Eugenic “Selection” and Forced Sterilization
Sterilized in 1934, Murdered in 1941: Josef Fuhr
Born in Königswinter in 1884, Josef Fuhr was a soldier in the First World War when he fell from a height of three metres. He began to hear voices and was treated at a psychiatric clinic in Bonn. After the war, he ran a successful business as a cabinetmaker with two employees. He was admitted to the Bonn Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Home in 1926, becoming a permanent patient in May 1934 with a diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia”. He was sterilized against his will just five months later, following a written request by hospital management. The legal basis for this was the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring”. In the summer of 1941, Josef Fuhr was transported via Andernach to the Hadamar killing centre near Limburg, where the father of five was most likely murdered on 25 July 1941 in the gas chamber.
Even today, we still know very little about the fates of many who fell victim to the Nazi policy of exterminating any “life unworthy of life”. For a long time, family members were reluctant to openly discuss the stories of those who were sterilized against their will or murdered. In contrast, Wilbert Fuhr decided to research his grandfather’s case in the 1990s, thereby making it known.
The Work of “Physician Judges”
Enacted on 14 July 1933, the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring” was the legal basis for sterilizing anyone with a disease considered hereditary, along with “antisocial” and “inferior” individuals. It was to this end that public health authority doctors began identifying “conspicuous” persons and creating case files on them—with the help of numerous officials, physicians, and private citizens. With such a file, even in cases where there was just the presumption of an ostensibly hereditary illness, they could submit an “Application for Sterilization” to the newly established “Hereditary Health Courts”. In order to facilitate official medical investigations, the right to doctor–patient confidentiality was revoked by the Law’s second implementing ordinance. A “Hereditary Health Court” consisted of a magistrate (as chairman), a state-employed doctor, and another licenced doctor who had to be “particularly well versed in hereditary health theory”.
By the start of the Second World War, some 300,000 sterilizations had been carried out in Germany (within the borders of 1937). This number increased by almost 60,000 in the next five-and-a-half years, with probably 40,000 more in the areas annexed since 1938.