The lived context of euthanasia under the Nazis is established through four brief narratives. The first two tell of the author's experience with a German farm family which hid a deaf mute during the war and with a silent building which turned out to have housed Joseph Mengele and his staff. The third narrative concerns Mengele's fascination with a Gypsy boy at Auschwitz
and the fourth a film used to accustom German audiences to mercy-killing. A survey of key developments in the history of eugenics theory in Germany and the United States follows, and a thesis is developed that the same racial-purification impulses that drove German science during the 1930s and 1940s were present in American documents and legal proceedings.