Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring
The Nazis promulgated the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, a sterilization law which was offensive to the church, shortly before the Reichskonkordat was signed. Days later, the dissolution of the Catholic Youth League began. Political Catholics were targets of the 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge: Catholic Action head Erich Klausener, Papen speechwriter and adviser Edgar Jung (also a Catholic Action worker), and Catholic Youth Sports Association national director Adalbert Probst; former Centre Party chancellor Heinrich Brüning narrowly escaped death. William Shirer wrote that the German people were not aroused by Nazi church persecution. Most were not moved to face death or imprisonment for the freedom of worship. Impressed by Hitler's early foreign-policy successes and the restoration of the German economy, few "paused to reflect that the Nazis intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, and substitute old paganism of tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists." Anti-Nazi sentiment grew in Catholic circles as the government increased its repression.