We do not stand alone: 1936 Nazi poster with flagsof other countries with compulsory sterilization legislation

1. "We do not stand alone": 1936 Nazi poster with flagsof other countries with compulsory sterilization legislation

2. 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 Verh�tung 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,

3. 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.

4. 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.[6]

5. 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.[7]

6.  'Still Hiding:�Woman sterilized at 14 carries a load of shameATLANTA - Elaine Riddick Jessie can't forgive the state of North Carolina for what it did to her in an Edenton hospital in 1968. She tenses as she talks about being sterilized soon after delivering her first and only child when she was 14. 

7. Board did its duty, quietlyMembers from five governmental areas heard case summaries and usually stamped approvalFor 40 years, in a rather routine fashion, the eugenics board made major decisions for more than 7,600 North Carolinians.

8. Lifting the Curtain On a Shameful EraThey were wives and daughters. Sisters. Unwed mothers. Children. Even a 10-year-old boy. Some were blind or mentally retarded. Toward the end they were mostly black and poor. North Carolina sterilized them all, more than 7,600 people. 

9. Forsyth in the ForefrontMedical school to probe its role in county plan for sterilization As World War II wound down in 1944, Dr. C. Nash Herndon of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine described a eugenic sterilization program in Forsyth County using language eerily reminiscent of Nazi experimentation

10. Sign This or Else...A young woman made a hard choice, and life has not been peaceful since Nial Cox Ramirez remembers every detail of what happened to her in 1965, even though she has been trying hard to forget. Ramirez had a choice to make, and it was a wrenching decision for an an 18-year-old who had just had her first child. Her options? Sign a form from the Eugenics Board "consenting" to be sterilized, or have welfare payments for her mother and six brothers and sisters cut off. 

11. 'Wicked Silence': State board began targeting blacks, but few noticed or seemed to care about programState Sen. Wilbur Jolly's voice thundered as he spoke at a public hearing in the legislature on April 1, 1959. Out-of-wedlock births were soaring and he had a solution. After an unmarried woman gave birth for the third time, he said, she should be sterilized. 

12. DETOUR: In '48 state singled out delinquent boysThe seven boys are old men now, if they're all still alive. They are senior citizens who may well carry haunting memories about what happened to them while they were at the Stonewall Jackson Training School in 1948

13. Most of them were all set to be released, but before they could leave the school outside Concord, the state of North Carolina wanted to sterilize them. Harry Truman was president and the thousands of veterans who had fought in World War II had returned home and were pushing the United States toward its boom years. There was order in the land, and those who trespassed against that order were dealt with firmly in a time when neither capital punishment nor corporal punishment were subject to debate.

14. Across North Carolina, boys and girls who broke the law - as well as ones who were simply promiscuous or truant - were sent to reform schools such as Jackson. The fat folders on these schools at the state archives in Raleigh are full of yellowed letters in which state officials praise each other for their efforts to help these children. Tucked away amid all those images of backslapping are a few pages that tell grimmer stories, ones of children crying unheard, lost in the shadows of a system

15. where being beaten and locked in closets was not all that unusual. During a 1938 hearing before the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, a 13-year-old girl was asked why she wanted to go home from a county institution. Patient: 'Cause I don't want to stay up in the lockup all time. Mrs. Bost: What do you mean, lockup? Patient: They call it bread and water room... Dr. Stimpson:They keep you locked up in this room. Patient: Yes.

16. For hundreds of youth among the thousands in North Carolina institutions, being sterilized by the state was also a fact of life. For these young people, who were categorized as "feebleminded," the operation was a prerequisite for release. The eugenics board urged it, and the social workers the board kept in contact with often insisted that institutionalized students be sterilized before returning to their counties.

17. "We would say this person is ready to return to the community ... the community would say, 'No, we can't accept her back because she'll get pregnant and there'll be another child on welfare," said Vernon Mangum, who headed the O'Berry Center, a training school in Goldsboro, from 1959 to 1978.