In July 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was passed, legalising mass sterilisation as a means of eliminating the weak, idle, criminal and insane. The Führer believed that all these degenerates were a drain on the public purse, and were to be removed from the chain of heredity in order to strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of pure-bred Germans. The Brauweiler director, Albert Bosse, declared in 1936 that 95 per cent of his women prisoners were ‘incapable of improvement and must be sterilised for moral reasons and for the purpose of maintaining the
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