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Nazi eugenics

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Nazi eugenics pertains to Nazi Germany's race based social policies that placed the improvement of the race through eugenics at the center of their concerns and targeted those humans they identified as "life unworthy of life" (German Lebensunwertes Leben), including but not limited to the: criminal, degenerate, dissident, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle, insane, religious and weak humans for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 persons were sterilized against their will, while 70,000 were killed in the Action T4.

Hitler's views on eugenics

Adolf Hitler had read some racial-hygiene tracts during his period of imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. The future leader considered that Germany could only become strong again if the state applied to German society the basic principles of racial hygiene and eugenics. Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream. In his opinion, these had to be removed as quickly as possible. He also believed that the strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, and the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.

The concepts of racist social Darwinism were discussed by European scientists, and also in the Vienna press during the 1920s, but how exactly Hitler picked up these ideas is uncertain. In 1876, Ernst Haeckel had discussed the selective infanticide policy of the Greek city of ancient Sparta. In his Second Book, which was kept unpublished during Nazi Germany, Hitler, like Haeckel before him, praised Sparta because he considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State," and endorsed what he perceived to be an early eugenics treatment of deformed children:

Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.

Nazi eugenics program

The Nazi's based their eugenics program on the United States' programs of forced sterilization.

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, proclaimed on July 14, 1933 required physicians to register every case of hereditary illness known to them, except in women over forty-five years of age. Physicians could be fined for failing to comply. In 1934 the first year of the Law's operation, nearly 4,000 people appealed against the decisions of sterilization authorities. 3,559 of the appeals failed. By the end of the Nazi regime, over 200 Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichten) were created, and under their rulings over 400,000 people were sterilized against their will.

The Nazi eugenics policy led to Germans suffering from cerebral palsy and other physical impairments being killed. Action T4 (German Aktion T4) was the official name of the Nazi Germany eugenics program which forcefully conducted euthanasia on Germans who were institutionalized or suffering from birth defects. In total, an estimated 200,000 people were killed as a result of the program.

Nazi eugenics institutions

The Hadamar Clinic was a mental hospital in the German town of Hadamar, which was used by the Nazis as the site of their T-4 Euthanasia Program. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927. In its early years, and during the Nazi era, it was strongly associated with theories of eugenics and racial hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, and by its director Otmar von Verschuer. Under Fischer, the sterilisation of so-called Rhineland Bastards was undertaken.

Further reading

Books

  • Aly, G. (1994). Cleansing the Fatherland : Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-4824-5
  • Baumslag, N. (2005). Murderous Medicine : Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 0-275-98312-9
  • Burleigh, M. (1991). The Racial State : Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-39802-9
  • Burleigh , M. (1994). Death and Deliverance : 'Euthanasia' in Germany, c.1900 to 1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41613-2
  • Ehrenreich, Eric. The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-253-34945-3
  • Friedlander, H. (1995). The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2208-6
  • Kuntz, D. (2006). Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2916-1
  • Lifton, R. (1986). THE NAZI DOCTORS : Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. ISBN 0-465-04905-2
  • Proctor, R. (2003). Racial Hygiene : Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-74578-7
  • Spitz, V. (2005). Doctors from Hell : The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans. Sentient Publications. ISBN 1-59181-032-9
  • Weikart, R. (2006). From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, And Racism in Germany. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-7201-X
  • Weindling, P.J. (2005). Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials : From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-3911-X
  • Weindling, P.J. et al. (1989). Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42397-X
  • Kuhl, S. (2002). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism Oxford University Press ISBN 0195149785

Academic articles

Videos

  • Burleigh, M. (1991). Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich. London: Domino Films.
  • Michalczyk, J.J. (1997). Nazi Medicine: In The Shadow Of The Reich. New York: First-Run Features.

See also
  • Nazi human experimentation
  • Nazism and race
  • Nordic theory
  • Nur für Deutsche
  • Nuremberg Trials
  • Mischling
  • Racial policy of Nazi Germany
    		•
  • Racial purity
  • Reich Citizenship Law
  • Scientific racism
  • Second-class citizen
  • Social Darwinism
  • State racism

    • References

    External links

    General reference



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