Karl Wilhelm Jtten

Passions

Vocation

German bacteriologist, hygienist and eugenicist whose studies provided a politically motivated justification for the forced sterilization of about 100,000 children in Germany. After the Reichstag election in March 1933, Jötten tried to be admitted to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi party). Because his ties to the Catholic milieu made him politically unreliable, he was not accepted until 19 May 1936, retroactively to 1 May 1933. In 1933 he published the first "Erbhygienische Untersuchungen" under his direction. Jötten had carried out such hereditary examinations with more than 4,300 auxiliary schoolchildren with a colleague. The children between the ages of 7 and 15 were counted, weighed, measured and tested. In 1935 he represented, together with Heinrich Reploh, as a speaker at the International Congress for Population Sciences, the thesis that special needs pupils should be "switched off from the reproductive process". After the end of the war, he was allowed to remain at the Westphalian Wilhelms University. He devoted himself to commercial hygiene and staging research. He was emeritus in 1955. He died on 13 May 1958 in Münster, aged 72. Link to Wikipedia biography (German)