Nazi eugenics

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Nazi eugenics pertains to Nazi Germany's nazism and race social policies that placed the improvement of the race through eugenics at the centre of their concerns and targeted those humans they identified as Life Unworthy of Life, including but not limited to: criminal, degenerate, dissident, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle, insane, religious and weak humans for elimination from the chain of heredity.

Hitler and eugenics

Adolf Hitler had read some racial-hygiene tracts during his period of enforced leisure 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 genetic engineering.

Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream. These had to be removed as quickly as possible. The strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.

Sterilization law

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 "Genetic Health Courts" were created, and under their rulings over 400,000 people were sterilized against their will.Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988): 108.

Sterilization to murder

T-4 Euthanasia Program (Tiergartenstraße 4 or Aktion Tiergartenstrasse 4) was the official name of the Nazi Germany eugenics program which forcefully conducted mass sterilizations and so-called 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.

Applying racial hygiene

Applying the principles of racial hygiene to society meant sweeping away traditional Christian morality and replacing it with a system of ethics that derived good and bad solely from the imagined collective interests of the master race.

International views

Belief in eugenics had flourished internationally before the Nazis began implementing their programs. In the United States, for example, eugenic practice had centered around programs of state-sanctioned compulsory sterilization; even before the Nazi's came to power in Germany twenty-eight states in the United States had passed compulsory sterilization laws resulting in the sterilization of 15,999 people; the total had more than doubled by 1939.[The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics] By the 1960s over 60,000 people had been sterlized under U.S. compulsory sterilization laws.

Years and decades after the large-scale forced sterilization programs had ceased to exist in the US, many countries maintained post WWII sterilization campaigns lasting well into the 1970s.

In 1997 it was disclosed that Sweden in particular had a strong sterilization program, sterilizing around 62,000 individuals over a period of 40 years until 1976. In the United Kingdom, Home Secretary Winston Churchill introduced a bill that included forced sterilization and writer G.K. Chesterton led a successful effort to defeat that clause of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. In Peru, former president Alberto Fujimori pressured 200,000 indigenous people in rural areas, mainly Quechuas and Aymaras, into being sterilized. [Mass sterilisation scandal shocks Peru] The Soviet Union imposed forced sterilization for female workers deported from Romania to Soviet labour camps, which occurred after World War II, when Romania was supposed to supply reconstruction workforce, according to the armistice convention. [A link to the testimony of such a deportee] India and China have at various times implemented sterilization campaigns as a population control policy, although only the latter has made any previous overtures towards any potential eugenic motivations.

Other countries that had notably active sterilization programs include Australia, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Panama, Slovakia and Switzerland.Broberg, G. (2005). Eugenics And the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Demark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Michigan State University Press. ISBN 0870137581

The Roman Catholic Church has been a notable opponent of eugenics and sterilization programs, because of that many Roman Catholics in Nazi Germany were persecuted.

After revelations of the Holocaust and the connection between Nazi master race ideology and eugenics became well known, public support for eugenics became muted in the postwar years and eventually became non-existent, as eugenics became inextricably associated with the Nazi regime.

Footnotes

See also

• Aryan race
• Doctors' Trial
• Genocide
• German Blood Certificate
• Holocaust
• Lebensborn
• Nazi human experimentation
• 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

Further reading

Books

• Aly, G. (1994). Cleansing the Fatherland : Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. The Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN 0801848245
• Baumslag, N. (2005). Murderous Medicine : Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus. Praeger Publishers ISBN 0275983129
• Proctor, R. (2003). Racial Hygiene : Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press ISBN 0674745787
• Spitz, V. (2005). Doctors from Hell : The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans. Sentient Publications ISBN 1591810329
• Weindling, P.J. (2005). Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials : From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 140393911X

Articles

• Bachrach S. (2004). [In the name of public health—Nazi racial hygiene]. NEJM 29 July 2004; 351: 417–420.
• Lerner, B. (1995). [Medicine and the Holocaust: Learning More of the Lessons] ACP 15 May 1995; 122: 10: 793-794.
• Strous, R. D. (2006). [Nazi Euthanasia of the Mentally Ill at Hadamar]. AJP January 2006; 163: 27-27.
• Weigmann, K. (2001). [The role of biologists in Nazi atrocities: lessons for today’s scientists] EMBO 15 October 2001; 2(10): 871–875.

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.

External links

Nazi propaganda for their compulsory "euthanasia" program: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too."

General reference

• [Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments]
• [Life Unworthy of Life]
• [Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine]
• [Nazi Germany's Racial Laws]
• [Nazi Eugenics Programs]
• [Nazi Race Laws]
• [Race and Membership: The Eugenics Movement]
• [Sterilization Law in Germany]
• [Victims of the Nazi Era]

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• [Bibliography]
• [Deadly medicine]
• [Euthanasia program]
• [Mentally and physically handicapped]
• [Nazi Persecution of the Disabled]

 

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