In Australia, these ideas manifested in the murder, abduction and forced assimilation of Aboriginal

peoples (Barta 2001), with the intention of ‘breeding out the colour’ to achieve ‘racial purity’ and a
White Australia (McGregor 2002: 286). Although the idea of ‘an Australia without Aborigines was both
imagined and canvassed’ (Barta 2001: 37) in the early 1800s, Germany was the first to issue a
compulsory sterilisation law in furtherance of ‘social hygiene’. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Offspring, enacted by the Nazi regime in 1933 as one of its first official acts, ordered the
compulsory sterilisation of specific categories of the ‘hereditarily ill’ (Mostert 2002). These specific
categories included people with ‘mental retardation’, ‘grave bodily malformation’, schizophrenia,
Huntington’s chorea, blindness, epilepsy, hereditary deafness and hereditary alcohol-ism (Mostert 2002:
159). The regime established 220 Health Courts in which a jurist and two doctors determined who would
be sterilised (Mostert 2002). The Nazi eugenics program was further promoted by the 1935 Nuremberg
Laws, including the Marriage Health Law, which prevented the marriage of any person with an
intellectual disability or a contagious or hereditary disease (Mostert 2002). Propaganda films and
literature promoted the ‘mercy killing’ of those ‘lives unworthy of life’ (Benedict et al. 2009: 514).On 18
August 1939, a directive was issued by the State Ministry of the Interior compelling all doctors and
midwives to register any infant with a ‘congenital deformity’ or ‘mental retardation’ up to the age of
three (Mostert 2002: 161). Soon after, this age limit was raised to sixteen years (Benedict et al. 2009).
Medical practitioners were paid a small fee for each referral and were fined heavily for any failure to
report. Later, teachers were also required to report any of their students who fell within the directive
(Mostert 2002). The records of these children were sent to the Reich Health Ministry, where their fate
was decided by a panel of three health professionals. Those children selected for exter-mination were
sent to special killing wards in 28 health facilities across Germany, where they were poisoned, starved,
intentionally exposed to the cold or given a lethal injection by medical staff.

MLA (Modern Language Assoc.)

Linda Graham. Inclusive Education for the 21st Century : Theory, Policy and Practice. Routledge, 2020.

APA (American Psychological Assoc.)

Linda Graham. (2020). Inclusive Education for the 21st Century : Theory, Policy and Practice. Routledge.