As influential as they were at home, American eugenicists received an even warmer welcome in Germany, where they found enthusiastic support for their ideas in another country that had recently suffered the loss of a generation of bright, physically fit young men in war. Fearing that this decimation would act like natural selection in reverse, the ambitious leaders of this proud and wounded nation undertook a plan to secure the future of their race by wiping “mental defectives” off the face of the earth forever.
