[2] Produced by Harold Mayer[3] under the aegis of the Nazi party's Office of Racial Policy[1] and directed by Carl C. Hartmann, it aimed at legitimizing the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring ("Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses"),[2] which allowed for sterilization.
"[7] In the second part, the movie discusses the sorrow of the disabled and posits a relation between choice of the right partner and hereditary diseases of the offspring.
Peter Zimmermann of the House of Documentary Film in Stuttgart evaluates the movie as follows:The short movie Das Erbe (1935), which leads over from the animals' struggle for survival and natural selection to a plea for forced sterilization of the mentally ill, marks exactly the point where Social Darwinist biologism turns into Fascist racial policy providing the reasoning for the necessity of euthanasia.
[nb 1]In addition to Das Erbe, two silent movies were produced in 1935 to propagate euthanasia in the German population, Sünden der Väter and Abseits vom Wege ("Sins of the Fathers" and "Off track").
[9] Together with Erbkrank and Alles Leben ist Kampf, Das Erbe reflects the spirit of the Nuremberg Laws by subordinating the people to the authority of a superior "breeder's" cost-benefit analysis.