In 1933 the Nazi party seized control of Germany and forever altered public opinion of eugenics. Initially, the Nazis enacted only sterilization laws. However, these laws went far beyond the actions of the United States. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that "anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of the disease." (David, 89) The Nazi party took several steps to rid the Third Reich of the "causes of the disease." On July 14, 1933 the Cabinet passed the Law for the Prevention of Heridtary Diseases in Future Generations. This law, which was to be implemented on January 1, 1934 called for the sterilization of "lives unworthy of life". These "unworthy lives" included those persons suffering from congenital mental retardation, schizophrenia, manic-dpressive insanity, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, grave bodily malformation, and severe alcoholism. To enforce the sterilization laws, Nazi leadership created special "Hereditary Health Courts." All physicians were legally required to report to the courts anyone they encountered who fell into any of the categories for sterilization. As a result, by 1937 some 225,000 individuals had been sterilized by German authorities, a figure that was roughly ten times the number in the United States. (David, 91) Surprisingly, many eugenic supporters saw the rash tactics of Germany as a threat to the United States eugenic movement. Many began to argue that the United States was in fact sterilizing too few people. In 1934, Joseph S. DeJarnette, a key figure in Virginia eugenics said, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.” (Kevles, 116)
Eventually, the megalomaniac ideas of Hitler and his closest advisors would completely end public support for eugenics. With the mass extermination of the Jews and those deemed unfit in the eyes of Hitler, a very powerful anti-eugenic movement arose. Public support wavered and eugenic programs slowly faded away. The science that was once thought to contain the key to human betterment became nothing more than a black mark on history.
In his book Fundamental Outline of Racial Hygiene, Ploetz called for the elimination of "counter-selective processes." He was concerned about social processes that reversed the work of natural selection by eliminating the strong and favoring the weak. He did not like war, because it eliminates the strong. And he opposed charitable programs to protect the weak and the ill. He suggested that doctors who were present at the birth of a weak or malformed child could provide an easy death with a small dose of morphine.
In 1922, a German lawyer named Karl Binding and a German psychiatrist named Alfred Hoche published a slim book with a clumsy title: Permission to Destroy Life Not Worth Living (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens). They argued in favor of euthanasia, or mercy killing. The cost of maintaining useless people was too high, and the government could spend the money on better things. Religious barriers should be pushed aside, so that the government could get on with the job of killing the physically and mentally defective (painlessly). Destroying useless lives was necessary for the survival of society as a whole, they wrote.
In 1935, a French-American Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Alexis Carrel, wrote Man the Unknown, in which he advocated building euthanasia institutions to deal with criminals and the mentally ill, using some suitable gas.
Step by step, positive eugenics gave way to negative eugenics. In 1910, Francis Galton and the President of the new Eugenics Society, Montague Crackanthorpe, gave a reception for Ploetz in London. Later, Ploetz and his colleague R¸din built the German racial hygiene program, and both were ardent supporters of Hitler.