Nazi Germany period

The Nazi Germany period appears in the book’s history of infanticide as a stark instance of state-directed selection: newborns deemed unfit under the regime’s racial ideology were killed through a medical system, while women who ended or attempted to end a pregnancy faced the death penalty. The passage links bureaucratic classification, professional complicity, and the coercive control of reproduction in a single account of how the state claimed authority over both birth and survival.

Racial Selection and the Newborn

The account describes the regime as acting in pursuit of an optimized Aryan race. Premature infants, children with paralysis, and newborns suspected of intellectual disability were classified as lives not worth preserving. Rather than treating those conditions as experiences requiring care, the system made them grounds for removal and killing.

The selection began at birth. Infants identified under these criteria were transferred to wards called Kinderfachabteilungen, where the process of state violence was carried out within medical institutions. The passage presents the wards not as isolated sites but as part of an organized policy directed against children marked as defective by the regime.

Medical Cooperation and the Scale of Killing

A small dose of phenobarbital, supplied by Bayer laboratories, was enough to kill the infants. The detail makes the violence chillingly procedural: a measured drug, supplied through commercial laboratories, became an instrument for erasing children whom the state had categorized as undesirable.

Pediatricians, nurses, and midwives across the Reich were required to report each designated birth. The account says they received a small financial payment for doing so, joining professional duties and material incentive to the reporting system. Within a few years, this machinery had caused the deaths of about ten thousand babies, which the book describes as a genocide.

Reproductive Coercion and Historical Significance

The account sets the killing of disabled and otherwise disfavored newborns beside the regime’s prohibition of abortion. Abortion was illegal in Germany, and a woman who carried one out—or merely attempted one—could be sentenced to death. The juxtaposition is central: the state permitted itself to determine which infants should live while denying women the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy.

Placed within the book’s wider history of infanticide, this period shifts the focus from an individual mother’s act to an institutional system that classified, reported, and killed children. The narrator’s research follows legal and historical records but also confronts the limits of official documentation as a way to explain human motives. Here, however, the passage emphasizes a policy whose mechanisms and scale are presented as evidence of organized state violence.