Germany Invades Poland (World War II)
A segment from the 1942 U.S. government film “The World at War.”
Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous, vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet. … [but] … Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, “Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.” I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was “good”.
Wir stehen nicht allein: “We do not stand alone”. Nazi propaganda poster from 1936. The woman is holding a baby and the man is holding a shield inscribed with the title of Nazi Germany’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (their compulsory sterilization law). The couple is in front of a map of Germany, surrounded by the flags of nations which had enacted (to the left) or were considering (bottom and to the right) similar legislation.
The countries which had enacted compulsory sterilization laws (and the date shown) were:
- United States (date illegible; Indiana enacted first laws in 1907)
- Denmark (1929)
- Norway (1934)
- Sweden (1935)
- Finland (1935?)
The countries where they were considering compulsory sterilization laws were:
- Hungary
- United Kingdom
- Switzerland
- Poland
- Japan
- Latvia
- Lithuania
Scan taken from Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), page 96. Originally from Neues Volk, March 1, 1936, p.37.
