The Nazi eugenics program in Germany did draw significantly from ideas and policies that had developed earlier in the United States and elsewhere, although the Nazis pushed those ideas much further and with far more extreme brutality.

Some key points:

• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenics—the idea that society should encourage reproduction by the "fit" and discourage or prevent it among the "unfit"—was influential in many countries, including the United States, Britain, and Germany.

• The United States was a world leader in the eugenics movement before the Nazis came to power. More than 30 U.S. states enacted forced sterilization laws aimed at people judged mentally ill, intellectually disabled, epileptic, or otherwise "unfit." Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized under these laws. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld such laws in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

• Nazi leaders and racial theorists studied American eugenics closely. They admired U.S. sterilization laws and some aspects of American racial segregation. Historians have found that Nazi officials cited American examples when drafting the 1933 Nazi sterilization law.

• After taking power in 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, leading to the forced sterilization of roughly 400,000 people.

• The Nazi program then escalated far beyond anything practiced in the United States. It progressed from sterilization to the murder of disabled people in the Aktion T4 program and ultimately to the genocide of European Jews and others in the The Holocaust.

So the short answer is: yes, Nazi eugenic policies were influenced in part by American eugenics professionals, institutions, and laws, but the Nazis radicalized these ideas into a program of mass murder and genocide that went far beyond American practice.