Chapter 11
Racial Hygiene for the Master Race
Hitler and the National Socialists held the view that a person’s worth was not determined by their individual qualities but rather by their membership in a specific racial group. This ideology placed great importance on preserving racial purity, as any form of interbreeding between different races was believed to lead to the decline and eventual degeneration of that group. This would result in the gradual loss of the group’s unique characteristics and traits, as well as its ability to protect itself, ultimately leading to its own demise.
The “Blood Community”
The National Socialist concept of a Blutsgemeinschaft (blood community) was that a Volk was a living organism established according to certain laws. This Volkskörper (figuratively, racial corpus) embodied not only those living at the time but also the previous and subsequent generations, and should be preserved by way of self-affirmation and procreation. This notion implied that a Volk was, above all, a union of people of the same “blood”—of a consistently similar genetic makeup.1
The ideas behind classic Social Darwinism included fixed stereotypes, both positive and negative, of ethnic group appearance, behavior, and culture. These identity groups were supposedly unalterable and found their roots in biological inheritance. To National Socialists, those in Europe belonging to the group of “inferior” or “weaker” races included mainly, though not exclusively, Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Slavs.
“Nordicism”
The definitions of Volk and “race” were not the same: these two were believed to have been identical only in prehistoric times. The National Socialist racial education did not consider the German Volk to be reinrassig (racially pure) but a blend of European races in which a Phalian-Nordic racial portion dominated. “Northern blood” was viewed as possessing characteristics of the highest quality, and the Aryan race embodied the top-quality European races (as did their offshoots living outside the boundaries of Germany).
According to the National Socialists, the racial standard of the German Volk was no longer at its peak, and it was urgent that measures of racial hygiene be urgently implemented. On the one hand, elements of a foreign race or inferior genotype were to be eliminated, and on the other, a healthy genetic makeup was to be promoted and proliferated thanks to the application of racial policies, in particular the “northern blood” measure (Aufnordung, or encouragement of northern elements to dominate the race).2
Hitler combined the National Socialists’ concept of Volk with a Social Darwinist belief that peoples were subjected to a constant existential struggle in which the “strong” (healthy, good) hold their own while the “weak” (sick, inferior) perish. The “perpetual fundamental law,” namely, the selection of the strong and the eradication of the weak, was in Hitler’s opinion cruel but rational and wise because it ensured the preservation and higher development of both Volk and species. In his view, any humanitarian efforts to escape this merciless law of nature and to preserve the weak at the expense of the strong would lead to the demise of that Volk and, finally, of the entire human species.3
“Applied Biology”
Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess claimed that National Socialism was “applied biology.” To this effect, a politically extreme, antisemitic interpretation of eugenics influenced the course of state policy. Public health programs to monitor reproduction and marriage aimed at improving the Volkskörper, or ethnic body, by removing biologically threatening genes from the Volk. Hitler’s dictatorial regime, assisted by its totalitarian police and terror apparatus, stifled possible criticism of National Socialist eugenics and those who believed in individual human rights. Once all educational and cultural institutions, as well as the media, came under NS control, racial eugenics pervaded German society and institutions, especially in schoolchildren’s education.4
In one of Plato’s best-known literary works, The Republic, he wrote about producing a superior society by procreating high-class people among each other and by discouraging coupling between the lower classes. He also suggested a variety of mating rules to help create an optimal society. In the same vein, National Socialists believed that people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies, and even poverty and that these preconditions could be bred out of the gene pool.5
The origin of the pseudoscience of eugenics can be traced back to the late nineteenth century when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, sought to improve humankind through the increased propagation of the British elite. His concept did not gain much support in Great Britain but was more widely embraced in the United States, where eugenics made its first official appearance through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were “feeble-minded” to marry. In 1903, the American Breeder’s Association was created to study eugenics, and in 1911 John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal tycoon, organized the Race Betterment Foundation and established a “pedigree registry.” The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915, and 1928.6
As the concept of eugenics took hold in the United States, prominent citizens, scientists, and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits, claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities, or the poor. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. Eventually, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized about sixty thousand Americans, forbade the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways that are still being researched.7
The National Socialist version of eugenics and racial biology was taught as early as primary school. Series of classroom posters, as well as picture books of stereotypes, provided illustrated aids on its key aspects, showing in simple pictures the urgency of the Jewish threat, the danger presented by the mixing of races, how the pure breed will always prevail, and that mixed breeds must be eliminated. In September 1935, the Blood Protection Law was announced in Nuremberg, by which marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans became criminal offenses.
Within a short time, the regime took biological segregation a step further by privately considering the “complete emigration” of all Jews in Germany as a goal. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in March, Adolf Eichmann coordinated the forced emigration of tens of thousands of Austrian Jews. In the same year, the National Socialist regime’s attacks on German and Austrian Jews, as well as Jewish property, known as the Kristallnacht, “Night of Broken Glass,” convinced many Jews remaining in the Reich that emigration was their only chance of survival.8
Sterilization and Euthanasia Programs
Already in the first year of Hitler’s dictatorship, the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases was enacted. This law applied to those who were diagnosed with any of nine conditions: hereditary feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism. Further targets were the roughly thirty thousand Roma and Sinti “gypsies” as well as some five hundred offspring of African–German unions, following French occupation of the Rhineland. Posters warned the population of the danger of allowing minderwertig (inferior/substandard) Germans to procreate. The enforcement of this law led to an estimated 375,000–400,000 Germans experiencing the pain, terror, and mortification of being forcibly sterilized.9
“Those who do not work shall not eat” became a National Socialist dictum. Posters and booklets “informed” the public about how much money it was costing the taxpayers to support those afflicted with hereditary disabilities. The demeaning designation of minderwertig was applied, above all, to the mentally ill, mentally disabled, “asocial” citizens, and criminals.10 It soon became legal to sterilize those deemed unfit to procreate, and the euthanizing of unfit newborns became common practice. A controversial euthanasia program, code-named T4, also became part of the National Socialists’ exclusionary eugenics and of racial hygiene methods to purify the Volk by eliminating the unfit. To cleanse the Aryan German population, an estimated two to three hundred thousand citizens were eliminated under the guise of “mercy killing.” These victims had generally been designated as being mentally ill, disabled, asocial, or simply “unfit.”11
The Master Race
Hitler and the National Socialists believed the Nordic or Aryan race to be the Herrenrasse (master race) or Herrenvolk (master people). The NS theorist Alfred Rosenberg understood the Nordic race to have descended from Proto-Aryans, who he believed had prehistorically dwelt on the North German Plain and previously originated on the lost continent of Atlantis.12 Hitler viewed the Germanic peoples, or Aryans, as not only superior to all other races but entitled to territorial expansion.13
Within months of seizing power, the National Socialist government required Germans to obtain an Ariernachweis (Aryan certificate) or an Ahnenpass (ancestors’ pass): two similar documents that certified that a person was a member of the alleged Aryan race. From April 1933, the document was required from all employees and officials in the public sector, including in the field of education.14 Later, proof of racially “pure” ancestry was required of lawyers and medical doctors, and finally it was even required in order to attend high school or get married. Usually, the lineage was investigated two generations back, and legislation required seven birth or baptism certificates or a combination of both. A Großer Ariernachweis (greater Aryan certificate) was required for compliance with the requirements of the Reichserbhofgesetz (land heritage law) and membership in the National Socialist Party. This certificate required a family pedigree reaching back to 1800 (and to 1750 for SS officers). No matter what type of certificate was applied for, the applicant had to prove that he or she had no ancestors of “Jewish or colored blood.”15
The Woman’s Role in National Socialism
In a speech on September 8, 1934, Hitler proclaimed, “In my state, the mother is the most important citizen.” In an attempt to reverse the trend of falling birth rates, the National Socialist regime not only encouraged racially “acceptable” couples to have as many children as possible but made it a national duty for the “racially fit.” The 1935 Marital Health Law prohibited marriages between the so-called hereditarily healthy and those regarded as “genetically unfit.”16
Another effort to encourage the increase of “pure-blooded” Germans—and counter the high number of abortions—was the Lebensborn program (literally, Fount of Life). A registered association, Lebensborn was backed by both the SS and the state with the mission of providing assistance to unmarried mothers, encouraging unmarried women to give birth anonymously at special maternity homes, and subsequently in arranging the adoption of these children by “racially pure” and “healthy” parents, above all to SS members and their families.
Untermenschen
National Socialists defined the Slavic people, among others, as being racially inferior, non-Aryan Untermenschen (subhumans), and consequently a potential threat to the Aryan or Germanic master race.17 According to the National Socialist secret “Hunger Plan” and Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population was to be systematically removed from Central Europe by means of expulsion, enslavement, starvation, and extermination,18 with the exception of a small percentage considered to be non-Slavic descendants of Germanic settlers and thus suitable for Germanization.19
Homosexuality
During the time of the German empire, homosexuality was widely persecuted, but attitudes toward homosexual citizens became more accepting during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. This newfound tolerance, however, was abruptly reversed from 1933 onward, as the new regime claimed that homosexuals were unwilling to contribute to the strengthening of the German family and nation due to their inability to reproduce. The Gestapo and SS used the homosexuality of SA leader Ernst Röhm, among others, to justify their murders, which were also claimed to be in response to a “Röhm putsch.” A widespread propaganda campaign was subsequently launched against homosexual men, resulting in the criminalization and imprisonment of nearly sixty thousand men under the guise of “preventive custody.”20
The NS ideology of eugenics was central to its racist and genocidal policies and was used to justify unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence. The regime’s implementation of eugenics ultimately led to the mass murder of millions of people—both Jews and non-Jews—and has made the terms “eugenics” and “racial hygiene” deeply associated with the horrors of Hitler’s Germany.
Notes
1. Dahm, “Die ‘Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft,’” 247.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 1933–1939,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-biological-state-nazi-racial-hygiene-1933-1939.
5. “Eugenics,” History.com, https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/eugenics.
6. Ibid.
7. Edwin Black, “The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics,” History News Network, September 2003, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796.
8. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Biological State.”
9. Ibid.
10. Dieter Pohl et al., “Eugenik, ‘Rassenhygiene,’ Euthanasie,” in Dahm, Die Tödliche Utopie, 402.
11. H. Faulstich, “Die Zahl der Euthanasieopfer,” in “Euthanasie” und die aktuelle Sterbehilfe-Debatte: Die Historischen Hintergründe Medizinischer Ethik, ed. A. Frewer and C. Eickhoff (Frankfurt am Main, Campus, 2000), 218–29.
12. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the 20th Century (1930; Brooklyn, NY: Revisionist Press, 1982), 24–26.
13. Hitler, Mein Kampf.
14. Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 61.
15. Isabel Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003).
16. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Biological State.”
17. Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 241.
18. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 162–63.
19. Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, Hitler’s Plans for Eastern Europe: Poland under Nazi Occupation (Warsaw: Polonia, 1961), 7–33, 164–78.
20. Permanent exhibit, Topography of Terror Documentation Centre, Berlin, December 7, 2022.