Before there was Auschwitz, there was “Aktion T4” the Nazi program begun in 1939 that killed 300,000 disabled German men, women and children.  And before Aktion T4, there was the 1933 German “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring” that led to the forced sterilization of 400,000 German citizens.  Adolf Hitler claimed that his forced-sterilization law was fashioned after the model sterilization law extant in at least thirty of the then forty-eight United States.  This was not a specious claim; the German forced sterilization program had its roots in America.  Furthermore, while euthanizing the disabled was not practiced in America, the policy did have its supporters in astonishingly high places. We will have a conversation about this dark and rarely discussed part of American political and medical history