Everything about Nazi Eugenics totally explained
Nazi eugenics were
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 ideas of competition, termed
social Darwinism in 1944, 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Second Book, which was kept unpublished during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 also praised Sparta, adding that this was 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
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 sterilization of so-called
Rhineland Bastards was undertaken.
Further Information
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