ical, biological and social scientific communities in the decade before World War II. Many physicians and scientists were frantic about threats they saw to the genetic health of the nation posed by the presence of inferior populations such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, with a lesser extent a distant threat which was, African peoples (Adams, 1990). The steps they took to protect against the public health disaster of a 'polluted' racial stock were so
             awful, so immoral, and so heinous that they have rightly, shaped all subsequent discussion of the ethics of both human genetics and eugenics.
             Steps to eliminate unfit or undesirable genes by prohibitions on sexual relations, restrictions on marriage, sterilization or killing, are all forms of negative population eugenics (Kevles, 1995). Nazi judges and scientists ordered children killed or sterilized who had parents of different racial backgrounds or were thought to have genetic predispositions toward mental illness, alcoholism, retardation or other disabilities. This was done to remove the threat such children posed to the genetic stock of the nation and to avoid having to pay the costs associated with institutionalization and hospitalization (Caplan, 1992). Laws were enacted prohibiting marriages between those whom Nazi race hygiene theory held were likely to produce degenerate offspring.
             Conversely, on a smaller scale, the Nazis tried to encourage those who satisfied Nazi racial ideals to have more children. The most extreme form of encouraging eugenic mating was the Lebensborn program which gave money, medals, housing and other rewards to persuade "ideal" mothers and fathers to have large numbers of children in order to create a super-race of Aryan children (Proctor, 1988). The provision of rewards, incentives and benefits to encourage the increased representation of certain genes in the gene pool of future generations constitutes positive population eugenics (Kevles, 1995).
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