Eugenics and Racism

1
Eugenics and Racism

• Hist 1101

2
Eugenics Background

• Social Darwinism (Herbert Spencer)
• Survival of the fittest
• Biology as destiny
• Galton (Darwins nephew)
• Statistics
• Founder of Eugenics movement
• Weissmann
• Germ theory
• Lombroso
• Degeneration and criminality
• Mendel
• Genetics
• Race Suicide
• Public Health Movement
• Identifying, Institutionalizing and Sterilizing
  of Feeble-minded (psychiatry)

3
Sources

• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
• Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race
• Heather Pringle, The Master Plan

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Nazi Eugenics

• Nazism applied biology (Rudolf Hess)
• Idea of Aryan race
• Nordic race
• Eugenic ideal and attempted to mold Germany into
  a cohesive national community that excluded
  anyone deemed hereditarily less valuable or
  racially foreign.
• Public health measures to control reproduction
  and marriage aimed at strengthening the national
  body by eliminating biologically threatening
  genes from the population.
• Lebensraum
• Drang Nach Osten

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Antecedents

• Forced expulsion and ghettoes
• American policy towards native peoples (Hitler)
• Concentration Camps
• British use in Boer War, 1899-1901
• Eugenics policy
• American influences (Hitler)

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Race and Education

• Purebred black, purebred white, and hybrid
  Andalusian chickens,
• Lecture by Dr. Ludwig Arnold Schloesser, director
  of education for the SS Race and Settlement
  Office (1934)
• Foundations of the study of heredity.

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Nordic Heads, 1936
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Mentally Ill Patients, 1934
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The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and
German Honor." (1935)
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Interracial Friendship and Racial Pride
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Miscengenation
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Propaganda and Hereditary Disease
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Ideology of Eugenics

• OUR STARTING POINT IS NOT THE INDIVIDUAL, AND WE
  DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO THE VIEW THAT ONE SHOULD FEED
  THE HUNGRY, GIVE DRINK TO THE THIRSTY, OR CLOTHE
  THE NAKED . . . . OUR OBJECTIVES ARE ENTIRELY
  DIFFERENT WE MUST HAVE A HEALTHY PEOPLE IN ORDER
  TO PREVAIL IN THE WORLD.  Joseph Goebbels,
  Minister of Propaganda, 1938

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Role of Physicians and Scientists

• Gleichanschultung
• Pro-Nazi academics, scholars and scientists put
  into university positions
• Fear of losing position
• Increased funding for research involving race

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Results

• Creation of the S.S. (1929)
• Racial Laws
• Voluntary sterilization law drafted by Prussian
  health officials in 1932
• Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased
  Offspring (1933)
• feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive
  disorder, genetic epilepsy, Huntingtons chorea
  (a fatal form of dementia), genetic blindness,
  genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, and
  chronic alcoholism.
• Mass Sterilization
• Euthanasia Programmes
• Scientific Experimentation
• Mass Killings (Einsatzgruppen and the death
  camps)
• Selection at Auschwitz

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Deadly Medicine Creating the Master Race

• http//www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/deadlym
  edicine/narrative/index.php?contentfinal