["Patients with genetic diseases can, by surgical intervention, be sterilized..." Mandatory sterilization in Germany during the era of national socialism].

The ethical problem of permissibility of sterilisation for eugenic reasons is being discussed since the end of the last century. For many years restriction and rejection were the predominant opinions. A bill passed July, 1933--"Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses" ("Act of prevention of heredopathic progeny")--imposed juridical regulations to prevent offspring with inherited diseases in National Socialist's Germany. No major protests had been made against such compulsion put upon the medical profession. Papers dealing with questions of surgical techniques had been published in Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie predominantly in 1935 and 1936. The significance of the scientific analysis of mandatory sterilisations for so-called eugenic reasons performed in almost 400,000 women and men in Germany between 1933 and 1945 has only recently began to be recognised by the scientific community in the last decade addressing predominantly the regional impact of this jurisdiction.