The recent rally by white nationalists and supremacists on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, has left Americans soul searching. But what they might discover in the history of their heartland is chilling.

During the protests white supremacists and alt-right members waved flags emblazoned with Nazi-symbolism — visceral reminders of the hell that Jewish people and others endured under Nazi rule.

The violence culminated in the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was allegedly mowed down by a young neo-Nazi sympathiser in his car.

Tributes surround a photograph of Heather Heyer, on the spot where she was killed. ( Getty Images: Chip Somodevilla/staff )

At face value, last month's events were triggered by the planned removal of a Confederate statue, which for many black Americans symbolises the cruel apartheid of slavery.

But a little-known fact is that a key pillar of Nazi ideology found its foundation in Charlottesville decades before Hitler's rise to power.

The birthplace of eugenics

Charlottesville is the birthplace of America's eugenic laws.

These laws resulted in up to 70,000 people being sterilised against their will throughout the last century, in over 30 states. In men, this meant being given a vasectomy; for women it involved a hysterectomy or having your fallopian "tubes tied" or clamped.

'Fitter families' and 'better baby' contests were run across America. ( Supplied: American Philosophical Society/Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory )

Under the US legislation, people who were deemed feeble-minded, moronic, mentally deficient, psychologically or physically inferior were often incarcerated in institutions and then sterilised.

The medical labels used were many and varied, but the outcome was the always the same — enormous suffering, shame and loss.

Some survivors describe being told they were having their appendix out, only to find out, often years later, the real reason why they were never able to have children.

It's no coincidence that victims were often people who were poverty-stricken, pulled out of school early, disabled, or prisoners. Women accused of promiscuity — unwed mothers or rape survivors — were targeted too.

Essentially anyone considered undesirable by the moral arbiters of the time and those wielding the scalpel were at risk.

Scientists believed that weeding out people from the gene pool would purify the human race to include only those with a robust biological heritage — and that this would benefit the economy.

They developed detailed pedigree charts, tools and measurement techniques to justify their claims.

And countless others climbed on board.

"I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done," wrote former American president Theodore Roosevelt in 1914.

"Criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them."

This very same thinking was what drove Hitler's eugenic policies and atrocities, in his pursuit of an Aryan master-race during World War II. The extermination of millions of people was the Nazi's horrific end point.

A shameful past

In 1906, Carrie Buck was born in Charlottesville and was to become the subject of one of the most notorious of US Supreme Court cases in American history, Buck v. Bell.

Carrie was placed in foster care as a child and her mother incarcerated in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.

Carrie Buck with her mother Emma. ( Supplied: University of Albany, SUNY )

When she was 16, by then effectively an indentured servant to her foster parents, Carrie was raped by their nephew and became pregnant.

Embarrassed, her foster family had her locked away in the same colony as her mother, and separated from her baby daughter Vivien. They falsely claimed Carrie was epileptic and "feeble-minded".

What happened next remains a blight on America's legislative history.

A powerful cohort of doctors, scientists and lawyers were wheeled in to mount a case against Carrie in an effort to demonstrate that she and her family members were a stain on society.

Carrie's daughter Vivien, circa 1924, who died at age eight in foster care. ( Supplied: University of Albany, SUNY )

They wanted to create a eugenically fit and efficient human race, and they needed one convincing case study to prove why.

The case Buck v. Bell ended up in the highest court of the land.

It was rigged — the was evidence manufactured, and Carrie lost. She was sterilised against her will.

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough" was the ruling.

Eugenic sterilisation was considered to be constitutional and laws were subsequently rolled out across the country.

Generations later, survivors are still dealing with the legacy of those events.

It took decades for many laws to be repealed, and even longer for authorities to apologise and start to put in place reparation arrangements for those willing to come forward.

In Virginia that only happened last year.

Too little, too late for too many. Some have died. Others live on in silent shame.

Misguided science

This is a story of misguided science and misappropriated power.

Scientists claim to be objective, neutral and to let their data do the talking — that's the fundamental principle underpinning the scientific method — but the science they do, the questions they ask and conclusions they draw can often reflect the values of the time in which they live.

Eugenics campaigners used family trees to make claims about feeble-mindedness and fitness. ( Supplied: The Harry H. Laughlin Papers/Truman State University )

Perhaps most chilling is the way in which decision-makers latched onto the flawed science of eugenics and used it to justify systematic human rights abuses.

History has a habit of repeating itself, and Carrie's legacy serves as a cautionary tale for how we translate developments in genetic science into social policy today.

Protests in the streets culminated when Heather Heyer and others were struck down by a car. ( Getty Images: Chip Somodevilla/staff )

The eminent scientific journal Nature, in a recent strongly worded editorial, argues against the use of science to justify prejudice.

"… the recent worldwide rise of populist politics is again empowering disturbing opinions about gender and racial differences that seek to misuse science to reduce the status of both groups and individuals in a systematic way," it says.

Neo-Nazi thinking isn't new to the streets of Charlottesville, or to America.

In fact, America led the way. And Hitler and his apparatchiks took notice.

Listen to part one and part two of Science Friction's story on the history of eugenics.