Nazi eugenics
Final solution Pre-Machtergreifung Post-Machtergreifung Parties The social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany were composed of various ideas about genetics.
The racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic" or "Aryan" traits at its center.
However, its prominence rose sharply under Adolf Hitler's leadership when wealthy Nazi supporters started heavily investing in it.
[...] Hitler's letter authorizing the program to kill mental patients was dated September 1, 1939, the day German forces invaded Poland.
California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals.
[16] Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague: You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program.
Afterwards, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics.
The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.
Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centers, and today it is a memorial place dedicated to the victims of Aktion T4.
Standardized questionnaires had been designed by Nazi officials with the help of Dehomag (a subsidiary of IBM in the 1930s), so that the information could be encoded easily onto Hollerith punch cards for fast sorting and counting.
[32] In Hamburg, doctors gave information into a Central Health Passport Archive (c. 1934), under something called the 'Health-Related Total Observation of Life'.
This file was to contain reports from doctors, but also courts, insurance companies, sports clubs, the Hitler Youth, the military, the labor service, colleges, etc.
[31] After the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, it became compulsory for both marriage partners to be tested for hereditary diseases in order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the Aryan race.
In September of the same year, the Berlin Council of Physicians warned its members that "proceedings will be taken against every evil-doer who dares to injure our sacred healthy race.
)[34] General reference United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Final solution Pre-Machtergreifung Post-Machtergreifung Parties
