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Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream.{{Fact|date=September 2007}} 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.
Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream.{{Fact|date=September 2007}} 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.<ref>See Dónal P O'Mathúna: "[http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1484488 Human dignity in the Nazi era: implications for contemporary bioethics]", published in ''[[BMC Med Ethics]]'' 2006; on-line on March 14, 2006 {{en icon}}</ref> In 1870, [[Ernst Haeckel]] had defended the selective infanticide policy of the Greek city of ancient [[Sparta]] and of native Americans against the indignation of the humane civilisation.<ref>See O'Mathúna (2006)</ref> In his [[Zweites Buch|''Second Book'']], which was kept unpublished during [[Nazi Germany]], Hitler, like Haeckel before him, praised Sparta, which he freely interpreted as a model of the “[[Völkisch movement|folkish]] state”.<ref>“Sparta must be regarded as the first folkish 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”, quoted in Dónal P O'Mathúna (2006), see also: {{cite book
The concepts of racist [[Social Darwinism]] were discussed in the German and Austrian press and science during the 1920s.{{Fact|date=September 2007}} How exactly Hitler picked up these ideas is uncertain. However, in 1876, [[Ernst Haeckel]] had brought up the selective infanticide policy of the Greek city of ancient [[Sparta]],<ref>{{cite web
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| author = Mike Hawkins
|first=
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| title = Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: nature as model and nature as threat
|last=
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| year = 1997
|authorlink=
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| publisher = Cambridge University Press
|author=[[Ernst Haeckel|Haeckel, Ernst]]
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| language = English
|coauthors=
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| isbn = 052157434X
|title=The History of Creation, vol. I
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| oclc = 34705047
|url=http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/Radical%20Ecology.htm#EUGENICS%20JUSTIFIED%20BY%20NATURE
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| pages = pp. 276
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|url = http://books.google.com/books?id=SszNCxSKmgkC&pg=PA276&dq=Hitler%27s+Secret+Book+sparta&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=q5g40V7M6bHFNX8pm4ZD65FxH6s#PPA276,M1
|work=
| quote = }}
|publisher=New York: D. Appleton
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</ref>
|id=
|pages=pp. 170
|page=
|date=1876
|accessdate=
|language=English
|quote=Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race. }}</ref> and of native Americans against the indignation of the humane civilisation.{{Fact|date=September 2007}} In his [[Zweites Buch|''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 Sparta's early [[eugenics]] treatment of deformed children:

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{{cquotetxt|At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus 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.|Adolf Hitler|<ref>{{cite book
| author = [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler, Adolf]]
| title = [[Hitler's Secret Book]]
| year = 1961
| publisher = Grove Press
| location = New York
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| language = English
| isbn = 0394620038
| oclc = 9830111
| pages = pp. 8-9, 17-18
| quote = }}</ref><ref>{{cite book
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| author = Hawkins, Mike
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| title = Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: nature as model and nature as threat
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| year = 1997
⚫
| publisher = Cambridge University Press
| language = English
⚫
| isbn = 052157434X
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| oclc = 34705047
⚫
| pages = pp. 276
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| url = http://books.google.com/books?id=SszNCxSKmgkC&pg=PA276&dq=Hitler%27s+Secret+Book+sparta&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=q5g40V7M6bHFNX8pm4ZD65FxH6s#PPA276,M1
| quote = }}</ref>|color=silver|size=360%}}


==Sterilization law==
==Sterilization law==

Revision as of 15:38, 1 October 2007

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: 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.[1]

Hitler and eugenics

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.[citation needed] 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 in the German and Austrian press and science during the 1920s.[citation needed] How exactly Hitler picked up these ideas is uncertain. However, in 1876, Ernst Haeckel had brought up the selective infanticide policy of the Greek city of ancient Sparta,[2] and of native Americans against the indignation of the humane civilisation.[citation needed] 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 Sparta's early eugenics treatment of deformed children:


At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus 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.

— Adolf Hitler, [3][4]

Sterilization law

Main article: Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring

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.[5]

Sterilization to murder

File:EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg
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."
Main article: Action T4

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.

Hadamar Clinic

Main article: Hadamar Clinic

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.

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

Main article: Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics

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
  • 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

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

General reference
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

References

  1. ^ Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Profile in Power, Chapter VI, first section (London, 1991, rev. 2001)
  2. ^ Haeckel, Ernst (1876). "The History of Creation, vol. I". New York: D. Appleton. pp. pp. 170. Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race. {{cite web}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  3. ^ Hitler, Adolf (1961). Hitler's Secret Book. New York: Grove Press. pp. pp. 8-9, 17–18. ISBN 0394620038. OCLC 9830111. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  4. ^ Hawkins, Mike (1997). Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: nature as model and nature as threat. Cambridge University Press. pp. pp. 276. ISBN 052157434X. OCLC 34705047. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  5. ^ Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988): 108.
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