Wir stehen nicht allein: “We do not stand alone”. Nazi propaganda poster from 1936. The woman is holding a baby and the man is holding a shield inscribed with the title of Nazi Germany’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (their compulsory sterilization law). The couple is in front of a map of Germany, surrounded by the flags of nations which had enacted (to the left) or were considering (bottom and to the right) similar legislation.
Today marks 65 years of remembering the holocaust. An went which for many women caused more grief than the widespread loss of life, torture and forced family breakdown. In 1939-040, a secret Nazi plan, called Generalplan Ost (Masterplan East) was concocted by Hitler that established a blueprint for genocide and ethnic cleansing in Poland and other countries to the east. The documents were divided into two parts, the Kleineplanung (Small Plan) which specified actions that the Nazis were to accomplish during the war, and the Grosseplanung (Large Plan) which detailed the actions to be gradually implemented after the war and during the subsequent 25 to 30 years. According to Nazi projections during the “Small Plan”, the following nationals were targeted for “elimination”.
A less well publicised legacy of the holocaust was the forced sterilisation which many men, women and children were forced to undergo.
One of the first acts by Adolf Hitler after achieving total control over the German state was to pass the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) in July 1933. The law was signed in by Hitler himself, and over 200 eugenic courts were created specifically as a result of the law. Under the German law, all doctors in the Reich were required to report patients of theirs who were mentally retarded, mentally ill (including schizophrenia and manic depression), epileptic, blind, deaf, or physically deformed, and a steep monetary penalty was imposed for any patients who were not properly reported. Individuals suffering from 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 on the individual, using force if necessary. Though not explicitly covered by the law, 400 mixed-race “Rhineland Bastards” were also sterilized beginning in 1937.
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 whom they had taken inspiration. The Nazis had many other eugenics-inspired racial policies, including their “euthanasia” program in which around 70,000 people institutionalized or suffering from birth defects were killed.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wir_stehen_nicht_allein.png
http://polishgreatness.blogspot.com/2011/01/from-lebensraum-to-genocide.html?m=1
