In 1932, DeJarnette opened a self-supporting, semiprivate mental hospital for middle-income patients,adjacent to Western State which the General Assembly named the DeJarnette State Sanatorium after him. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler rose to power as Chancellor of Germany and instituted the world's most ambitious eugenics program, DeJarnette closely watched its progress and wrote favorably of the Nazi eugenics program. In 1934, he begged the General Assembly to broaden the scope of Virginia's sterilization law; "the Germans," DeJarnette complained, "are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are."