Eugenics: A Brief History – History Deep Dive

Disclaimer – This blog post describes the history of eugenics. The title, Eugenics: A Brief History, is a nod to the expanse of historical context involved with this topic. Although I attempt to provide a glimpse into the injustices that the eugenics movement caused, this post is by no means a definitive history of the events discussed. At the end of the post I have listed my sources. I encourage you to read the source material if you are interested in learning more about this topic.

Warning – Readers may find some of the content discussed within this post disturbing. This article covers forced sterilization, medical experimentation, and genocide.

Introduction

In 1915, a Chicago surgeon named Dr. Harry Haiselden refused to perform life-saving surgery on a newborn.¹ Haiselden, with the support of the boy’s mother, classified the child as defective and allowed him to die. When the state investigated, the legal system ruled that Haiselden was within his professional rights to withhold treatment.

Helen Keller, who herself had overcome significant disabilities to become a renowned author and activist, publicly supported the decision.² While the exact timing and wording of her statement are debated by historians, Keller did express support for allowing “defective” infants to die rather than live with severe disabilities, writing statements to the effect that human life held value based on its potential usefulness.

These events occurred during the rise of eugenics—a movement that claimed scientific legitimacy for policies aimed at improving human heredity by preventing reproduction among those deemed “unfit.”³ While these ideas were being implemented in American hospitals and enshrined in state sterilization laws, a German soldier named Adolf Hitler was serving in the trenches of World War I.

By the 1920s, American eugenics had gained international attention. Hitler and other Nazi ideologists studied American eugenic policies, particularly the forced sterilization laws that had been enacted in numerous states. Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race, which advocated for racial purity and restrictive immigration, was translated into German and circulated among Nazi leadership. Hitler is often said to have called Grant’s book his “Bible,” though historians debate whether this quote is authentic or the precise nature of their correspondence.⁴ When the Nazis rose to power, they drew upon these American precedents while developing their own extensive racial ideology that would ultimately lead to systematic genocide—taking eugenic ideas to extremes that far exceeded American practices.

Section I

In 1922, the eugenics movement moved from theory to standardized practice. Harry H. Laughlin, a leading figure at the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, drafted the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law.⁵ This was not merely a theoretical document; it was a legislative blueprint designed for states to adopt into their own legal codes. While more than a dozen states had already experimented with such measures, Laughlin’s work provided a unified template that targeted “socially inadequate” classes, including the “feebleminded,” the deaf, and the “dependent.”

The legal validity of these laws reached the highest level of American legal authority in 1927 with the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell. In an 8-1 decision, the Court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck, a young woman classified as “feebleminded” along with her mother and daughter. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. authored the majority opinion, declaring:

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”⁶

Historians have since noted the bitter irony of Holmes’s statement: Carrie Buck’s daughter Vivian died at age eight, but school records indicate she was of normal intelligence, undermining the central claim of the case. The Buck v. Bell decision has never been explicitly overturned and remains part of American legal precedent.⁷

With this Supreme Court endorsement, the expansion accelerated. Eventually, 32 American states enacted sterilization laws, many based on the Laughlin model, providing a proven legal framework for the international community to observe.⁸

In 1933, the newly established Nazi government in Germany looked to the United States as a model for eugenic policy. They enacted the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which drew directly from American sterilization statutes.⁹ However, the German application was more expansive. While American laws often focused on institutionalized individuals, the German law applied to the general population, targeting conditions ranging from schizophrenia and epilepsy to “congenital mental deficiency” and physical deformities.

The German leadership was particularly indebted to Laughlin’s framework. In 1936, the University of Heidelberg invited Laughlin to receive an honorary Doctor of Medicine degree in recognition of his contributions to “the science of racial cleansing.” Though duties at the Eugenics Record Office prevented him from attending, Laughlin sent a cordial response to Dr. Carl Schneider, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, expressing his regret at being unable to “receive this highly honored diploma in person.”¹⁰

The connection between the two men was more than symbolic. Dr. Schneider, who facilitated Laughlin’s honorary degree, would later become a primary architect of Aktion T4—the Nazi program that expanded German policy from forced sterilization to systematic murder of those deemed “life unworthy of life.”

Section II

By 1939, the Nazi regime moved from preventing “unfit” lives to actively terminating them. Hitler authorized his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to oversee a program that would later be known as Aktion T4. This was the pivotal bridge between the sterilization laws of the 1930s and the Holocaust. At this stage, there were no extermination camps; instead, the program operated within the existing infrastructure of nursing homes, hospitals, and psychiatric wards.¹¹

The foundation for this state-sponsored murder was set in late 1938 with a single petition. Two parents requested a “mercy killing” for their infant son, a child referred to in historical records as Gerhard Kretschmar, who was born blind with severe physical and developmental disabilities. Hitler sent Brandt to evaluate the child, and in the summer of 1939, the infant was euthanized. Following this case, Hitler instructed Brandt to apply the same logic to all “similar cases.”

On August 18, 1939, the regime established the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. Its purpose was to create a database of “defective” children. Recognizing that parents would never willingly surrender their children to be murdered, the Nazis utilized a systematic program of deception. Parents were told their children were being sent to “Special Sections” for “improved and innovative treatment.”¹²

In reality, these children were held for a brief “assessment” period before being killed by lethal injection. To complete the deception, parents were sent condolences claiming their child had succumbed to “pneumonia” or other routine illnesses.

By the fall of 1939, the method of killing evolved. The regime determined that carbon monoxide gas was the most “efficient” means to handle larger numbers of victims. Simultaneously, the regime issued a decree requiring all medical institutions to report patients who were institutionalized for five years or more, those deemed “criminally insane,” or anyone of “non-Aryan race.”

The decision-making process was purely bureaucratic. A panel of “experts” reviewed the paperwork without ever meeting the patients. Their judgment was rendered in symbols:

A “+” (plus) signaled death.
A “–” (minus) signaled life.
A “?” signaled a need for further review.

If three experts marked a report with a “+”, the patient was condemned to death.

To transport victims to the six designated killing centers, the regime used the Community Patients Transport Service. These were distinctive grey buses run by SS personnel wearing white medical coats to maintain the illusion of healthcare. Most patients were murdered in gas chambers disguised as showers within 24 hours of arrival.

Their bodies were immediately cremated. Families received death certificates listing false causes of death—heart attacks, strokes, or pneumonia—along with urns containing random ashes, as the victims were cremated in mass groups.

The program was officially halted in August 1941 after public protests, particularly from church leaders such as Bishop Clemens von Galen, and growing public unease as people noticed inconsistencies in the official explanations. Stories circulated of families receiving death certificates claiming causes of death that were medically impossible given the patient’s known medical history. While the public outcry forced Hitler to end the centralized T4 program, the expertise, the personnel, and the gassing technology were not dismantled. Instead, they were transferred eastward to staff the death camps of the Holocaust.¹³

Section III

The persecution of Jews under Nazi Germany did not begin with the Holocaust but evolved over years of escalating discrimination. Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Jews faced systematic exclusion through the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Kristallnacht in 1938, and forced ghettoization beginning in 1939. By 1941, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union, mobile killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen began mass shootings of Jewish civilians in occupied territories, marking the transition from persecution to systematic mass murder.¹⁴

To facilitate the removal of Jewish populations from German-controlled areas, the regime established a network of camps across Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp system was complex and varied: some were concentration camps for political prisoners and forced labor, others were explicitly designed as extermination centers. The regime’s propaganda portrayed deportations in various ways depending on the audience, often emphasizing “resettlement” to the East or the contribution of labor to the war effort, allowing the Nazi government to implement its genocidal policies while minimizing immediate domestic alarm.¹⁵

In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Nazi leadership formalized the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”—a coordinated plan for the complete extermination of European Jews.¹⁶ The expertise developed during the earlier Aktion T4 program—the gas chambers, the bureaucratic “selection” process, and the mass cremation—was now applied at an industrial scale in purpose-built extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Sobibor. Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 6 million Jews were murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of Romani people, disabled individuals, political prisoners, homosexuals, and others deemed “undesirable” by the regime. The methods included mass shootings, gas chambers, starvation, forced labor, and death marches.¹⁷

It is a common misconception that the Allied powers entered World War II to stop the Holocaust. In reality, the war was triggered by Germany’s territorial expansion and the invasion of Poland in September 1939. While reports of atrocities reached Allied governments through intelligence services, resistance networks, and escapees, the full industrial scale of the genocide was not fully comprehended by the global public—or even many Allied soldiers—until American, British, and Soviet forces began liberating the camps in 1944 and 1945. The liberation of Majdanek in summer 1944 and subsequent liberations through 1945, including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau, revealed the full horror of the Nazi extermination system.¹⁸

The relationship between World War II and Nazi genocidal programs is complex. While the Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program was officially halted in August 1941 due to domestic opposition, decentralized killing of disabled persons continued throughout the war under what historians call “wild euthanasia.” The war provided both cover and justification for escalating violence, but it also ultimately led to the regime’s defeat and the end of its killing apparatus. The Holocaust was not an inevitable byproduct of war but a deliberate ideological project that the Nazi leadership pursued with systematic determination.

Section IV

When the Allied powers convened the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945, they faced complex legal questions about how to prosecute Nazi leadership. The defendants and their attorneys raised several arguments in their defense, including that they had acted in accordance with German law and that they were being prosecuted under laws that had not existed at the time of their actions.¹⁹

Defense attorneys argued that the tribunal violated the principle against ex post facto prosecution—punishing individuals for actions that were not crimes when committed. They contended that their clients had followed orders and operated within the legal framework established by the German state. In the case of the medical defendants tried in the subsequent Doctors’ Trial (1946-1947), physicians like Karl Brandt argued they had acted as state officials carrying out legally authorized programs.²⁰

The prosecution countered these arguments on multiple grounds. They cited existing international law, including the Hague Conventions on the laws of war, which Germany had signed. They argued that certain acts—such as aggressive war, war crimes, and the systematic persecution and murder of civilian populations—violated established international legal principles regardless of domestic authorization.

The London Charter, established in August 1945 before the trials began, formally defined three categories of crimes: crimes against peace (planning and waging aggressive war), war crimes (violations of the laws of war), and crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, enslavement, and other inhumane acts against civilian populations). The prosecution argued that the systematic nature and scale of Nazi atrocities placed them beyond the protection of any domestic legal system.²¹

The Doctors’ Trial, which ran from December 1946 to August 1947, specifically addressed the medical experiments and euthanasia programs conducted by Nazi physicians. The tribunal’s judgment in this case led to the creation of the Nuremberg Code, a set of ten principles governing ethical medical experimentation. The code established that voluntary informed consent is absolutely essential for human subjects in medical research and that experiments must avoid unnecessary physical and mental suffering.

The Nuremberg Code represented a foundational moment in medical ethics, establishing principles that would influence subsequent declarations including the Declaration of Helsinki and modern research ethics regulations.

While the Nuremberg trials established new international legal precedents for prosecuting atrocities, the contradiction between these principles and ongoing domestic practices was evident. American officials participated in prosecuting Nazi doctors for forced sterilization and medical experimentation while similar, though less extreme, coercive sterilization programs continued to operate under state law in the United States. The legal framework that had inspired aspects of Nazi eugenic policy—particularly the state sterilization laws validated in Buck v. Bell—remained in effect in numerous American states for decades after Nuremberg.

Section V

While the Nuremberg trials officially dismantled the Nazi medical machine, the underlying logic of eugenics did not vanish; it simply continued in altered forms. In the United States, the legal precedent set by Buck v. Bell remained in effect long after the liberation of the concentration camps. Forced sterilization programs continued into the 1970s under evolving justifications including “population control” and “social hygiene,” disproportionately targeting people of color, the poor, and those in institutional settings.

The persistence of these practices came to national attention in 1973 with the case of the Relf sisters. Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, two African American girls aged 14 and 12, were living in Montgomery, Alabama, when they became targets of a federally funded family planning clinic. The sisters had been receiving Depo-Provera contraceptive injections, but clinic staff then sought to sterilize them permanently.

Because the girls’ mother, Mrs. Minnie Relf, was illiterate, clinic staff had her sign a consent form with an “X,” which she believed authorized continued contraceptive shots. Under this dubious consent, the clinic performed a tubal ligation on 14-year-old Minnie Lee. Her younger sister Mary Alice was scheduled for the same procedure but had not yet undergone it when their father, Lonnie Relf, discovered what had happened. The family also had a younger daughter, Katie, who had been sterilized at an even younger age.²²

The resulting federal lawsuit, Relf v. Weinberger, exposed widespread coercion in federally funded family planning programs.²³ The case revealed that thousands of sterilizations were being performed annually with inadequate or fraudulent consent, often targeting poor women and women of color. The court found that federal guidelines failed to protect vulnerable individuals from coercive practices, leading to the first strict federal regulations requiring genuine informed consent for sterilization procedures funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

The Relf case marked a turning point in public awareness and regulatory oversight, though it did not completely dismantle the eugenic legal framework. Buck v. Bell was never formally overturned by the Supreme Court, and some state sterilization laws remained on the books for decades afterward. Nevertheless, the case represented a critical moment when coercive sterilization practices, which had operated with legal sanction since Laughlin’s model law, finally faced meaningful federal restrictions in the civil rights era.

Conclusion

The history of eugenics reveals a pattern that transcended national boundaries and political systems. From a Chicago hospital in 1915 to a rural Alabama clinic in 1973, the methods remained remarkably consistent: identify the “unfit,” utilize legal frameworks to strip them of autonomy, and employ medical authority to justify the outcome.

The ideology that drove these programs—the belief articulated by Helen Keller in 1915 that human life holds value based on its usefulness to society—found expression in American sterilization laws, Nazi extermination programs, and post-war coercive practices. What began with Harry Laughlin’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law in 1922 provided a template that was adopted across dozens of American states and studied by Nazi Germany. The techniques developed in Aktion T4—bureaucratic decision-making, deceptive consent procedures, and industrial-scale implementation—were later applied in the Holocaust. Even after the Nuremberg trials exposed these horrors, similar practices continued in the United States for decades.

The legal and medical establishments that enabled these programs did not collapse on their own. Change came through specific challenges: the public protests that halted Aktion T4 in 1941, the Allied liberation of the camps in 1944-1945, the Nuremberg prosecutions that established medical ethics standards, and cases like Relf v. Weinberger that exposed ongoing abuses and led to stricter consent regulations. In each instance, it was individuals—prosecutors, family members, journalists, and advocates—who forced these systems into public scrutiny.

Contemporary Reflection

As we consider this history, certain questions remain relevant to modern society. Advances in genetic technology, debates over healthcare allocation, and the increasing role of data in social policy all raise questions about how societies determine value and make decisions about human lives. The historical record demonstrates how easily scientific language and appeals to collective benefit can be used to justify policies that violate individual dignity and autonomy.

The eugenics movement was not solely the product of a single regime or ideology, but emerged from democratic societies with legal systems, medical establishments, and public support. This history serves as a reminder that the protection of human dignity requires constant vigilance, robust informed consent procedures, and skepticism toward policies that categorize people based on perceived social utility. The principle that emerged most clearly from the Nuremberg trials—that individuals possess inherent dignity regardless of their perceived usefulness—represents a direct rejection of the eugenic worldview that dominated earlier in the century.