Did Hitler borrow ideas from American Democrats?

“Hordes of people [are] born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions… Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.”¹

You’d be forgiven for thinking these were the words of Adolf Hitler. Truth is, they’re not. They’re the words of a woman Hilary Clinton claims she “admires… enormously.” Barack Obama has said he is “truly grateful” to the organisation she founded. And Dinesh D’Souza has said, she helped to supply blueprints for some of the worst acts carried out by the Nazis.

These are the words of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. The following excerpts are taken from a speech given by D’Souza. The video is shared below.

If Stephen Colbert [at the Emmys] opened  the Nazi 25-point platform and began to read from it: nationalisation of industry, universal healthcare, let’s go after the greedy, swindling bankers, and so on, and so on, he literally would have gotten thunderous applause from the people in the audience. In other words, what I’m saying is, the platform of the Nazi Party was manifestly left-wing. And historically, in America, the left recognised the Nazis, recognised the Italian fascists as kindred spirits.

Hitler, in fact, got some of his most maniacal and destructive ideas from the American Left. I’m not saying that there were similar things going on, I’m saying Hitler literally lifted it from the blueprints, from the examples, supplied by the Democrats and the left.

A slogan that Margaret Sanger had, which was published in her magazine, Birth Control Review [was]: “More children from the fit, fewer children from the unfit, this is the chief aim of birth control.”

According to Margaret Sanger, the “greatest present menace to civilisation,” is the “unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’.” What was Sanger’s proposed solution? Birth control, “…to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”² Sanger believed that ultimately, birth control must lead to a “cleaner race.”³

In America, the gang around Margaret Sanger, had basically two approaches to achieving this goal – the goal of preventing the unfit from reproducing. The first was forced sterilisation, this is the one that Margaret Sanger supported. The other one was euthanasia, which basically referred to killing off people who were seen as sick, disabled, old, and so on.

Now, amazingly the Nazis got a wind of this — through international conferences, they learned about what the American progressives were proposing. There was a California progressive, Paul Popenoe, who said, listen if we’re going to have euthanasia we can’t kill people one at a time. We need to have a more systematic way of doing it. And he proposed “lethal chambers” to carry this out.

And what I’m saying, is that the Nazis go, what the Americans are proposing is fantastic, we’re going to run with it. The Nazi sterilisation laws of 1933 and the Nazi euthanasia laws of 1935 which were in fact the first gas chambers. The Nazis used poison gas, carbon monoxide gas, to kill initially not Jews, but the sick, the disabled, what Hitler called imbeciles, and so on. And what I’m saying is that the Nazis adopted almost wholesale the blueprints supplied by Margaret Sanger and her American Progressive buddies in the eugenics movement.

1. Margaret Sanger. Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities, 1925
2. Margaret Sanger. “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5
3. Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922, page 12