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The state has the "duty to restrict the freedom of the individual to the extent that the well-known interest of the community as a whole requires," say the supporters of mandatory vaccination.
That is by no means true, because compulsory treatment is “a violation of the basic rights” of the individual, contradict their opponents, “especially the right to self-determination over one's own body”.
The irreconcilable dispute met with a lot of public response: "In parliamentary experience, I have hardly seen a single time that the larger public took such an interest in the negotiations in the German parliament as it did on this occasion," wonders a Christian-Democrat MP.
What sounds like the debate about mandatory vaccinations against Corona in 2021 actually dates back to the spring of 1874. At that time, the German Reichstag discussed for five sessions a “bill on mandatory vaccination” introduced by the Bismarck government.
The Chancellor wanted to make the smallpox vaccination, which had been in effect in Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg since the beginning of the 19th century, mandatory throughout the Reich.
Between autumn 1870 and 1872 alone, around 150,000 people in the now unified Small German Empire succumbed to the insidious infection.
German soldiers were vaccinated against cholera during the First World War
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
But it was not just about expanding a tried and tested medical precautionary measure.
"For the first time, the 'interventionist state' and its task of 'public services' were conceived of compulsory vaccination," writes the medical historian Malte Thießen in his habilitation thesis "Immunized Society", published in 2017, on "Vaccination in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries" .
It provides important background for the current discussion.
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The parliament passed the draft called “Reich vaccination law” on March 9, 1874 by raising it with a clear majority - a formal vote and counting did not have to take place.
From then on, parents were obliged to have their children immunized against smallpox between the ages of one and twelve.
Anyone who evaded this duty should be “punished with a fine of up to fifty marks or with imprisonment for up to three days”, according to Section 14 of this law.
Even if the Reichstag was elected democratically (according to the standards of the time), the empire itself was an authoritarian state.
Like many other laws, the compulsory vaccination was therefore a new item on the agenda after the revolution in November 1918.
"13 months have passed since the establishment of a German republic that promised the German people freedom of conscience in every respect", complained a "Reich Association for Combating Vaccination" on November 23, 1919 in a petition to the Weimar National Assembly, without Bismarck's law of 1874 was repealed.
The alleged "300,000 members" of the association demanded the end of the compulsory vaccination and threatened to vote against the "current government" in the upcoming elections to the Reichstag.
But it was not until 1922/23, as Thießen found in his archive studies, that anti-vaccination opponents, authorities and scientists met for talks.
Internally, however, representatives of the Reich Health Office admitted that they were only willing to do so “for tactical reasons”;
it is all about showing openness to “concerns in the population”.
Employees of the Behring works with blood samples to obtain antibodies
Source: picture alliance / VisualEyze / Unit
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The experts remained tough on the matter.
A conscience clause as an exception to the compulsory vaccination against smallpox, for example, described the Berlin virus protection Heinrich Gins as a "crime against public health", and the head of the Paul Ehrlich Institute responsible for vaccination safety Wilhlem Kolle identified 61 fatal complications from the smallpox vaccination since 1874 received tens of millions of immunizations against it.
"In the interest of the general public, an inconvenience, even a certain danger, may be imposed on the individual," said the Göttingen hygienist Hans Reichenbach.
The supporter of compulsory vaccination added: "In any case, we want to put the individual behind the general public."
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That was still the case when problems with the vaccination against smallpox arose in Great Britain, the Netherlands and also in Germany in the mid-1920s, which resulted in deaths from a previously undiagnosed nerve disease.
The frequency of cases was six to seven deaths per million first vaccinations, i.e. a statistically irrelevant 0.0007 percent.
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Nevertheless, for the first time there was a majority in the Reichstag that supported an application to review the “scientific basis” of the Vaccination Act.
The proposal was made by the opposition SPD at the time.
The advocates of compulsory vaccination did away with this request by pointing out that Germany is in the "central position" of Europe, which is a threat.
The SPD, part of a grand coalition since the summer of 1928, did not pursue the issue any further.
A year and a half later, the Lübeck vaccination scandal with contaminated tuberculosis vaccines caused the dispute to flare up.
Two doctors had experimented with a French vaccine;
72 out of 251 children vaccinated on a trial basis died (according to other sources it was 76 or 77 out of 256 vaccinated newborns), most of the others became seriously ill.
A disaster for vaccination advocates.
They were now violently attacked in the Reichstag;
The SPD health politician Julius Moses, for example, criticized the medical profession, which has lost all sense of the concerns of the population: “Like gods enthroned above the clouds on the scientific Olympus, all criticism as blasphemy, as blasphemy, sacrifices on the altar of scientific medicine always only demand something self-evident from the ignorant people - that is no longer possible. ”At least a mandatory vaccination against diphtheria (the vaccine was even developed in Germany) was no longer enforceable.
In the spring of 1933, anti-vaccination campaigners had hoped to be able to overturn the compulsory smallpox vaccination in view of the fact that NS health policy actors were partly committed to naturopathy.
Instead, at the end of the year, the Reich Ministry of the Interior dissolved all “anti-vaccination and mandatory anti-vaccination associations” and banned “any public activity against vaccination”.
At the same time, however, no general compulsory vaccination was decreed for the newly available diphtheria vaccination, but rather, according to Thießen research, it was not even seriously considered.
Ironically, a dictatorship that employed the most radical means with murder programs such as the “euthanise” and forced sterilization of “hereditary diseases” to protect the “national body”, renounced new vaccination obligations.
At least when it came to the normal “national comrades”.
For soldiers of the Wehrmacht, serial vaccinations, whether for the first time or as a booster, were common.
The immunization against diphtheria, scarlet fever and typhus was increased;
In contrast, the voluntary tuberculosis vaccination in the last year of the war met with little response.
Things were different after 1945: Many people in bombed-out Germany now felt the need to be vaccinated - against dysentery, typhus and typhus, and again against smallpox, because in the second half of the war the mandatory vaccination was no longer implemented in many cases.
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By October 1949 at the latest, however, “the population was extremely fatigued by vaccinations”.
That was due to the same questions as exactly three quarters of a century earlier, in the debates about the compulsory smallpox vaccination: Did the “right to self-determination about one's own body” take precedence over the “interests of the community”?
Or not right now?
Malte Thießen: “Immunized Society. Vaccination in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries "(Vandenhoek & Rupprecht, Göttingen. 400 pp., 70 euros)
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