Walter Gross (politician)

[6] In 1933, Gross was appointed to create the National Socialist Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare, which was designed to educate the public and build support for the Nazi sterilization program and other "ethnic improvement" schemes through the 1930s.

[7] This was termed "enlightenment" rather than "propaganda" by Nazi authorities, because it was not a call for immediate action but for a long-term change in attitude, aiming at undermining the view where people thought of themselves as individuals rather than as single links in the great chain of life.

[11] Echoing Stone's comments, historian Wolfgang Bialas likewise quipped that Gross was "entrusted with the racial education of Germans, who should from that point on be encouraged to develop biased biological sentiments".

[15] Over time, he signaled for the racial anthropological theories associated with Nordicism to "adopt a lower public profile", while hereditary psychology gained comparative favor regarding inherited characteristics along with evolutionary biology and human genetics.

[17] This late 1934 meeting included: Dr. Rudolf Kummer from the Bavarian State Ministry for Instruction and Education, the leader and founder of the Reich Association of Kinship Researchers and Heraldists, Achim Gercke, the leader of the National Socialist German Doctors' League, Gerhard Wagner, and the General Commissioner for Medical and Health Service, Dr. Karl Brandt, who was ultimately responsible for overseeing the T4 extermination program[c]; this assemblage of "experts" was called together to establish the Nazis' fundamental position on "racial policy".

[20] Such thinking eventually contributed to the formation of the Nazi euthanasia program, where a vast array of factors (including many highly subjective illnesses) were cited as justification for murdering persons under the auspices of racial cleansing.

[27] One of his later pseudo-scientific works—written in 1943 as the Final Solution was being carried out—evoked "zoological anti-semitism" and contained verbiage portending the horrors of Nazi carnage; its title for posterity, Die rassenpolitischen Voraussetzungen zur Lösung der Judenfrage (The Racial Political Prerequisites for Solving the Jewish Question).

[32] Covering some of his own tracks, Gross burned his files in Berlin at the closing of World War II, thereby, in the opinion of Claudia Koonz, erasing significant evidence "that would have incriminated the more than 3,000 members of his national network of racial educators.