Whereas modern genetic counselling was already established in the UK and the USA by the 1940s, it was not until the beginning of the 1970s that it became institutionalized in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). During the first decades after World War II, it was provided sporadically to single persons, families, couples and parents of unborn children, who asked for advice from human geneticists established at the universities. In the 1970s regular genetic counselling services were introduced, driven, in part, by the increased interest of public health authorities. By then genetic counselling had become an acknowledged medical service, receiving government support and public acceptance. This essay traces the emergence of a climate favourable to genetic counselling. In particular, it analyses how eugenic motives shaped the discourse of human geneticists involved in the institutionalization of genetic counselling.

Over the past decades, an increasing amount of historical research has identified the longevity of eugenic discourses and practices – from the turn of the last century, when eugenics emerged as a biopolitical concept defined by the aim of improving the ‘hereditary health’ of the ‘national body’ (Volkskörper), to well beyond 1945. Although eugenicists propagated voluntary ‘genetic marriage counselling’ long before the political upheaval of 1933, eugenics is usually regarded as a political programme demanding authoritarian implementation, a nexus epitomized by Nazi racial hygiene.