Swiss sterilisation scandal

Swiss women's groups reacted with shock and outrage to revelations by a historian that doctors sterilised mentally handicapped patients against their will under a law passed in 1928. Hans Ulrich Jost, a professor of history at the University of Lausanne, told Swiss television that many Swiss people - nine out of 10 of them women - were affected by the campaign in the French-speaking western canton of Vaud. He said that a copy of the law, which was passed in Vaud in 1928, was requested by Adolf Hitler in 1934 as a basis for Nazi Germany's own racist legislation.

Reuters - Geneva