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The social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany were composed of various ideas about genetics. The racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic race" or "Aryan race" traits at its center. These policies were used to justify the involuntary sterilization and Mass murder of those deemed "undesirable".
Eugenics research in Germany before and during the Nazi period was similar to that in the United States, by which it had been heavily inspired. However, its prominence rose sharply under Adolf Hitler's leadership when wealthy Nazi supporters started heavily investing in it. The programs were subsequently shaped to complement Nazi racial policies.
Those targeted for murder under Nazi eugenics policies were largely people living in private and state-operated institutions, identified as "life unworthy of life" (Lebensunwertes Leben). They included prisoners, degenerates, Gleichschaltung, and people with congenital cognitive and physical disabilities (Erbkranken)people who were considered to be feeble-minded. In fact being diagnosed with "feeblemindedness" () was the main label approved in forced sterilization, which included people who were diagnosed by a doctor as, or otherwise seemed to be:
All of these were targeted for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while up to 300,000 were murdered under the Aktion T4 euthanasia program.Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Profile in Power, Chapter VI, first section (London, 1991, rev. 2001) Thousands more also died from complications of the forced surgeries, the majority being women from forced . In June 1935, Hitler and his cabinet made a list of seven new , in which number 5 was to speed up the investigations of sterilization.
In German, the concept of "eugenics" was mostly known under the term of Rassenhygiene or "racial hygiene". The loanword Eugenik was in occasional use, as was its closer loan-translation of Erbpflege. An alternative term was Volksaufartung (approximately "racial improvement").
Edwin Black wrote that after the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it was spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.Murphy & Lappé, 1994: p. 18
In 1927, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (KWIA), an organization which concentrated on physical and social anthropology as well as human genetics, was founded in Berlin with significant financial support from the American philanthropic group the Rockefeller Foundation.Gretchen E. Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 48–54. German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics Eugen Fischer was the director of this organization, a man whose work helped provide the scientific basis for the Nazis' eugenics policies.Robert S. Wistrich, Who's Who In Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 60.In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed Fischer rector of Frederick William University of Berlin, now Humboldt University. See: "Rektoratsreden im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert – Online-Bibliographie", der ehemalige Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin. The Rockefeller Foundation even funded some of the research conducted by Josef Mengele before he went to Auschwitz.
Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader Charles Goethe bragged to a colleague:
Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the Nuremberg Laws. In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany (scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty), to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the "science of racial cleansing". Due to financial limitations, Laughlin was unable to attend the ceremony and had to pick it up from the Rockefeller Institute. Afterwards, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics."
Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by dysgenics, the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream.
The racialism and idea of competition, termed Social Darwinism in 1944, were discussed by European scientists and also in the Vienna press during the 1920s. Where Hitler picked up the ideas is uncertain. The theory of evolution had been generally accepted in Germany at the time, but this sort of extremism was rare.
In his Zweites Buch, which was unpublished during the Nazi era, Hitler praised Sparta (using ideas perhaps borrowed from Ernst Haeckel),In 1876 Haeckel had discussed the selective infanticide policy of the Greek city of ancient Sparta. adding that he considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State". He endorsed what he perceived to be an early eugenics treatment of deformed children:
The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, enacted on July 14, 1933, allowed the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who according to the opinion of a "Genetic Health Court" "suffered" from a list of alleged genetic disorders and required physicians to register every case of hereditary illness known to them, except in women over 45 years of age. facinghistorycampus.org – The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased 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. A total of 3,559 of the appeals failed. By the end of the Nazi regime, over 200 Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte) were created, and under their rulings over 400,000 persons were sterilized against their will.Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988): 108.
Information to determine who was considered 'genetically sick' was gathered from routine information supplied by people to doctor's offices and welfare departments. Standardized questionnaires had been designed by Nazi officials with the help of Dehomag (a subsidiary of IBM in the 1930s), so that the information could be encoded easily onto Hollerith punch cards for fast sorting and counting.See IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, 2001, Crown / Random House, pg 93-96 and elsewhere
In Hamburg, doctors gave information into a Central Health Passport Archive (), under something called the 'Health-Related Total Observation of Life'. This file was to contain reports from doctors, but also courts, insurance companies, sports clubs, the Hitler Youth, the military, the labor service, colleges, etc. Any institution that gave information would get information back in return. In 1940, the Reich Interior Ministry tried to impose a Hamburg-style system on the whole Reich.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Nazi eugenics policies regarding marriage
After the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, it became compulsory for both marriage partners to be tested for hereditary diseases in order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the Aryan race. Everyone was encouraged to carefully evaluate his or her prospective marriage partner eugenically during courtship. Members of the Schutzstaffel were cautioned to carefully interview prospective marriage partners to make sure they had no family history of hereditary disease or insanity, but to do this carefully so as not to hurt the feelings of the prospective fiancée and, if it became necessary to reject her for eugenic reasons, to do it tactfully and not cause her any offense.Peter Padfield Himmler New York:1990--Henry Holt
Nazi abortion policies
The Nazi's policies on abortions were conceived of alongside the general Nazi eugenics program. Upon coming to power, the Nazis restricted advertisements on the sale of Birth control. In May 1933, the Nazis reintroduced earlier laws outlawing the advertisement of abortion procedures and to the public. In September of the same year, the Berlin Council of Physicians warned its members that "proceedings will be taken against every evil-doer who dares to injure our sacred healthy race." Abortion procedures were placed under strict political control. Abortions for eugenic reasons were also prohibited during this period, but in some hereditary health courts such abortions were exempt from punishment. (This consideration extended to the exemption of punishment for a Jewish couple who attempted to procure an abortion in 1938, on the basis that the law did not protect Jewish .)
Euthanasia
Euthanasia in Nazi Germany consisted of various campaigns of murder against the physically and mentally ill, including: (2026). 9780300262537, Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300262537
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