendel.” Addressing a crowd of nonexperts, Ast then gave a short exposition of Mendel's laws, clarifying key terms such as homozygosity, heterozygosity, dominance, and recessiveness. “All findings speak for the fact that the hereditary trait for schizophrenia is recessive,” he claimed, before moving on to a discussion of other mental diseases and their hereditary dangers.Footnote 53
The inclusion of widely recognized Mendelian disorders in the Sterilization Law of 1933, was therefore perfectly in accordance with an often used type of argumentation employed by psychiatrists, and it may be seen as yet another attempt to bridge the widening gap between Mendelism and “empirical hereditary prognosis”—while minimizing the differences between the (internationally acclaimed and highly successful) field of biological genetics, on the one hand, and the (statistically grounded, but somewhat vague and still less prestigious) psychiatric hereditary studies, on the other. The clearest embodiment and most masterful demonstration of this scientific-rhetorical strategy was the official commentary to the Sterilization Law, which Rüdin, Gütt, and Ruttke wrote jointly.
The commentary, which sold thousands of copies to doctors throughout Germany, and which became legally binding at the precedings of the new hereditary courts, begins by explaining in detail Mendel's laws and by affirming their relevance for humans. Dominant inheritance is explained using the example of Huntington's chorea; recessive inheritance by deaf-mutism; and sex-linked inheritance by glaucoma. The authors then argue that “there is much evidence that, for example, schizophrenia is based on a pair of factors, a dihybrid hereditary mode, although a satisfactory, comprehensive proof [for that] is difficult to obtain.”Footnote 54 This difficulty stemmed primarily from computational complexities, they claimed, and it undermined in no way the validity of the Mendelian suppositions. As the authors saw it, even if one could not determine for certain whether a particular disorder was inherited in a “simple recessive or sex-linked recessive, dominant or recessive monohybrid or polyhybrid, recessive and dominant mixed, or pure recessive” manner, the law was still valid, “as long as it is generally clear” that “some kind of heredity” was behind the disorder.Footnote 55
After the law came into effect, German Gymnasium teachers used a similar type of argumentation in the classroom. They explained Mendelism as the basis for the study of human heredity, and they related it directly to the Sterilization Law—a link that would have been far more tenuous if the law had not contained such clear-cut examples of Mendelian inheritance, like blindness and Huntington's chorea. In this vein, a 1934 guidebook for teachers recommended using the example of deaf-mutism to demonstrate recessive inheritance in humans. Many teachers complied, referring in class to deaf-mutism and night blindness in order to spark discussion about Mendelian dominance and recessivity—as well as about their practical eugenic implications.Footnote 56 Huntington's chorea served a similar pedagogical role, as one student's final exam in biology reveals:
We know of a series of hereditary diseases that undoubtedly follow a simple hereditary pattern (e.g., Huntington's chorea). It is a blessing of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, now in effect, that the hereditary mass that determines the quality of our Volk will not deteriorate to such a horrible extent any further.Footnote 57
Used as a singular example as evidence of a more general rule, Huntington's chorea became the link that enabled the student to associate Mendelism with the Sterilization Law—and thus to suggest that the law rested on firm biological ground.Footnote 58
Was the law intentionally formulated to serve such propagandistic purposes? Or did the inclusion of the three Mendelian diseases simply derive unwittingly from the legislators’ discussions? We will likely never know definitely, in the absence of sources necessary for drawing such a conclusion.Footnote 59 “Mendelizing” the law by including classically recognized Mendelian diseases was certainly a conventional rhetorical move by 1933, and this choice might have emerged naturally during the exchanges among Gütt, Rüdin, and others. In any event, it is with this rhetorical “habit”—or “strategy”—in mind that the inclusion of blindness, deaf-mutism, and Huntington's chorea in the list of diseases targeted by the law needs to be understood. What gave these disorders prominence among eugenicists, well before 1933, was their scientific status, not their perceived medical danger.
Later developments only confirm that the actual sterilization of the blind and deaf was a relatively minor concern for lawmakers. For the latter, it was the act of naming them for sterilization that was imperative. It is obvious that these specific medical conditions would not have been chosen unless they had represented some form of damaged hereditary endowment; but neither would they have been chosen as independent categories, had they not brought with them any benefit in the form of Mendelian legitimization.Footnote 60 In shaping a crucial building block of future eugenic policy, Nazi lawmakers wanted to ensure that their legislation would be as scientifically grounded as possible, so that they could indeed call their law a “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases.”
Conclusion
The Health Council of the Reich held a special meeting in 1920. On the agenda were competing proposals for a law that would require prospective marriage partners to exchange their health certificates before marriage. Professor O. Abel of the university in Jena surveyed the background for these proposals. “Specific deviations from health, which have become so important for the study of hereditary relations in humans, such as hemophilia, night blindness, polydactyly, and many others, are,” he maintained, “probably occurrences too rare to require separate consideration in the present context.”Footnote 61 Thirteen years later—and six days after the Sterilization Law was passed—psychiatrist Robert Gaupp noted that “there is no doubt that the law deals primarily with diseases and [medical] conditions that fall under our psychiatric area of work. With respect to their prevalence and significance, ‘hereditary blindness’ and ‘hereditary muteness,’ as well as ‘severe hereditary physical deformities,’ are secondary to the psychic diseases named in [clauses] 1-4 and to severe alcoholism.”Footnote 62 In the second edition of the law's official commentary, the authors admitted themselves, with respect to Huntington's chorea, that “this disease plays almost no role in the average population.”Footnote 63
Regardless of their rarity, blindness, deafness, and Huntington's chorea became pivotal, during the two decades preceding the adoption of the Sterilization Law, for promoting Mendelian research among geneticists, physicians, and psychiatrists. These disorders became standardized as fundamental examples of Mendelian processes in humans, and they were repeatedly referred to in the flourishing fields of professional and popular writing on biology and heredity.Footnote 64 Embodying the relevance of Mendelian teaching to the study of human pathologies, they nourished the hope that modern science could uncover the way in which human heredity worked, and also eradicate sickness from the individual and collective body of the nation.
Blindness, deafness, and Huntington's chorea therefore became, for the scholars involved, what Thomas Kuhn has called “scientific exemplars,” i.e., a limited set of examples that form the basis of a scientific field by indoctrinating scholars and teaching them how to think “properly” about their subject matter.Footnote 65 At the same time, to the obvious disappointment of leading eugenicists and psychiatrists, feeble-mindedness and schizophrenia, the two major villains held responsible for national degeneration, did not very easily lend themselves to Mendelian analysis. The widening gap between the study of mental diseases and research on physical disorders was not working to the benefit of the former, yet psychiatrists and eugenicists habitually treated this gap as if it were only a temporary and artificial one—a force of habit that reached its climax in the official commentary about the Sterilization Law.
But as socio-medical conditions, blindness and deafness were not on par with the other disorders—even in Nazi Germany. After 1933, blind and deaf people still had their own independent organizations and army units; blind youngsters could join the Hitler Youth, wear its uniform, and display a special badge; there was even a Sturmabteilung (SA) unit for the deaf. In 1938, a chorus of blind girls sang and played the flute at a meeting of the Nazi Winter Aid Charity, and, as late as 1942, a school textbook about the dangers of hereditary diseases devoted no fewer than ten pages to praising the talents and social usefulness of blind people. That would have been unimagineable for the “mentally-deprived,” who were presented to the public as subhuman asylum inmates.Footnote 66
Was the peculiar place of blindness in eugenic discourse prior to 1933 unique to Germany? Despite some national differences, it was not. In American eugenics, for example, blindness occupied a more salient role than in Germany, as Edwin Black has argued in his book, War Against the Weak.Footnote 67 Three elements in Black's account are relevant for the foregoing analysis. First, blindness was intended in America to spearhead the eugenic crusade against the procreation of the mentally inferior—a means to an end more than an end in its own right. Second, the campaign against the blind in the United States was largely the work of one man, Lucien Howe—a legendary figure in the history of American ophthalmology and a leader in the eugenic movement who lobbied incessantly for preventing marriage by the visually impaired. It was primarily because of his efforts (and his connections with Harry Laughlin) that blindness acquired a central place in American eugenics. Not by chance, Howe was a Mendelian enthusiast as well. He lived on a New York estate called “Mendel's Farm,” and he eulogized Mendel's work in exuberant poetry (“If our good old Father Mendel is still counting peas grown in the celestial garden, he probably takes time … to lean over the golden bars, and … look down on what is being done at Cold Spring Harbor … His mouth must stretch into a very broad grin when he thinks how little attention was paid to him on earth and what a big man he is now”). Third, in spite of Howe's efforts, the campaign against the blind failed completely in America, long after laws targeting the mentally ill were already in force. At least half the “core coterie” of the Eugenics Record Office, the hub of eugenic efforts in the United States, was reluctant to take action against the visually impaired; in the end, none of these efforts went beyond the pages of eugenic journals.Footnote 68
The American case seems similar to the German one: blindness in America became a (failed) target for sterilization, largely because of the efforts of an influential Mendelian enthusiast. And, even for him, the principal goal of trying to sterilize the blind was to pave the way for the sterilization of others. The place of blindness in the international eugenic discourse followed along similar lines. Blindness was certainly not absent from eugenic initiatives: it appeared in eugenic writings, and it was repeatedly referred to as a demonstration of Mendelian inheritance. But, as a rule, it disappeared as an independent category as soon as actual measures were taken against society's “inferior elements.” In this spirit, the Third International Congress of Eugenics, held in New York in 1932, included a number of papers that mentioned blindness as a generally dysgenic feature that needed to be eradicated. The accompanying exhibit, which drew over 15,000 visitors in forty days, included a booth on the “Heredity of the Eye,” with a sign that read: “You can help prevent blindness by encouraging laws, visual tests, and education.”Footnote 69 But, in the end, no bill targeting the blind (or the deaf) was passed by any legislative body in America—or anywhere else. Drafts for sterilization laws in Britain and Poland did mention these two categories, but they were formulated immediately after the Nazi law had been enacted, and they clearly echoed the German legislation (the Polish draft copied the German categories verbatim, in fact). But even this inclusion of the blind and deaf did not last long, and later drafts for sterilization bills in both countries omitted once again any explicit reference to either of these categories.Footnote 70
It was thus only in Germany that the categories of blindness, deafness, and Huntington's chorea were actually introduced into sterilization law, a fact that proved fateful for those afflicted with visual or hearing impairments, as well as for Huntington patients. In theory, one cannot know for sure what actions would have been taken against them had they not been explicitly named by the lawmakers. But, in practice, their inclusion in the law had immediate, palpable, and horrific consequences. By portraying the blind, the deaf, and Huntington's chorea patients as a socio-medical danger, the legislators empowered local authorities, doctors, teachers, and regular citizens to initiate legal proceedings against them. The law severely diminished the ability of the blind and the deaf to fight against these measures, either individually or collectively. Moreover, it became the basis for future judicial measures, from forced abortion, on June 25, 1935, to the prohibition of marriage (Ehegesundheitsgesetz), on October 18, 1935. The precise wording of the law sealed the fate of the 2,400-2,800 blind and of the more than 15,000 deaf who were later sterilized, and it may have also contributed to the murder of blind or deaf children as part of the Nazi “euthanasia” project during World War II.Footnote 71 It was precisely the Nazis' attempt to ground their sterilization policies firmly in biological teaching that came at a grave human cost—for the visually and hearing impaired, as well as for those with Huntington's chorea.
