"In view of the often acrimonious debates surrounding many discussions of abortion, and the occasional references to the Holocaust, it seems appropriate to review the abortion experience in Germany during the Hitler years (1933-45). Increasingly severe restrictions were placed on the availability of contraceptives and on access to legal abortion. During World War II special courts in Vichy France and Nazi Germany were authorized to impose the death penalty for the illegal termination of unwanted pregnancies, and carried out their mandate. While “fifty thousand books and monographs” have been written about the Nazi period (Koonz, 1987, p.3), a search of numerous German and American archives, research libraries, and indexes of volumes especially oriented to the experiences of women produced few references specifically pertaining to abortion trends in the Hitler era."