Many countries had powerful eugenics movements, most eugenicists lobbied and argued for coerced sterilization, and politicians in many countries heeded the eugenicist call. Only one country, however, took eugenics to its murderous extreme. That it turned out so would not have been predicted in the early or even the late 1920s.

Germany was a latecomer to coerced sterilization: such policies had already been adopted in Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States. There had been discussion of eugenic sterilization since Alfred Ploetz, the key figure of German eugenics, published Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse (The Efficiency of Our Race), but all legislative proposals had come to nothing. Sterilization bills died before the Prussian legislature in 1903, the national Reichstag in 1907, the Saxon legislature in 1923, and the Reichstag again in 1925. Interestingly, studies in the 1920s cited Germany as a country notable for its reluctance to adopt a sterilization law. In this context, the fate of Gustav Boeters is instructive. Boeters was a sort of Saxon Hoyt Pilcher. He worked as a district physician in Zwickau and lobbied for sterilization by instigating and advertising illegal sterilizations carried out by Heinrich Braun, a surgeon. In May 1923, he sent a report to the government of Saxony in which he demanded compulsory sterilization for the hereditarily blind and deaf, the mentally handicapped, the mentally ill, “perverts,” and fathers with two or more illegitimate children. The “Lex Zwickau” (named after the Saxon town in which he lived) was his model law, but it received little support from the German government. On October 5, 1928, a frustrated Boeters penned a letter to the well-meaning but probably dim American philanthropist, E. S. Gosney.