Science and the Swastika by Adrian Weale, Channel 4 Books, £14.99, ISBN
0752219316
THE Nazis didn’t invent eugenics. The first professor of eugenics was
appointed in 1909 at University College London. Years earlier, the Fabian
socialist Beatrice Webb had proposed sterilising “difficult” members of the
working class, and laws permitting compulsory sterilisation of the mentally
handicapped were introduced at the beginning of the 20th century in several
countries, including the US and Sweden.
But it was in Germany during the 1930s that the “applied biology” of eugenics
became an entrenched political doctrine, finally leading to the systematic
slaugher of the…
