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Public Health under the Third Reich

Also in Family Life During the Holocaust ; Nazi Propaganda and National Unity ; and Targets of Eugenics

"Healthy Woman - Healthy Nation"

tags: children & youth family gender health & hygiene propaganda women's experiences

type: Newsreel

Nazi ideology placed great importance on promoting the health and physical strength of the so-called "national community" ( " Volksgemeinschaft ") . The regime sponsored many sporting events and athletic activities for “Aryan” citizens through Nazi youth groups and the “Strength through Joy” program (" Kraft durch Freude "). 1 Nazi public health officials urged every German to exercise regularly, but the regime encouraged men and women to do very different types of exercises.

The featured propaganda film shows young women performing group exercises and helping children with their gymnastics. Created in 1937, “Healthy Woman - Healthy Nation” demonstrates the Nazi ideal of young “Aryan” women making themselves fit and strong so they can become healthy mothers. Similar propaganda films of young German men exercising in the Hitler Youth show them hiking mountains and doing military exercises. Particularly in the years before World War II , the Nazi regime encouraged young German women to practice graceful, coordinated exercises intended to develop feminine grace and a spirit of camaraderie and solidarity. 2

Although there was nothing especially unusual at the time about separate gender roles being reflected in men’s and women’s athletic activities, the different types of exercises promoted by the regime demonstrate how Nazi ideology imagined the primary roles of men and women. Young men received physical conditioning and military training for their future roles as soldiers, and young women did exercises to prepare them for lives as wives and mothers of large families for the Reich . 3 Many German women sought professional careers in spite of the regime’s propaganda, and Nazi policies had complex and uneven effects on their career opportunities. 4  

The regime promoted an idealized vision of large German families 5 with mothers as primary caregivers for the children, but Nazi propaganda also encouraged men to play an active role in their children’s upbringing. Displaying images of German men in uniform holding their children, articles such as “Is This Unmanly?” suggested that "there is probably nothing more manly" than being a father as well as a soldier. Although the regime pushed very specific gender roles, labor shortages and the changing dynamics of World War II created many exceptions to idealized Nazi gender roles. Military service kept many fathers from spending time with their families, and German mothers were often forced to find work outside of the home to support their children. 6

"Strength through Joy" was designed to create popular support for the Nazi regime by providing German workers with tourism and leisure activities .  For more on "Strength through Joy," see the related  Experiencing History  item,  Photograph of "Strength through Joy" Event at Strandbad Wannsee . See also the related collection in  Experiencing History,  Nazi Propaganda and National Unity.

For more about Nazi ideals of women and femininity, see Dagmar Herzog, ed., Sexuality and German Fascism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); and Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (New York: Longman, 2001). See also the Experiencing History collection,  Gendered Experiences of Jewish Persecution .

For more on Nazi ideology, physical conditioning, and the regime's idealized gender roles, see Lisa Pine, "Education and Socialisation: Imbuing German Society with Nazi Family Ideals," in Nazi Family Life, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1997): 47–87; and Gerhard Rempel, "Contestants, Boxers, Combatants," in Hitler's Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS, 1933–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989): 173–204.

The regime introduced policies encouraging women to adopt roles that Nazi ideology deemed appropriate, but labor shortages caused by World War II also provided some German women with new opportunities to pursue their careers. To learn more about Nazi gender policies and women’s professional opportunities in the Third Reich, see Michelle Mouton, "From Adventure and Advancement to Derailment and Demotion: Effects of Nazi Gender Policy on Women’s Careers and Lives," Journal of Social History 43, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 945–971.

For more primary sources related to Nazi ideas about reproduction, see the related  Experiencing History  collection, Targets of Eugenics .

For more on gender and family life under Nazi rule, see the  Experiencing History collection,  Family Life During the Holocaust.

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 [Narrative introduction to the film; not featured in selected clip]

"For women, the mothers of the future generations, the greatest asset is a healthy mind in a healthy body. Therefore a woman’s daily duties include the training of the body. Women’s sports must differ from men’s sports. Breaking records is a matter for men. Sports should give a woman more than just strength, joy, and gracefulness. The sports organization of the new Germany makes it possible for every woman to pursue the types of sports that are best and healthiest for her."

All 16 Items in the Public Health under the Third Reich Collection

Police Order on Tuberculosis X-Rays

tags: bureaucracy health & hygiene law enforcement science & medicine

type: Poster

Photograph of Prisoners Forced to Exercise

tags: group violence health & hygiene humiliation Red Army

type: Photograph

Propaganda Poster: “Jews Are Lice: They Cause Typhus”

tags: antisemitism fear & intimidation ghettos health & hygiene propaganda

Photo of Quarantined Building in the Warsaw Ghetto

tags: food & hunger health & hygiene propaganda science & medicine

Hitler Youth Training Film

tags: children & youth German military health & hygiene leisure & recreation

type: Raw Footage

"The English Disease"

tags: children & youth eugenics family food & hunger health & hygiene science & medicine

Oral History with Avraham Tory

tags: fear & intimidation ghettos health & hygiene refugees & immigration

type: Interview

"But Who Are You?"

tags: eugenics family health & hygiene propaganda science & medicine

type: Pamphlet

Brochure for the Lebensborn Program

tags: children & youth eugenics family science & medicine sex women's experiences

"Born Out of Necessity"

tags: children & youth health & hygiene leisure & recreation science & medicine

type: Documentary

Photograph of "Strength through Joy” Event at Strandbad Wannsee

tags: children & youth community health & hygiene leisure & recreation

"Sexually Transmitted Disease Is an Obstacle to Marriage"

tags: family health & hygiene propaganda science & medicine sex

"Nazis Hit Alcohol, Tobacco"

tags: children & youth health & hygiene propaganda

type: Newspaper Article

"One in Eight"

tags: health & hygiene propaganda science & medicine

Photograph of a "Strength through Joy" Car

tags: belongings community leisure & recreation propaganda

Archival Information for This Item

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 17, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party, grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany through totalitarian means from 1933 to 1945 under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Founded in 1919 as the German Workers’ Party, the group promoted German pride and anti-Semitism, and expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 peace settlement that ended World War I. Hitler joined the party the year it was founded and became its leader in 1921. In 1933, he became chancellor of Germany and his Nazi government soon assumed dictatorial powers. After Germany’s defeat in World War II, the Nazi Party was outlawed and many of its officials were convicted of war crimes related to the Holocaust.

Nazi Party Origins

In 1919, army veteran Adolf Hitler , frustrated by Germany’s defeat in World War I —which had left the nation economically depressed and politically unstable—joined a fledgling political organization called the German Workers’ Party.

Founded earlier that same year by a small group of men including locksmith Anton Drexler and journalist Karl Harrer, the party promoted German nationalism and anti-Semitism, and felt that the Treaty of Versailles , the peace settlement that ended the war, was extremely unjust to Germany by burdening it with reparations it could never pay.

Hitler soon emerged as a charismatic public speaker and began attracting new members with speeches blaming Jews and Marxists for Germany’s problems and espousing extreme nationalism and the concept of an Aryan “master race.” In July 1921, he assumed leadership of the organization , which by then had been renamed the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (abbreviated to Nazi) Party.

Did you know? Sales of Hitler's political autobiography “Mein Kampf,” sometimes referred to as the bible of the Nazi Party, made him a millionaire. From 1933 to 1945, free copies were given to every newlywed German couple. But after World War II, the publication of “Mein Kampf” in Germany became illegal.

Through the 1920s, Hitler gave speech after speech in which he stated that unemployment, rampant inflation, hunger and economic stagnation in postwar Germany would continue until there was a total revolution in German life. Most problems could be solved, he explained, if communists and Jews were driven from the nation. His fiery speeches swelled the ranks of the Nazi Party, especially among young, economically disadvantaged Germans.

Many dissatisfied former army officers in Munich also joined the Nazis, including Ernst Röhm , the man responsible for recruiting the Sturmabteilung (SA) “strong arm” squads that Hitler used to protect party meetings and attack opponents.

Beer Hall Putsch

In 1923, Hitler and his followers staged the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a failed takeover of the government in Bavaria, a state in southern Germany. Hitler had hoped that the “putsch,” or coup d’etat, would spark a larger revolution against the national government.

In the aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison but spent less than a year behind bars (during which time he dictated the first volume of Mein Kampf , or My Struggle, his political autobiography).

The publicity surrounding the Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler’s subsequent trial turned him into a national figure. After his release from prison, he set about rebuilding the Nazi Party and attempting to gain power through the election process.

Nazi Rise to Power

In 1929, Germany’s Weimar Republic entered a period of severe economic depression and widespread unemployment. The Nazis capitalized on the situation by criticizing the ruling government and began to win elections. In the July 1932 elections, they captured 230 out of 608 seats in the “ Reichstag ,” or German parliament.

In January 1933, Hitler was appointed German chancellor and his Nazi government soon came to control every aspect of German life. Under Nazi rule, all other political parties were banned.

In 1933, after coming to power, the Nazis established the Dachau concentration camp in Germany to detain political prisoners. Dachau evolved into a death camp where countless thousands of Jews died from malnutrition, disease and overwork—or were executed.

In addition to Jews, the camp’s prisoners included members of other groups Hitler considered unfit for the new Germany, including artists, intellectuals, Roma , the physically and mentally handicapped and homosexuals.

Nazi Foreign Policy

Once Hitler gained control of the government, he directed Nazi Germany’s foreign policy toward undoing the Treaty of Versailles and restoring Germany’s standing in the world. He railed against the treaty’s redrawn map of Europe and argued it denied Germany—Europe’s most populous state—“living space” for its growing population.

Although the Treaty of Versailles was explicitly based on the principle of the self-determination of peoples, he pointed out that it had separated Germans from Germans by creating such new postwar states as Austria and Czechoslovakia, where many Germans lived.

Germany Invades Poland

From the mid- to late 1930s, Hitler undermined the postwar international order step by step. He withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in 1933, rebuilt German armed forces beyond what was permitted by the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the German Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938 and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939 .

When Nazi Germany moved toward Poland, Great Britain and France countered further aggression by guaranteeing Polish security. Nevertheless, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Six years of Nazi Party foreign policy had ignited World War II .

Nazis Fight to Dominate Europe

After conquering Poland, Hitler focused on defeating Britain and France. As the war expanded, the Nazi Party formed alliances with Japan and Italy in the Tripartite Pact of 1940, and honored its 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union until 1941, when Germany launched a massive blitzkrieg invasion of the Soviet Union.

In the brutal fighting that followed, Nazi troops tried to realize the long-held goal of crushing the world’s major communist power. After the United States entered the war in 1941, Germany found itself fighting in North Africa, Italy, France, the Balkans and a counterattacking Soviet Union.

At the beginning of the war in 1939, Hitler and his Nazi Party were fighting to dominate Europe; five years later they were fighting to survive.

The Holocaust

When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, they instituted a series of measures aimed at persecuting Germany’s Jewish citizens. By late 1938, Jews were banned from most public places in Germany.

During the war, the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaigns increased in scale and ferocity. In the invasion and occupation of Poland, German troops shot thousands of Polish Jews, confined many to ghettoes where they starved to death and began sending others to death camps in various parts of Poland, where they were either killed immediately or forced into slave labor.

In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Nazi death squads machine-gunned tens of thousands of Jews in the western regions of Soviet Russia.

In early 1942, at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, the Nazi Party decided on the last phase of what it called the “ Final Solution ” of the “Jewish problem” and spelled out plans for the systematic murder of all European Jews in the Holocaust .

In 1942 and 1943, Jews in the western occupied countries including France and Belgium were deported by the thousands to the death camps mushrooming across Europe. In Poland, huge death camps such as Auschwitz began operating with ruthless efficiency.

The murder of Jews, communists, homosexuals, political prisoners and other people in German-occupied lands stopped only in last months of the war, as the German armies were retreating toward Berlin. By the time Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, some 6 million Jews had been killed.

Denazification

After the war ended in 1945, the Allies occupied Germany, outlawed the Nazi Party and worked to purge its influence from every aspect of German life. The party’s swastika flag quickly became a symbol of evil in modern postwar culture.

Although Hitler killed himself before he could be brought to justice, a number of Nazi officials were convicted of war crimes in the Nuremberg trials , which took place in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949.

The Nazi Party. Holocaust Encyclopedia . The Rise of the Nazi Party. College of Education, University of South Florida . Rise of the Nazi Party. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust .

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Nazi Germany 1933-1939: Early Stages of Persecution

How Hitler laid the groundwork for genocide.

To read contemporary news accounts of the Holocaust and other Jewish events from 1917 on, search the JTA Archive. 

Dismantling Germany’s Democracy

Once in power, Hitler moved quickly to end German democracy. He convinced his cabinet to invoke emergency clauses of the constitution that permitted the suspension of individual freedoms of press, speech, and assembly. Special security forces — the Gestapo, the Storm Troopers (SA), and the SS — murdered or arrested leaders of opposition political parties (Communists, socialists, and liberals). The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933 — forced through the Reichstag already purged of many political opponents –gave dictatorial powers to Hitler.

READ: Jewish Reactions to the Enabling Act (March 24, 1933)

Also in 1933, the Nazis began to put into practice their racial ideology. The Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior” and that there was a struggle for survival between them and inferior races. They saw Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and the handicapped as a serious biological threat to the purity of the “German (Aryan) Race,” what they called the master race.

Jews, who numbered about 525,000 in Germany (less than one percent of the total population in 1933) were the principal target of Nazi hatred. The Nazis identified Jews as a race and defined this race as “inferior.” They also spewed hate-mongering propaganda that unfairly blamed Jews for Germany’s economic depression and the country’s defeat in World War I (1914-1918).

Nuremberg Laws, Property Seizures and Kristallnacht

In 1933, new German laws forced Jews out of their civil service jobs, university and law court positions, and other areas of public life. In April 1933, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg made Jews second-class citizens. These Nuremberg Laws defined Jews, not by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves, but by the religious affiliation of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further and made daily life very difficult for them. Jews could not attend public schools; go to theaters, cinema, or vacation resorts; or reside or even walk in certain sections of German cities.

Also between 1937 and 1939, Jews increasingly were forced from Germany’s economic life. The Nazis either seized Jewish businesses and properties outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain prices. In November 1938, the Nazis organized a riot (pogrom), known as Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”). This attack against German and Austrian Jews included the physical destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, the arrest of Jewish men, the vandalization of homes, and the murder of individuals.

Non-Jewish Targets of Persecution

Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, the Nazis persecuted other groups they viewed as racially or genetically “inferior.” Nazi racial ideology was buttressed by scientists who advocated “selective breeding” (eugenics) to “improve” the human race. Laws passed between 1933 and 1935 aimed to reduce the future number of genetic “inferiors” through involuntary sterilization programs: 320,000 to 350,000 individuals judged physically or mentally handicapped were subjected to surgical or radiation procedures so they could not have children. Supporters of sterilization also argued that the handicapped burdened the community with the costs of their care. Many of Germany’s 30,000 Roma (Gypsies) were also eventually sterilized and prohibited, along with Blacks, from intermarrying with Germans. About 500 children of mixed African-German backgrounds were also sterilized. New laws combined traditional prejudices with the racism of the Nazis, which defined Roma by “race” and as “criminal and asocial.”

Another consequence of Hitler’s ruthless dictatorship in the 1930s was the arrest of political opponents and trade unionists and others whom the Nazis labeled “undesirables” and “enemies of the state.” Some 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps; under the 1935 Nazi-revised criminal code, the mere denunciation of a man as “homosexual” could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who numbered at least 25,000 in Germany, were banned as an organization as early as April 1933, because the beliefs of this religious group prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state or serving in the German military. Their literature was confiscated, and they lost their jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, and all social welfare benefits. Many Witnesses were sent to prisons and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and their children were sent to juvenile detention homes and orphanages.

Refugees With No Place to Go

Between 1933 and 1936, thousand of people, mostly political prisoners, were imprisoned in concentrations camps, while several thousand German Roma were confined in special municipal camps. The first systematic round-up of German and Austrian Jews occurred after Kristallnacht, when approximately 30,000 Jewish men were deported to Dachau and other concentration camps, and several hundred Jewish women were sent to local jails. The wave of arrests in 1938 also included several thousand German and Austrian Roma.

Between 1933 and 1939, about half of the German-Jewish population and more than two-thirds of Austrian Jews (1938-1939) fled Nazi persecution. They emigrated mainly to the United States, Palestine , elsewhere in Europe (where many would be later trapped by Nazi conquests during the war), Latin America, and Japanese-occupied Shanghai (which required no visas for entry). Jews who remained under Nazi rule were either unwilling to uproot themselves or unable to obtain visas, sponsors in host countries, or funds for emigration. Most foreign countries, including the United States , Canada, Britain, and France, were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.

Reprinted courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum .

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Representations of the German woman s body in the official Nazi women s magazine

This study examines the ways in which the German female body is represented in the official National Socialist party’s magazine, NS FrauenWarte, published from 1934 to 1944. Analyses of the female body visuals help reveal the Nazi regime’s ideology and expectations of women within the Third Reich. Based on semiotic analysis of representations and illustrations appearing in 77 of the magazine’s issues, the study reads the female body as a site of negotiation on the Nazi women’s role in the German society. Ostensibly, we would expect representations appearing in essentially a propaganda magazine to portray Nazi ideology’s definition of women’s expected role in Nazi society. However, the findings indicate contradictions between various representations appearing in the magazine and Nazi ideology as expressed by leading Nazi ideologues. The magazine presents both “feminine,” healthy, and maternal bodies suited for nurturing “Hitler’s children,” as well as sexual and athletic body images, seemingly incompatible with Nazi ideology. In addressing these contradictions, this paper reveals Nazi ideology’s dynamism and complexity.

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Article Contents

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Culture in Nazi Germany.

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Benjamin G Martin, Culture in Nazi Germany., German History , Volume 38, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 158–160, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghz109

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In her 2016 book, Art of Suppression , Pamela Potter sums up the simplistic but still widely shared view about Nazis and culture: ‘that Hitler, with Propaganda Minister Goebbels at his side, controlled all manifestations of artistic creation and established rigid guidelines, according to their own personal tastes, of what was acceptable or unacceptable. They stamped out all forms of modernism and debased the arts, à la Stalin, to mere tools of ideology and propaganda’ (p. 1). Potter shows that all aspects of this view have been undermined by decades of research; her important book explores why that research has failed to shake this popular consensus. Michael H. Kater’s scholarship—from his 1974 study of the SS’s Ahnenerbe project to his three books on music in Nazi Germany—has played a key role in challenging elements of the old narrative, as Potter notes with appreciation. It is therefore surprising and disappointing that Kater’s new book essentially restates this discredited view.

In Culture in Nazi Germany , Kater proposes to tell ‘the story of culture in the Third Reich’. He pursues this goal by describing the role that the visual arts, literature, music, film and the news media were made to play in the regime’s effort to control the German population and, from 1938, to dominate Europe. ‘The National Socialists’, we are told, ‘systematically set out to destroy Modernism in the arts throughout Germany, to make room for their own kind of culture’ (p. 1). Having purged the arts of the democratic ethos of Weimar modernism, the Nazis exploited them to serve propaganda, crafting art, novels and movies that were mediocre in quality and yet awesomely powerful in their ability to spread lies, misinformation and Nazi ideology.

Kater does add important caveats to the view that Potter caricatures. He documents the infighting and confusion that characterized the regime’s policy-making; he acknowledges that it was never possible to define ‘Nazi’ music, art or architecture; he notes that aspects of modernist art and jazz music did survive under Hitler. Nonetheless, the dominant narrative throughout the book’s six chapters remains a new version of the old storyline.

That Kater ends up relying on this narrative is the result, I think, of two of the book’s central features. First, Kater has chosen to prize the individual story at the expense of any kind of broader, structural argument. Exploring a period through the lives of several of its key participants is a technique Kater pursued to excellent effect in his Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (2000). Here, however, the capsule narratives are too short to offer much real insight, and putting several of them in a list does not make up for the absence of a broader perspective. The result is an emphasis on personal motivations that is more conducive to moralizing than to analysis.

Second, the analytical claims the book does make rely on a simplistic understanding of the relationship between culture and power. According to Kater, art and culture had three uses under Hitler: propaganda (‘to influence popular attitudes toward the regime’), entertainment (‘to keep the people satisfied, diverting their attention’) and diplomacy (‘to impress foreign governments’) (pp. 62–63). As Kater gives this third claim almost no attention, we are left with ‘culture’ as nothing more than a tool for mind control, applied by a mighty state to a passive and undifferentiated population, as either mass propaganda or mass entertainment. This narrow model stands in the way of a richer analysis that might more fully have taken stock of the last several decades of historical research on so many aspects of cultural life in Nazi Germany—to say nothing of the sophisticated theoretical literature on the relationship between culture and power.

The combination of Kater’s emphasis on the micro-perspective with the bluntness of his analytical instruments rather limits what this book can offer. A chapter on the exclusion of Jews from German cultural life has many compelling stories, but offers no explanation of the significance of anti-Semitism in Nazi cultural policy. Anti-Semitism appears here less as an ideology, with deep roots in German and European cultural history, than as a set of falsehoods, advanced by regime-sponsored cultural products that were really propaganda, ‘to be ingested by the general population that did not have the means or desire to check message content for the truth’ (p. 149). A discussion of Nazi culture during World War II amounts to a list of examples of the Nazis’ use of cultural forms—movies, music, literature and visual art, as well as radio, print media and newsreels—to spread ideological indoctrination and misinformation to wartime German audiences, or simply to distract them. Because Kater fails to distinguish between cultural politics and propaganda, he can offer no analysis of the Germans’ sophisticated, multi-pronged mobilization of high and popular culture at home and abroad in support of the war effort. When Kater presents what he sees as evidence of ‘a transfer of Nazi culture, or artists working under Hitler, into post-war Germany, certainly the western part’ (p. 309), he does this chiefly through stories of German writers, artists and scholars who managed to find employment in their fields after 1945. As he heaps scorn on their efforts to downplay or justify their cooperation with the regime, it is clear how Kater judges these people. It is not equally clear what he thinks these continuities mean for German history or for our interpretation of Nazi cultural policies.

The book’s final chapter offers a welcome, if brief, comparison of the Nazis’ manipulation of culture with cultural policies of fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, based on an overview of relevant secondary literature. But the chief finding here—that in all three regimes ‘culture had to be an instrument of autocratic rule, manipulated by political revolutionaries from the top, on the path to or in perfection of totalitarianism’ (p. 338)—amounts to a restatement of the book’s point of departure.

Kater commands an extraordinary wealth of knowledge about German cultural history in the Nazi period. Each of the book’s chapters presents striking and often shocking vignettes, portraying a varied and colourful set of characters as they fled from, profited from, or were crushed by the Nazis’ cultural-political project. Ultimately, however, because they are presented without a broader explanation of the social, economic, political and cultural context in which individuals acted, these scenes end up inviting readers to join Kater in shaking our heads in disapproval at the horrors committed by the Nazis and their collaborators, or at the vulgarity and mediocrity of ‘Nazi culture’. This may feel good, but it does little to advance our understanding. In particular, it cannot help us answer what, to my mind, remains a vital question: why did so many highly educated and ‘cultured’ men and women—in Germany and around Europe—support Hitler’s regime?

Rather than confirm our self-righteous condemnation of the errors of the past, historical research on culture and fascism might challenge us, forcing us to think critically about the relationship between aesthetic expression, social life, economics and politics in our own day. In a time marked by the resurgence of nationalist and authoritarian political forces, the historical example of Nazi Germany continues to have much to teach us in this regard. Scholars seeking to conduct such research will find rich materials here, materials that testify to Kater’s eye for the compelling narrative. Readers looking for a nuanced, up-to-date historical analysis of culture in Nazi Germany will, however, need to look elsewhere.

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History Grade 11 - Topic 3 Essay Questions

Essay Question

To what extent did Australian government policies and legislation succeed in perpetuating racism and the dehumanization of the Aborigines in the 19th and 20th centuries? Present an argument in support of your answer using relevant historical evidence. [1]

Introduction :

A number of scholars agree that race was part of the Enlightenment project that resulted from the desire to classify people into distinct categories. [2] Racial classification certainly existed before this period, but the ‘modern’ application of race has much to do with Europe’s interaction with the ‘rest of the world’. [3] Thus, central to the project of European colonialism was the crystallization of Eugenics policies and an array of social Darwinist theories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These theories which later transformed government policy and law rendered non-European peoples as subhuman and biologically inferior and thus should be dispossessed of their land and other vital resources and ultimately exterminated in society. Therefore, and relevant to this essay, we will focus on the implementation of Eugenics policies and Social Darwinism in Australia in order to evaluate the extent to which these policies impacted on the Aboriginal people of Australia.

British colonisation and occupation of Australia

After the British colonised Australia in the 18th century, the first one hundred and forty years of Australian colonial history was marked by conflict and dispossession. [4] The arrival of Lieutenant James Cook and then Arthur Philip in 1788 marked the beginning of ‘white settlement’. [5] From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was expropriated by the British colonists on the premise that the land was empty (the terra nullius theory) and that the British colonists discovered it. This myth was applied across the colonial world to perpetuate and justify indigenous dispossession and genocide. [6]

Colonists viewed the indigenous Australians as inferior and scarcely human. Their way of life was seen as ‘primitive and uncivilised’, and colonialists believed that their culture would eventually die out. [7] This view justified colonial conquest of the Aboriginal people. Social anthropologists from universities who ‘studied’ the way of life of the Aborigines reinforced this view. [8] Firstly, this view added some ‘scientific’ credibility to observations about this ‘primitive’ society with the lowest level of kinship and the most ‘primitive’ form of religion. Secondly, it also added to the views of Australian eugenicists without deeply analysing the complexities of Aboriginal life. [9]

Application of eugenics policies on the Aborigines

Eugenics associations were established in many states, e.g., New South Wales and Victoria. In 1960 the Racial Hygiene Association, based in Sydney, became the Family Planning Association. [10] A prominent eugenicist in Melbourne was Prof Richard Berry who believed the Aborigines to be the most primitive form of humans. Berry studied and measured people’s heads to prove his theory that white, educated people were the smartest, while the poor, criminals and Aboriginal Australian were the least so. Berry proposed a euthanasia chamber for so-called mental defectives. [11] Ideas of racial decay and racial suicide were aimed at strengthening the number of whites in society, especially in the north where Asian populations were expanding. [12] In 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act was passed (known as the White Australia Policy). White racial unity was promoted as a form of racial purity.

Immigration was encouraged from the UK in 1922 to swell European numbers and thousands of children were sent to keep Australia white. 1912: white mothers offered £5 childbirth bounty in order to grow the size of wealthy middle -class families, which tended to have fewer children than poorer, pauper families in society. [13] This was partly in response to the debate around ‘racial suicide’. It was thought that the middle class would die out because they were not having enough children. [14] Decrease in the number of middle-class whites led to notions of ‘racial decay’. It was assumed that ‘racial poisons’ (e.g., TB, venereal disease, prostitution, alcoholism and criminality) would decimate whites with good stock (middle class). Plans were made to deal with ‘racially contaminated’ and misfits to keep middle class ‘pure’. [15]

Australia Immigration Policies

The White Australian policy of 1901 aimed at cohesion among the white population in the country. [16] It enshrined discrimination and white superiority. Between 1920 and 1967 thousands of British children between the ages of 3 and 14 were sent to Australia and Canada to boost the size of the white population. These children came from poor backgrounds and were mostly in social care. Many of these children were cut off from their families and were often told they were orphans. [17] In addition, a number of these children stayed in orphanages in Australia or became unpaid cheap labour on farms and in some instances were physically and sexually abused. The children who were forcibly migrated under the system became known as the Lost Generation. Catholic Church established homes to accommodate and assist migrant children. In 1987 the Child Migrant Trust under the leadership of Margaret Humphreys began to publicise the abuse of child migrants. [18]

The lost generation?

Children of mixed race were either viewed as inferior by some or as slightly more superior than other Aborigines. [19] However, at the beginning of the 20th century, these ‘half-caste’ children were viewed as a threat to the future of the white race in Australia. In 1913, W. Baldwin Spencer set up 13 proposals to manage the half-caste populations in and around the towns, mining housing and other sites of contact between ‘races’. These included: segregated living areas in certain towns, limits set on the employment of indigenous population by white Australians, the removal of Aboriginal people to a compound, the construction of a half-caste home in one area, a ban on interracial contact and authority given to protectors in some areas to remove ‘half-caste’ children from their families and place them in homes.

By 1930s the number of part-Aboriginal population increased. Dr Cecil Cook and A.O. Neville believed that the white race was headed for extinction. They were responsible for assimilation programmes for ‘breeding blackness out.’ About 100 000 ‘mixed-race’ children were taken from their parents between 1910 and 1970 to breed out Aboriginal blood. Cook encouraged lighter-skinned women to marry white men and in this way ‘breed out their colour’. In 1951, the new Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, claimed that assimilation would be the new policy to deal with the indigenous people and motivated this on the grounds of looking after the child’s welfare. Policemen or government officials often took children from their sobbing mothers, they were raised as orphans. Many of these children experienced abuse and neglect. Labels were used, e.g., quadroon, octaroon, to indicate how much ‘white’ blood they had. This policy only ended in 1971. These children are known today as the Stolen Generation. [20]

Reparations?

The practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families was not spoken about until 1997. An official enquiry revealed consistent abuse, exploitation in the labour market, social dislocation that led to alcoholism, violence, and early death. [21] In 2009 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament for the laws and policies that inflicted grief, suffering and loss on them. He particularly mentioned the ‘Stolen Generation’ who had been removed from their families. In 2010 Rudd apologised to the ‘Lost Generation’ of children who were held in orphanages and other institutions between 1930 and 1970. [22]

Racial ideologies were not simply advanced by a conglomeration of nationalism, imperialism, Darwinism and Eugenics. In the early Twentieth Century, there became evidence strands of simply cultural racism that can be seen as running alongside the biological determinism that was largely prevalent. From this perspective, individuals were suspicious or negative towards to other races not solely on the basis on racial differences, but because those differences represented a divergence in cultural values. This can be seen in the number of miscegenation laws that prevailed in Australia and elsewhere in the colonial world in this context, which have been interpreted as founded on notions of biological mixing. This therefore was an attempt to assert the supremacy of the white race over all other races. Therefore, the development of the sciences of evolutionary Darwinism and Eugenics provided further scientific validity to these views, justifying unequal power relationships either by pinpointing the inability of certain races to develop, or by suggesting the more advanced races had a personal benevolence to the others.

Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Hitlers consolidation of power from 1933 to 1934 :

The Great Depression had severe economic effects which increased support for political parties that were extremists such as the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which is popularly known as the Nazi party in English) on the right and the Communist Party on the left. [23] In 1993, Hitler was appointed as Chancellor by the then President Von Hindenburg. [24] This was a significant appointment as Hitler used his position as head of government to consolidate Nazi control. In power, the Nazis dominated the police force by utilizing them to break up meetings that opposition parties had and outlawed all forms of public meetings by justifying that these posed a ‘threat’ to public safety. on the 27th of February 1993, an arson attack occurred which burned the building which housed the German parliament, and this attack became known as the Reichstag Fire. After the Reichstag fire, Hitler got Von Hindenburg to pass a decree which suspended all articles in the constitution that guaranteed peoples key freedoms and liberty. [25] This meant that political opposition were arrested and subsequently sent to concentration camps. The Nazis did not win a clear majority in the elections despite rigorous intimidation and propaganda. As a result, Hitler banned the Communists from the Reichstag party which was supported by the Centre Party- a lay Catholic Party in Germany. [26] Hitler then arranged to get the Reichstag to agree to pass the Enabling Act which allowed him to make laws by decree. This made it possible for Hitler to centralise the government by taking away powers of the state governments. In addition, Hitler destroyed the free trade union movements and banned the Social Democrats and the Communist Party. [27] However, in 1934, an increasing number of left-wing elements within the Nazi Party were opposing Hitlers authority. [28] The Sturmabteilung- Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, which was led by Ernst Rohm was interested in the socialistic elements of Nazism. [29] In short, they wanted Germany to be a full socialistic state. However, the German Wehrmacht- unified armed forces of Nazi Germany opposed the Sturmabteilung’s stance. On the 30th of June 1934, Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS)- a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler got rid of the Sturmabteilung in which 400 of their murders were murdered including Rohm their leader. [30] The SS was now the new elite force which aligned itself with the Hitlers Nazi Party. Following the death of Von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler merged the positions of president and chancellor and became known as the Führer- leader. Within this new leadership structure, total loyalty was demanded from all Germans. This also led to Germany becoming police state- a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities. The SS were led by Heinrich Himmler who was a ruthless and brutal leader who ran the labour and concentration camps, including the Gestapo- secrete state police. [31] Most Germans understood that to resist the rule of the Nazis would be futile.

The creation of a racial state in Germany: defining the German nation in relation to the ‘other’:

In Germany, the ‘perfect German race’ came to be known as the Aryan race which was perceived as the master race by the Nazi Party. [32] The ‘other’ was other races which were perceived to be unproductive, asocial and undesirables such as the gypsies and the Jews which were viewed as coming from impure blood. These groups of people were thought to be inferior and therefore marginalised, treated as sub-human by segregating them and thus dehumanising them. [33] The Aryan race were considered superior because of their ancestry, survival instinct, ‘pure blood’, intellect and perception that they had the capacity to work hard. In Hitlers Nazi state, antisemitism was blamed on race. Hitler hated Jewish people and thus, this hatred shaped his political philosophy. As a result, Jews became a scapegoat for Germanies problems and were thus hunted down in order to eradicate them. To identify ‘others’, stereotyping was used to judge and isolate them. [34] This led to prejudice and gross discrimination which sometimes even meant death. The Nazi Parties promotion of the idea to cleanse Germany of all its ‘enemies’ and because Hitler hated Jews, this led to the mass killing of Millions of Jews.

Applying racial and eugenic laws and policies- Purifying the nation:

Positive eugenics- Refers to efforts which are directed and expanding desirable traits. Positive eugenic Nazi programmes thus encouraged the breeding of pure Aryans since they were viewed as the master race. [35] In these programmes, women were central in creating this perceived pure nation. What this meant practically was that breeding between ‘Aryan’ women and genetically suitable ‘Aryan’ men such as those who were part of the SS were heavily encouraged. In 1936, the Lebensborn programme was established in which SS couples who were deemed to be biologically, racially and hereditarily valuable families were selected to adopt suitable Aryan children. [36]

Negative eugenics- refers to effort which are directed to eliminate through sterilisation, segregation or other means those who are perceived or deemed to be physically, mentally or morally ‘undesirable’.  Negative eugenics programmes and laws were passed to eliminate ‘contaminating’ elements of German society. These took many different forms such as sterilisation programmes. [37] In July 1933, the Sterilisation law was passed which gave Nazis the power to sterilise any person who suffered from diseases or hereditary conditions such as schizophrenia or feeblemindedness. Approximately 350 000 people were sterilised as a result of this programme including teenagers of mixed race. In 1933, the Department of Gene and Race Care was establish and Genetic health courts helped enforce these laws. Concentration camps were established and by 1936, these camps were filled with prostitutes, alcoholics, beggars, homosexuals and juvenile delinquents. [38] By 1938, around 11 000 were sent to these camps. Euthanasia (intentionally ending life to relieve pain and suffering) programmes were established. At the beginning of WWII, Hitler signed a decree which allowed for the systematic killing (euthanasia) in institutions of handicapped patients who were considered incurable. [39] The name of the programme was called Operation T4. These killings were secretly carried out in order to prevent a negative reaction from the Catholic Church. These killings were ordered by doctors in special committees who decided who was going to be killed. Initially, these killings were done by lethal injection, however, carbon monoxide was later used. [40] Nazi records show that 70 273 deaths were carried out by gassing at six different euthanasia centres. These euthanasia programmes were just the testing for Jewish extermination later on.

Groups targeted by the Nazis:

Under Hitler, policies in Germany were based on anti-Semitism as he regarded Jews as a separate race who were un-Godly and evil. At first, discrimination made life very uncomfortable for Jews in Germany. However, as the Nazi Party grew in power by having less and less opposition in Germany, Hitlers Party introduced stricter laws against Jews. [41] Most German people chose to be bystanders when these atrocities were being committed. As a result of these laws, Jewish people were Segregated from political, economic, social and educational life in Germany.     Between the years 1933 to 1934, Jewish professions and buisinesses were being targeted which resulted in them being excluded from civil services. In 1935, the Nuremburg Laws (antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Germany by the Nazi Party) were passed. [42] The Nuremburg Laws meant that Jewish people were not considered German citizens and they forbade marriages between German citizens and Jewish Germans. However, these anti-Semitic laws were relaxed in 1936 because Germany hosted the Olympic games, and thus had many visitors. [43] The following year in 1937 ‘Aryanisation’ began again. When the Nazi Party annexed (The concept in international law in which one state forcibly acquires another states territory) Austria in 1938, anti-Semitism spread there as well. On November 1938, a German diplomat was murdered in Paris, and as retaliation, Jewish shops, buisineses, homes and places of worship were targeted throughout Germany. 20 000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, majority of whom were killed. [44] This event came to be known as Kristallnacht (Violent, state-mandated actions against Jews). This led to Jewish pupils being expelled from schools, Jewish businessmen forced to close their shops, Jewish valuables to be confiscated and in 1939 a curfew was introduced for Jews.

Sinti and Roma:

Gypsies in Germany, like the Jews were targeted for extermination. At first, many were deported as the ‘undesirables.’ However, later there were sterilisation laws against the gypsies.  A new law termed “Fight against the Gypsy Menace” required that all gypsies register with the police. [45] They were then forced into concentration camps and ghettos. In Europe, thousands of gypsy women and children were killed in various campaigns. A separate ‘Gypsy family camp’ was set up at Auschwitz-Birkenau which saw many inmates die of exhaustion from hard labour, disease, malnutrition and gassing of children which were done by a Dr called Mengele. [46] Alex Bandy, a Hungarian journalist termed this campaign the ‘forgotten holocaust’.

Other groups targeted by the Nazis:

Political opponents such as Social Democrats, Communists and Trade union leaders were targeted by the Nazis. [47] In addition, Religious opponents such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Dissident priests (Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany) were also targeted by the Nazis. Those accused of ‘asocial’ crimes such as criminals or homosexuals were also targeted by the Nazi Party. [48]

Choices that people made:

Perpetrators:

Some of the perpetrators of the Nazi regime were secretaries, train drivers, bureaucrats while others actively took part in the killings. [49] Others perpetrators were in the Einsatzgruppen (Extermination squads) while others ran the concentration camps. However, many Nazi Party official denied complicity and said that they were merely following orders. Some perpetrators even claimed that they were negatively affected by their violent actions. [50]

 Bystanders:

The vast majority of people not just in Germany but were the world were bystanders. By choosing this stance of being a bystander and be different and passive witnesses, bystanders affirmed the perpetrators. Within the group of bystanders, others chose to become the perpetrators, while others chose to be resisters or rescuers. [51]

Rescuers under the Nazi regime chose to courageously speak out against the regime or actively rescue victims. Many of these rescuers attributed their actions to their convictions and morality to resist evil. Many of them acted courageously based on their faith. Many hid Jews or smuggled them out of occupied areas. [52]

Responses of the persecuted: exile, accommodation, defiance:

Responses from being persecuted by the Nazi Party took many forms such as partisan activities such as smuggling of secret messages, exchanging of food and weapons which sabotaged the Nazis attempt to persecute those they deemed undesirable. In addition, those persecuted responded by military engagement with the Nazi Party despite being heavily suppressed by Nazi troops. Victims continued with their way of life such as cultural traditions, religious practices, creating music and art such as poetry inside the concentration camps and ghettos. In addition, some of the victims managed to escape or go into exile. This caused underground resistance movements aimed at countering Nazi propaganda with anti-Nazi propaganda. The determination for survival was also a form of resistance by victims.

From persecution to mass murder: The Final solution:

The Holocaust (Was the genocide of European Jews during WWII) was carried out as the ‘Final Solution’ under the guise of war. The Einsatzgruppen followed German soldiers into invading other territories. They arrested everyone who resisted and killed those they thought could resist. The Nazis carried out forced removals of those they deemed sub-human or undesirables and carried out mass murders. [53] In Poland, thousand of Polish citizens were sent to labour and concentration camps. Jews were forcibly put in overcrowded ghettos were many would die of inhumane conditions and starvation.

Labour and extermination camps:

In 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed invading troops into Russia where thousands of Jews were rounded up in preparation to send them to concentration camps. 700 Jews were gassed in vans in Chelmo. This reinforced Hitler’s desire for a ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question. The death camps under the SS were established for this reason. [54] In addition, extermination centre sites were purposely located near railway lines so that there was efficient transportation. In 1942, there were mass deportations of Jews from the ghettos. A lot of them died along the way due to the unhygienic conditions, lack of food and heat in transportation. Gas chambers were created for the purposes of mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B pellets. Jewish bodies were cremated, and their ashes and bones were intended for fertilisers. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. [55]

Forms of justice: The Nuremburg Trials:

Allied forces decided that the main perpetrators of the Holocaust should be put on trial. [56] An international military tribunal was set up at Nuremburg where 22 Nazi leaders were put on trial for crimes against humanity in addition to their other war crimes. [57] Nazi records provided a much of the evidence and details of the crimes the leaders and committed. The accused did not deny having committed these crimes but were claiming that these crimes were not against humanity. Others argued that they were simply following orders. 13 different trials were set up in Nuremburg between the years 1945 and 1950 and 12 defendants were sentenced to dead. In total 199 Nazis were put on trial. This type of justice is called punitive justice where the perpetrators get punished for their crimes. [58]

Shortcomings of the process:

These trials did not come without their shortcomings, some of which included small perpertrators not being called and held accountable for their actions as they could deny their complicity for what had happened. In addition, victorious allies carried out the trials and as a result, Germany and German people never faced what they had done. For many years there was a culture of silence and this could be regarded as a denial of responsibility. [59]

Positive outcomes of these trials:

These trials did come with some positives such as giving people new ways of thinking about how to tackle gross human rights violations. Restorative justice and mechanism such as truth and reconciliation commissions could be formed in the future. Examples of such truth and reconciliation commissions around the world are the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [60]

This content was originally produced for the SAHO classroom by Ayabulela Ntwakumba and Thandile Xesi

[1] National Senior Certificate. “Grade 11 November History Paper 1 Exam,” National Senior Certificate, November 2018.

[2] Cohen, William B. "Literature and Race: Nineteenth Century French Fiction, Blacks and Africa 1800-1880." Race 16, no. 2 (1974): 181-205.

[3] Macdonald, Ian. "The Capitalist Way to Curb Discrimination." Race Today (1973): 241.

[4] http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_3_Colo…

[7] https://australianstogether.org.au/discover/indigenous culture/kinship.

[8] Moses, A. Dirk. "An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89-106.

[9] Genger, Peter. "The British Colonization of Australia: An Exposé of the Models, Impacts and Pertinent Questions." Peace and Conflict Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 4.

[10] Barta, Tony. "Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia." Genocide and the modern age: etiology and case studies of mass death 2 (1987): 237-253.

[11] Foley, Gary. "Eugenics, Melbourne University and me." Tracker: be informed, be involved, be inspired (2012).

[12] Ibid.,

[13] Banner, Stuart. "Why Terra Nullius-Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia." Law & Hist. Rev. 23 (2005): 95.

[14] Ibid.,

[15] Lester, Alan, and Nikita Vanderbyl. "The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832–8." In History Workshop Journal, vol. 90, pp. 165-188. Oxford Academic, 2021.

[16] Hunter, Ernest, and Desley Harvey. "Indigenous suicide in australia, new zealand, canada and the united states." Emergency Medicine 14, no. 1 (2002): 14-23.

[17] Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A view of the art of colonization, with present reference to the British Empire. JW Parker, 1849.

[18] Hollinsworth, David. Race and racism in Australia. Thomson Learning Australia, 2006.

[19] Ibid.,

[20] Hume, Lynne. "The dreaming in contemporary aboriginal Australia." Indigenous religions: a companion. London: Cassell (2000): 125-138.

[21] Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, place and Aboriginal ownership. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[22] Ibid.,

[23] King, Gary, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner. "Ordinary economic voting behavior in the extraordinary election of Adolf Hitler." The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951-996.

[24] Caldwell, Peter. "National Socialism and Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi State, 1993-1937." Cardozo L. Rev. 16 (1994): 399

[25] Bessel, Richard. "The Nazi capture of power." journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 169-188.

[26] Evans, Richard. "Hitler's Dictatorship." History Review 51 (2005): 20.

[27] Ibid.,

[28] Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "SA." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 11, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization .

[29] Ibid.,

[30] Ibid.,

[31] Power, Jonathan. "Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Deputy–From Boyhood to Chief Murderer of the Jews." In Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals, pp. 13-18. Brill Nijhoff, 2017.

[32] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1

[33] Ibid.,

[34] Ibid.,

[35] Grodin, Michael A., Erin L. Miller, and Johnathan I. Kelly. "The Nazi physicians as leaders in eugenics and “euthanasia”: Lessons for today." American journal of public health 108, no. 1 (2018): 53-57.

[36] Ibid.,

[37] Kevles, Daniel J. "Eugenics and human rights." Bmj 319, no. 7207 (1999): 435-438.

[38] Ibid.,

[39] Benedict, Susan, and Jochen Kuhla. "Nurses’ participation in the euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany." Western Journal of Nursing Research 21, no. 2 (1999): 246-263.

[40] ibid.,

[41] Johnson, Mary, and Carol Rittner. "Circles of Hell: Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazis." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, no. 1 (1996): 123-137.

[42] Kroslak, Daniel. "Nuremberg Laws." The Lawyer Quarterly.-ISSN 8396 (1805): 184-194.

[43] Rippon, Anton. Hitler's Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games. Pen and Sword, 2006.

[44] Fitzgerald, Stephanie. Kristallnacht. Capstone, 2017.

[45] Lutz, Brenda Davis. "Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 346-359.

[46] Ibid.,

[47] Evans, Richard. "Hitler's Dictatorship." History Review 51 (2005): 20.

[48] Ibid.,

[49] O’Byrne, Darren. "Perpetrators? Political civil servants in the Third Reich." In Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence, pp. 83-98. Routledge, 2018.

[50] Ibid.,

[51] Monroe, Kristen Renwick. "Cracking the code of genocide: The moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust." Political Psychology 29, no. 5 (2008): 699-736.

[52] Ibid.,

[53] Breitman, Richard. "Plans for the final solution in early 1941." German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 483-493.

[54] Pohl, Dieter. "The Holocaust and the concentration camps." In Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, pp. 161-178. Routledge, 2009.

[55] Ibid.,

[56] Steinacher, Gerald J. "The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence Kim Christian Priemel." (2018): 123-124.

[57] https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials

[58] Ibid.,

[59] Ibid.,

[60] Adam, Heribert, and Kanya Adam. "Merits and shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In Remembrance and Forgiveness, pp. 34-46. Routledge, 2020.

• Adam, Heribert, and Kanya Adam. "Merits and shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In Remembrance and Forgiveness, pp. 34-46. Routledge, 2020.
• Bessel, Richard. "The Nazi capture of power." journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 169-188.
• Benedict, Susan, and Jochen Kuhla. "Nurses’ participation in the euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany." Western Journal of Nursing Research 21, no. 2 (1999): 246-263.
• Breitman, Richard. "Plans for the final solution in early 1941." German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 483-493.
• Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "SA." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 11, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization.
• Bunker, Raymond. "Systematic colonization and town planning in Australia and New Zealand." Planning Perspectives 3, no. 1 (1988): 59-80.
• Caldwell, Peter. "National Socialism and Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi State, 1993-1937." Cardozo L. Rev. 16 (1994): 399
• Dunn, Kevin M., James Forrest, Ian Burnley, and Amy McDonald. "Constructing racism in Australia." Australian journal of social issues 39, no. 4 (2004): 409-430.
• Docker, John. "A plethora of intentions: genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain." The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 1 (2015): 74-89.
• Fitzgerald, Stephanie. Kristallnacht. Capstone, 2017.
• Grodin, Michael A., Erin L. Miller, and Johnathan I. Kelly. "The Nazi physicians as leaders in eugenics and “euthanasia”: Lessons for today." American journal of public health 108, no. 1 (2018): 53-57.
• Hollinsworth, David. Race and racism in Australia. Thomson Learning Australia, 2006.
• Howard-Wagner, Deirdre. "Colonialism and the science of race difference." In TASA and SAANZ 2007 Joint Conference Refereed Conference Proceedings–Public Sociologies: Lessons and Trans-Tasman Comparisons, The Australian Sociological Association. 2007.
• Jalata, Asafa. "The impacts of English colonial terrorism and genocide on Indigenous/Black Australians." Sage Open 3, no. 3 (2013): 2158244013499143.
• Johnson, Mary, and Carol Rittner. "Circles of Hell: Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazis." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, no. 1 (1996): 123-137.
• Kevles, Daniel J. "Eugenics and human rights." Bmj 319, no. 7207 (1999): 435-438.
• King, Gary, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner. "Ordinary economic voting behavior in the extraordinary election of Adolf Hitler." The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951-996.
• Kroslak, Daniel. "Nuremberg Laws." The Lawyer Quarterly.-ISSN 8396 (1805): 184-194.
• Lutz, Brenda Davis. "Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 346-359.
• Monroe, Kristen Renwick. "Cracking the code of genocide: The moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust." Political Psychology 29, no. 5 (2008): 699-736.
• Moses, A. Dirk. "An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89-106.
• Moses, D., & Stone, D. (Eds.). (2013). Colonialism and genocide. Routledge.
• O’Byrne, Darren. "Perpetrators? Political civil servants in the Third Reich." In Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence, pp. 83-98. Routledge, 2018.
• Pohl, Dieter. "The Holocaust and the concentration camps." In Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, pp. 161-178. Routledge, 2009.
• Power, Jonathan. "Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Deputy–From Boyhood to Chief Murderer of the Jews." In Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals, pp. 13-18. Brill Nijhoff, 2017.
• Rippon, Anton. Hitler's Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games. Pen and Sword, 2006.
• Robinson, Shirleene, and Jessica Paten. "The question of genocide and Indigenous child removal: the colonial Australian context." Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (2008): 501-518.
• Rogers, Thomas James, and Stephen Bain. "Genocide and frontier violence in Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 1 (2016): 83-100.
• Short, Doctor Damien. Redefining genocide: Settler colonialism, social death and ecocide. Zed Books Ltd., 2016.
• Steinacher, Gerald J. "The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence Kim Christian Priemel." (2018): 123-124.
• Torrens, Robert. Colonization of south Australia. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A view of the art of colonization, with present reference to the British Empire. JW Parker, 1849.

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Should germany prosecute the few surviving nazis.

David Motadel is an Associate Professor of History at the London School of Economics. He is the author of  Islam and Nazi Germany’s War , which was awarded the Fraenkel Prize.
 (December 2021)

Please Note: the  New York Review of Books  is a subscription site. It is possible to read a single article by registering your email address. 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive

by Philippe Sands

Knopf, 417 pp., $30.00

Fritz Bauer: The Jewish Prosecutor Who Brought Eichmann and Auschwitz to Trial

by Ronen Steinke, translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe, with a foreword by Andreas Vosskuhle

Indiana University Press, 205 pp., $90.00; $30.00 (paper)

In the summer of 2020 a court in Hamburg found Bruno Dey, a ninety-three-year-old former member of the SS Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion) and a guard at Stutthof concentration camp, near Gdańsk, from August 1944 to April 1945, guilty on 5,232 counts of being an accessory to murder. The testimonies of survivors of the camp gave a glimpse into hell. It was normal to see the corpses of those who had died of hunger, exhaustion, and violence lying in the open, Marek Dunin-Wąsowicz told the court. Another witness, Abraham Koryski, spoke of the sadistic “shows” that the SS staged in front of the prisoners; in one such spectacle, a son was forced to beat his father to death. Judy Meisel recounted how she and her mother stood naked in a line leading to the gas chamber: “When I saw the chance to run back to the barracks, my mother urged me to run. I had to leave her behind.” It was the last time she saw her. Dey, who was seventeen when he joined the SS and became a guard at Stutthof, denied the charges against him. He gave a horrific account of his time there, recalling inmates being led to the gas chamber, their screams inside, their desperate banging on its door. Dey was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Trials like this are increasingly uncommon today. Most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust have passed away, but German courts still have an opportunity to prosecute those who remain alive. It is the final chapter in the country’s long and not very successful history of ensuring justice for their victims.

In the chaos that followed the end of World War II, as millions of refugees, returning soldiers, and liberated slave laborers roamed across Europe, it was relatively easy for Nazi criminals to flee abroad. Many escaped from Germany via the legendary “Ratline,” a route that ran across the Alps into the valleys of South Tyrol. In Italy, forged papers were easy to obtain from criminal gangs and former Fascist functionaries. The fugitives also often received help from the Red Cross, which, overwhelmed and operating under a liberal policy of humanitarian aid, issued travel documents without asking too many questions. The Vatican’s relief committee was also deeply involved in the escape route; willing to assist any enemy of communism, it offered shelter, papers, and safe passage to Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East. The list of those who eluded their pursuers this way is long. It includes Adolf Eichmann, who coordinated the transport of Jews to the extermination camps; the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele; Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibór and Treblinka; Klaus Barbie, Lyon’s sadistic Gestapo chief; Walter Rauff, architect of the gas van; and Eduard Roschmann, the “Butcher of Riga.”

Philippe Sands’s  The Ratline  traces the escape of the Austrian SS-Brigadeführer Otto Wächter. During the war years, Wächter was governor of Kraków in occupied Poland, where he set up the ghetto, and later governor of Galicia, based in Lemberg (Lviv), where he was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Under his governorship, more than 525,000 Galicians lost their lives. The region’s Jewish population was almost completely exterminated. (Among the victims were many members of Sands’s family.)

Sands depicts a grim world of mass violence that is often difficult to comprehend. “Tomorrow, I have to have 50 Poles publicly shot,” Wächter wrote casually in a letter to his wife, Charlotte, in late 1939. At the same time, the couple had an intense social life, hosting dinner parties, enjoying classical music concerts, and going on extravagant shopping trips. Wächter, a highly educated lawyer and veteran member of the Nazi Party, and his wife, who shared his ideological fanaticism and taste for high culture (and tolerated his womanizing), were prominent members of Nazi high society. They cultivated good relations with his superior, Hans Frank, the governor-general of German-occupied Poland, with whom they regularly played chess, and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who visited occasionally.

Police shut down pro-Palestinian gathering in Germany over hate speech fears

Among the speakers was activist salman abu sitta, author of a january essay that expressed understanding for the hamas terrorists who on oct. 7 attacked israel..

Speakers at the event

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Belgian court overturns ban on conservative conference attended by German cardinal

April 17, 2024 Catholic News Agency News Briefs 3 Print

Brussels, Belgium, Apr 17, 2024 / 16:30 pm (CNA).

Belgium’s highest court ruled late last night that a conference upholding conservative values in the public square could go ahead in the country’s capital after a Brussels district mayor had ordered police to shut it down yesterday.

Emir Kir issued the order to halt the National Conservatism conference that was scheduled to take place April 16–17 and that featured among its speakers the Vatican’s former doctrinal chief, Cardinal Gerhard Müller.

Police surrounded the venue on Tuesday, denying access to speakers and guests.

The conference, organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute, aims to promote conservatism as “inextricably tied” to the idea of nation, national independence, and the revival of national traditions.

The event has been held in various capitals including Rome, London, and Washington, D.C., since its founding in 2019.

Among other speakers at this year’s conference were Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Britain’s former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and the founder of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage. The British politician called the attempted shut down “a disgrace” and accused the EU of becoming the “new form of communism.”

Kir said he made the decision because the conference’s vision “is not only ethically conservative (e.g., hostility to the legislation of abortion, same-sex unions, etc.) but also focused on the defense of ‘national sovereignty,’ which implies, among other things, a ‘Eurosceptic attitude.’”

His order also stated that some of the speakers “are reputed to be traditionalists” and that the conference must be banned “to avoid foreseeable attacks on public order and peace.”

Prior to Kir’s attempted shutdown, political pressure had already forced the organizers to cancel two other venues shortly before the conference had begun, after which they found a third hotel venue, called Claridge, located in Kir’s district.

Cardinal Müller told author Rod Dreher, who was also speaking at the conference, that the attempt to shut down the conference was “like Nazi Germany” and that the authorities were acting “like the SA” — Hitler’s brownshirts who used violence and intimidation against opponents.

Just spoke to Cardinal Müller, who was visibly shocked by the police standing a few feet away, blocking entrance to NatCon. “This is like Nazi Germany,” he said. “They are like the SA.” (He gave me permission to quote him.) pic.twitter.com/TTX8lc8MQS — Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 16, 2024

The attempted forced cancellation also drew opposition from Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who defended the rights of the conference participants to freedom of speech and of assembly.

Writing on X before the court’s decision, he called the attempted shutdown “unacceptable” and said that “banning political meetings is unconstitutional. Full stop.”

The Belgian court overturned Kir’s decision after the order was challenged by conference organizers with the support of ADF International, a Christian legal group that works to oppose threats to religious liberty.

Paul Coleman, executive director of ADF International , said that while “common sense and justice” had prevailed, the attempt to shut down the conference was a “dark mark on European democracy.”

“No official should have the power to shut down free and peaceful assembly merely because he disagrees with what is being said,” he said in a statement . “The kind of authoritarian censorship we have just witnessed belongs in the worst chapters of Europe’s history.”

Belgian ADF lawyer Wouter Vaassen called the attempt to shut down the conference “unjust” and said that it “should never have happened, especially in Brussels — the political heart of Europe.”

“We must diligently protect our fundamental freedoms lest censorship become the norm in our supposedly free societies,” he added.

Along with Müller, other Catholic speakers at this year’s event included Father Benedict Kiely, founder of Nasarean.org , which helps persecuted Christians; the German aristocrat Princess Gloria von Thurn and Taxis; and Gladden Pappin, president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.

Another speaker, Jewish author and broadcaster Melanie Phillips, told the audience that she was in Jerusalem on Saturday night when Iran launched aerial attacks on Israel.

“At 2 a.m., the air raid siren wailed, and I huddled in my stairwell for safety,” she recounted. “Well, I left a war zone to come here. I didn’t realize that I was coming into another war zone in Brussels.”

This story  was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and is reprinted here on CNA with permission.

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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a swing vote on abortion, dies   

CNA Newsroom, Dec 1, 2023 / 17:40 pm (CNA).

Former U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a swing vote who became a key part of the court’s longtime abortion-supporting majority, died Friday. She was 93 and had been suffering from dementia for several years. 

Born Sandra Day in El Paso, Texas, in 1930, she grew up on a ranch in eastern Arizona. She was baptized an Episcopalian and later attended Episcopal churches as an adult. 

She went to Stanford and Stanford Law School at a time when few women did either. As an undergraduate, she dated future Supreme Court colleague William Rehnquist and turned down an offer of marriage from him. Instead, she married another fellow law school student, John O’Connor. 

As a female lawyer during the 1950s, she initially had trouble getting work but eventually joined a prosecutor’s office. She took five years off from practicing law after the birth of the second of her three children to tend to them. 

In 1965 she joined the office of the Arizona attorney general, a Republican, after campaigning the year before for the Republican nominee for president, Barry Goldwater, a fellow Arizonan. In 1969 the governor appointed her to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate, where she rose to become majority leader. She left in 1974 for a state judgeship, eventually rising to the Arizona Court of Appeals, which is the second-highest court in the state. 

O’Connor and abortion 

President Ronald Reagan nominated O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court in July 1981, fulfilling a campaign promise to name the first woman to the nation’s highest court. 

Reagan was unaware at the time of her selection that O’Connor as a Republican state senator in the 1970s supported abortion, according to conservative columnist Robert Novak’s 2007 autobiography “The Prince of Darkness.” When social conservatives erupted over the announcement, Reagan asked his attorney general to check on complaints about her. 

The task went to a young aide, who called O’Connor and reported in a memo that she said she could not recall how she had voted on a 1970 bill seeking to legalize abortion in the state — even though she was a co-sponsor of it. (Before the Internet, it wasn’t easy to check such information.) 

She also told the aide — Kenneth Starr, who later served as independent counsel investigating President Bill Clinton during the 1990s — that she “had never had any disputes or controversies” with the leader of the pro-life movement in Arizona, according to a memo Starr wrote. But the pro-life leader told Novak a couple of days later that she had frequently clashed with O’Connor, calling her “one of the most powerful pro-abortionists in the Senate.” 

Even so, O’Connor’s nomination went forward and sailed through the U.S. Senate. 

Once she joined the court, O’Connor’s position on abortion wasn’t immediately clear. In 1986, she voted with the minority in a 5-4 ruling that struck down a Pennsylvania law that required abortion providers to inform a woman seeking an abortion about fetal development and about “detrimental physical and psychological effects” and “particular medical risks” of an abortion. 

O’Connor in her dissent called the court’s abortion decisions to that time “a major distortion in the Court’s constitutional jurisprudence” and said the majority’s decision in the case before it,  Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , “makes it painfully clear that no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court when an occasion for its application arises in a case involving state regulation of abortion.” 

But her most memorable abortion vote came in the 1992 case  Planned Parenthood v. Casey , in which she joined the 5-4 majority in upholding what the court called the “essential holding” of Roe v. Wade that abortion is a “fundamental right” before a fetus is capable of living outside the womb. 

In Casey, O’Connor co-wrote the plurality opinion that continued a federal right to abortion for another 30 years. 

‘Loosen up, Sandy’

O’Connor was a key player in other landmark decisions as well. 

In 1986, she joined the majority in the 5-4 decision Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld as constitutional a state statute in Georgia that criminalized sodomy. (The court overturned that ruling in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas; O’Connor joined the 6-3 majority, though she made a distinction between the two cases because Texas’ law banned sodomy only between two members of the same sex, while Georgia’s statute banned sodomy generally.) 

In 2003, O’Connor wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld affirmative action based on race in public university admissions. (The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Grutter decision in June 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.) 

In 2005, she sided with the 5-4 majority in McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union   that found that displays of the Ten Commandments at two state courthouses in Kentucky violated the Constitution. 

She is perhaps better remembered, though, for what happened during a social occasion several years after she joined the court. 

In 1985, O’Connor went to a black-tie event in Washington where she was seated near John Riggins, a Washington Redskins star running back,  who had drunk  “a few beers” and two double scotches before knocking over and spilling four bottles of wine on the table. 

O’Connor had previously said she had to leave early and was in the process of doing so when Riggins, trying to get her to stay, piped up: “Loosen up, Sandy baby.” 

He then passed out. 

O’Connor got a kick out of it and got big laughs when she made a reference to it at the beginning of a speech a few days later. 

Retirement 

O’Connor retired from the court in January 2006 at age 75 to spend time with her husband, who had been  diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease  around the early 1990s. (He died in 2009.) 

O’Connor was replaced by Samuel Alito, who has since become one of the most conservative justices and who wrote the majority decision in Jackson Women’s Health Center v. Dobbs, which last year overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

Pope Francis elevates Las Vegas to a metropolitan archdiocese

The Vatican has announced that Bishop George Leo Thomas will be the first metropolitan archbishop of Las Vegas. / Diocese of Helena

Vatican City, May 30, 2023 / 06:10 am (CNA). Pope Francis created a new ecclesiastical province in the United St… […]

Adoption Month: Meet the birth mom who chose life after God saved hers

Kelly Clemente, who chose life and put up her son for adoption. / EWTN Pro-life Weekly/Screenshot

Denver Newsroom, Nov 16, 2021 / 16:01 pm (CNA). Adoption doesn’t mean giving up. It takes courage and love. That’s what Kelly Clemente says she di… […]

Rod Dreher referred to Belgian mayor Emir Kir’s blockade as an action somewhere between a caliphate [Kir Belgian born of Turkish heritage] and a dictatorship. Conference invitee Cardinal Gerhard Muller recalled the nightmare of Nazism. This is where the West has finally arrived. Our slow crucifixion of Christ and the return to paganism is evident in the persecution of those of us who refuse to burn incense to the gods of old given fresh names. Leuven University, once the Catholic stalwart of academia, now the purveyor liberal rubbish. The Edmund Burke Society Belgium seeks to revive conservative values. But they’re the enemy. If you’re truly Catholic in America you meet the same fate as the kids at that school outside of Seattle that wished to hold a prayer club and was quashed, while a queer jubilation club was allowed with honors. Catholics, all of us, need be a bit more courageous and speak up for the faith at parish council meetings, or the discussion club activities related to the universal Synod. Obviously we need leadership, and if priests have largely given up the ghost of orthodox preaching and teaching, the Laity have to come forward. It’s become evident to this writer that it’s the laity that are more attuned to the dilemma.

In A.D. 452 Pope Leo met with Attila and dissuaded him from sacking Rome. At the head of the papal procession was a monstrance containing the Real Presence.

In A.D. 2024 the barbarians are now in the sack with secular world and even chunks of the Church itself, but then a secular Belgian court restores to Cardinal Muller the, what, privilege to speak?

A happy outcome, but what’s missing or wrong with this picture?

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Theories of eugenics, or “racial hygiene” in the German context, shaped many of Nazi Germany’s persecutory policies.

Eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” was a scientific movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While today eugenics may be regarded as a pseudoscience, it was seen as cutting edge science in the early decades of the twentieth century. Eugenics societies sprang up throughout most of the industrialized world, particularly in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.

Eugenics provided the basis for the Nazi compulsory sterilization policy and underpinned the murder of the institutionalized disabled in the clandestine “euthanasia” (T4) program.

• Euthanasia Program
• Nazi rise to power
• medical professions
• Aryanization

A significant number of Nazi persecutory policies stemmed from theories of racial hygiene, or eugenics. Such theories were prevalent among the international scientific community in the first decades of the twentieth century. The term “eugenics” (from the Greek for “good birth or stock”) was coined in 1883 by the English naturalist Sir Francis Galton. The term's German counterpart, “racial hygiene” ( Rassenhygiene ), was first employed by German economist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. At the core of the movement’s belief system was the principle that human heredity was fixed and immutable.  

Eugenic Theories

For eugenicists, the social ills of modern society—criminality, mental illness, alcoholism, and even poverty—stemmed from hereditary factors. Supporters of eugenic theory did not believe that these problems resulted from environmental factors, such as the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late 19 th century in Europe and North America. Rather, they advanced the science of eugenics to address what they regarded as a decline in public health and morality.

Eugenicists had three primary objectives. First, they sought to discover “hereditary” traits that contributed to societal ills. Second, they aimed to develop biological solutions to these problems. Finally, eugenicists sought to campaign for public health measures to combat them. 

The International Impact of Eugenic Theories

Eugenics found its most radical interpretation in Germany, but its influence was by no means limited to that nation alone. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenic societies sprang up throughout most of the industrialized world. In Western Europe and the United States, the movement was embraced in the 1910s and 1920s. Most supporters in those places endorsed the objectives of American advocate Charles Davenport. Davenport advocated for the development of eugenics as “a science devoted to the improvement of the human race through better breeding.” Its supporters lobbied for “positive” eugenic efforts. They advocated for public policies that aimed to maintain physically, racially, and hereditarily “healthy” individuals. For example, they sought to provide marital counseling, motherhood training, and social welfare to “deserving” families. In doing so, eugenics supporters hoped to encourage “better” families to reproduce.

Efforts to support the “productive” members of society brought negative measures. For instance, there were efforts to redirect economic resources from the “less valuable” in order to provide for the “worthy.” Eugenicists also targeted the mentally ill and cognitively impaired. Many members of the eugenics community in Germany and the United States promoted strategies to marginalize segments of society with limited mental or social capacity. They promoted limiting their reproduction through voluntary or compulsory sterilization. Eugenicists argued that there was a direct link between diminished capacity and depravity, promiscuity, and criminality.

Members of the eugenic community in Germany and the US also viewed the racially “inferior” and poor as dangerous. Eugenicists maintained that such groups were tainted by deficiencies they inherited. They believed that these groups endangered the national community and financially burdened society.  

More often than not eugenicists’ “scientifically-drawn” conclusions did little more than to incorporate popular prejudice. However, by employing “research” and “theory” to their efforts, eugenicists could assert their beliefs as scientific fact.

Nazi Racial Hygiene

German eugenics pursued a separate and terrible course after 1933. Before 1914, the German racial hygiene movement did not differ greatly from its British and American counterparts. The German eugenics community became more radical shortly after World War I . The war brought unprecedented carnage. In addition, Germany saw economic devastation in the years between World War I and World War II . These factors heightened the division between those considered hereditarily “valuable” and those considered “unproductive.” For instance, some believed that hereditarily “valuable” Germans had died on the battlefield, while the “unproductive” Germans institutionalized in prisons, hospitals, and welfare facilities remained behind. Such arguments resurfaced in the Weimar and early Nazi eras as a way to justify eugenic sterilization and a decrease in social services for the disabled and institutionalized.

By 1933, the theories of racial hygiene were embedded into the professional and public mindset. These theories influenced the thinking of Adolf Hitler and many of his followers. They embraced an ideology that blended racial antisemitism with eugenic theory. In doing so, the Hitler regime provided context and latitude for the implementation of eugenic measures in their most concrete and radical forms.

Racial hygiene shaped many of Nazi Germany’s racial policies. Medical professionals implemented many of these policies and targeted individuals the Nazis defined as “hereditarily ill”: those with mental, physical, or social disabilities. Nazis claimed these individuals placed both a genetic and a financial burden upon society and the state.

Nazi authorities resolved to intervene in the reproductive capacities of persons classified as “hereditarily ill.” One of the first eugenic measures they initiated was the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (“Hereditary Health Law”). The law mandated forcible sterilization for nine disabilities and disorders, including schizophrenia and “hereditary feeblemindedness.” As a result of the law, 400,000 Germans were ultimately sterilized in Nazi Germany. In addition, eugenic beliefs shaped Germany’s 1935 Marital Hygiene Law. This law prohibited the marriage of persons with “diseased, inferior, or dangerous genetic material” to “healthy” German “Aryans.”  

Eugenic theory provided the basis for the “euthanasia” (T4) program . This clandestine program targeted disabled patients living in institutions throughout the German Reich for killing. An estimated 250,000 patients, the overwhelming majority of them German “ Aryans ,” fell victim to this clandestine killing operation.

Series: Deadly Medicine

Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race

Science as Salvation: Weimar Eugenics, 1919–1933

The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 1933–1939

Lebensborn Program

Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4

Final Solutions: Murderous Racial Hygiene, 1939–1945

Nazi Medical Experiments

Robert Ritter

The Doctors Trial: The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings

The Nuremberg Code

How did the shared foundational element of eugenics contribute to the growth of racism in Europe and the United States?

What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s?

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