Fun factoid: Germany 1933 to 1945 actually relaxed vaccine requirements....

[steve2470]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/vaccine-mandates-covid-pandemic-german-nazi-inoculation-policy

*snip*

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.

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.

*snip*

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.


Something to think about the next time you hear the anti-vax idiots compare vaccine mandates with Nazi Germany.

inspired by:

[brewens]

1. They also only banned guns for Jews, who mostly never had any anyway. They relaxed restrictions for

other people like watchmen.