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.
Though the Nazis were in favor of the shots, they made the pragmatic choice to keep the new, elastic enforcement of vaccination in place, even when they later officially withdrew the relaxation in 1934,
according to Malte Thiessen, head of the LWL Institute for Westphalian Regional History. Hitler’s interior ministry (the department in charge of the police, among other things) proposed adding an English-style conscience clause to the vaccination law, and, in 1935, the minister instructed that “the popular character of the health laws, which must appear to be absolutely desirable in the National Socialist state, is better served if unnecessary restlessness is avoided in the implementation of the laws in the population.”
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.
“If at the end of the Weimar Republic the attitude of state actors to coercive measures changed cautiously, the ‘Third Reich’ heralded the transition from coercion to voluntary action,” writes Thiessen.
