Don’t let anti-vaxxers fool you into thinking Hitler was pro-vaccine
‘The German vaccination law was one the Nazis inherited from the Weimar Republic and eventually overturned’
‘The Nazis were in fact responsible for the only eight-year gap in a century of compulsory vaccination in Germany’
No sooner had the Austrian government announced that it intended to make the coronavirus vaccination compulsory yesterday than inevitable comparisons with the Nazis emerged.
It is a favourite fact of the antivaxxer movement that the Nazis were the first to make vaccination compulsory in Austria, following the 1938 Anschluss with Germany.
It is also deeply misleading. The German vaccination law in question was one the Nazis had inherited from the Weimar Republic and did little to enforce. In 1940, they overturned it.
In fact, Hitler was an anti-vaxxer – at least when it came to the peoples the Nazis had conquered. “In the field of public health, there is no need whatsoever to extend to the subject races the benefits of our own knowledge,” he told fellow Nazi leaders in 1942.
“This would result only in an enormous increase in local populations... Compulsory vaccination will be confined to Germans alone.”
Later the same year, Hitler told his chief of staff, Martin Bormann: “No inoculations for the natives. We must persuade them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!”
The Nazis would take these ideas to their horrific conclusion in the Holocaust, allowing diseases to run unchecked through concentration camps and ghettos. But while Hitler opposed vaccination for conquered peoples, the truth is he did support compulsory vaccination for his German “master race”, but shied away from enforcing it because it was already so controversial.
Anti-vaxxer scepticism is as old as vaccines themselves. The world’s first vaccine was developed against smallpox in 1798. It remains the most effective vaccine in history, eradicating a disease that once killed 400,000 people a year in Europe.
But the vaccine was controversial from the start. The kingdom of Bavaria was the first place to make it compulsory in 1807. Two years later, the policy led to an armed rebellion in the Tyrol led by Andread Hofer, a devout Catholic who believed it was blasphemous. The scene of that uprising, which left more than 17,000 people dead, lies in modern Austria.
Despite this early opposition, smallpox vaccination caught on across Europe. Britain made it compulsory in 1853, in a law that would remain in force until 1971. The German empire followed suit in 1874 with the precursor of the law Hitler would eventually inherit.
But it remained controversial. In 1907, police had to break up an anti-vaxxer demonstration in Vienna – where vaccines weren’t compulsory – after it degenerated into a brawl between protesters and medical students. Long before the Nazis arrived on the scene, the anti-vaxxer movement had become embroiled in anti-semitic conspiracy theories. In 1881, Eugen Karl Dühring, a philosopher and economist, claimed vaccination was a superstition promoted by Jewish doctors to create business for themselves.
Hitler was only too happy to indulge such nonsense on his way to power, and by the time he became chancellor in 1933 widespread public opposition to compulsory vaccination had been further inflamed by a tragic incident.
In the Lübeck vaccine disaster of 1930, 77 babies died from a TB vaccine that had been contaminated with a live and virulent strain of the bacteria. It left many Germans reluctant to immunise their children.
It was against this backdrop that the Nazis inherited the compulsory jabs law. Wary of resistance, they did not enforce it, and in 1940 they reformed it, making vaccination optional.
Compulsory vaccination returned to Germany and Austria in the wake of the Second World War. In Austria, the law requiring all children to be vaccinated against smallpox was restored in 1948.
By then, Germany was divided by the Iron Curtain, and the Communist east took a particularly rigorous approach, mandating vaccines against smallpox, diphtheria, polio, tetanus and whooping cough until 1970.
A history of compulsory vaccination under communism has been blamed for some of the lowest coronavirus jab rates in Europe – in Poland just 53 per cent of people are fully jabbed, while in Slovakia it is just 43 per cent. But in Germany, a hard-line approach was not confined to the east.
Just as in the UK, the smallpox vaccine remained compulsory in democratic West Germany until the 1970s, while the diphtheria vaccine was mandatory until 1954. Far from being standard-bearers for the policy, Hitler and the Nazis were in fact responsible for the only eight-year gap in a century of compulsory vaccination in Germany between 1874 and 1975.