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You Know Who Else Opposed Vaccine Mandates? Hitler.
Contrary to claims about “fascist” vaccine mandates currently circulating on the Right, the Nazis actually relaxed German vaccine mandates — and hoped doing the same for people they conquered would kill them faster.
Pop quiz: What allowed the Nazis to seize and hold on to autocratic power in Germany for more than a decade, and carry out the horrific crimes they’re known for? Was it a police state that trampled on the rights to privacy, protest, and speaking out, enforced by brutal and sometimes secret paramilitary forces with the help of a pervasive surveillance state? Or was it a vaccine mandate?
In the topsy-turvy world of right-wing politics in today’s pandemic-riddled United States, it’s not even a question: clearly, the vaccines did it. Since Joe Biden issued a sweeping vaccine mandate last week, right-wing media and politicians wasted no time in deploying the Nazi comparisons, calling the move “fascist,” “totalitarian,” “authoritarian,” and invoking swastikas and the Nuremberg Code.
There’s only one problem: the Nazis didn’t actually issue a vaccine mandate. In fact, Republicans would have found much to like in the Third Reich’s vaccine policy, which was very much in line with their current recommendations: above all, it relaxed requirements for compulsory vaccination that had been in place in Germany for decades at that point, and went with a voluntary approach instead. We even have records of private discussions of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi colleagues clearly showing that, far from viewing vaccine mandates as key to their genocidal goals, the opposite was the case: they knew that withholding compulsory vaccination and other German public-health innovations would help kill more of the undesirable and “inferior” people who they wanted to rid from the world.
The Actual History
Let’s back up for a minute to understand the history of Germany’s compulsory vaccination. Like the United States and many other countries, the newly founded German Empire was forced to take this step by the ravages of smallpox, which had killed tens of thousands of people in Prussia. In 1874, the imperial government made vaccines compulsory for infants and men entering military service, as well as regular revaccination for children. For the next fifty-some years, the measure was one of the cornerstones of German public health.
By the time Hitler and the Nazis took over the country in 1933, disgruntlement with compulsory vaccines had been building for a while, some of the anti-vaccine sentiment mixing with the antisemitic conspiracy theories that were rife in that era. This opposition was especially inflamed by a 1930 incident in which more than seventy children died thanks to an improperly administered tuberculosis vaccine, in what came to be known as the Lübeck disaster. As a result, in the waning years of German democracy, the Weimar government suspended compulsory vaccination in practice, even if it was still officially the law of the land.
Though the Nazis were in favor of the shots, they made the pragmatic choice to keep the new, elastic enforcement of vaccination in place, even when they later officially withdrew the relaxation in 1934, according to Malte Thiessen, head of the LWL Institute for Westphalian Regional History. Hitler’s interior ministry (the department in charge of the police, among other things) proposed adding an English-style conscience clause to the vaccination law, and, in 1935, the minister instructed that “the popular character of the health laws, which must appear to be absolutely desirable in the National Socialist state, is better served if unnecessary restlessness is avoided in the implementation of the laws in the population.”
Forced vaccination against the will of kids and parents alike, which had caused outrage throughout the Weimar years, stopped happening from the 1930s on. By 1936, Germans no longer had to prove they’d gotten a smallpox vaccine to attend secondary school, and, by 1940, the policy of “elasticity” was made legally binding, and continued to be used by German governments even after the war. The Nazis instead relied on mass propaganda and the education system to convince people to choose to get vaccinated.
“If at the end of the Weimar Republic the attitude of state actors to coercive measures changed cautiously, the ‘Third Reich’ heralded the transition from coercion to voluntary action,” writes Thiessen.