Nazi Eugenics

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Nazi Eugenics

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Melvyn Conroy

Жанр: историческая литература серьезное чтение об истории серьезно

Язык: Английский

Добавлена: 13.06.24

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A few cautionary words. As Henry Friedlander pointed out, the terms "handicapped" or "disabled" were unknown both before and during the Nazi period. Instead, distasteful and inaccurate terms such as "idiots", "crazies", "cripples", and "feeble-minded" were in common use.19 In the same manner, Sinti and Roma were described as "Gypsies", a wholly erroneous word which has acquired derogatory overtones. In order to maintain some kind of consistency the original terminology has been quoted where appropriate throughout this work. No offense is intended thereby.

Experience teaches that dates and numbers are frequently problematical in a work of this nature. Sources do vary, often widely. Wherever precise evidence on such matters is not available, or in cases where the exact evidence cannot be subjected to corroboration from a second source (and sometimes even when it can), the reader will find use of words such as "about", "approximately", "early", or "late". Personal names too can present difficulties—Arthur/Artur, Walter/Walther, and so on. In such cases, the most commonly accepted spelling has been used. As for place names, anglicized versions (where they exist) are employed—so Nuremberg rather than Nürnberg, Munich rather than München, Warsaw rather than Warszawa. Where place names have changed, on their first appearance both are shown—Kovno/Kaunus, Posen/Poznan, etc. Thereafter, the contemporaneous name is utilised.

Diacritics in general present particular difficulties in a work of this nature. The English language contains few words with diacritic markings; Polish, by contrast, often seems to consist of little else. Such diacritics have normally been used when quoting the names of people and places, as well as where otherwise appropriate (except as already noted), in German, French and Hungarian, but not in Polish. Apologies are offered for the inconsistency, but it is hoped that the reader will have no difficulty, for example, in recognizing Belzec as being an anglicized version of Bełżec, or Lodz for Łódź.

Advantage has been taken of the extraordinary resource now provided by the internet to any student or researcher, whereby an overwhelming amount of detailed information on almost any given subject is accessible at the click of a mouse. The World Wide Web had exponentially expanded the availability of knowledge; the more cynical might suggest that it is has also performed the same service for ignorance, for there is much that is contentious, misleading, or simply wrong and/or ill-intentioned in cyberspace. Thus the same criteria need to be applied when utilising the internet as would be employed when consulting any other source. But it is self-evident that it is impossible for each and every individual to consult all of the primary documentation on the issues of interest. To that extent, the internet is no different than every other written authority. In researching any subject, most of us are dependant, to a greater or lesser degree, upon the translation and interpretation, literal and metaphorical, of talented individuals whose scholarship we trust. No apologies are therefore offered for the use of material from the internet, which in many cases would otherwise only be accessible with great difficulty, if available at all. The same care has been taken in evaluating and including such data as has been applied in utilising more traditional sources.

Finally, it is only proper to mention that in a number of instances there has been some minor editing of direct quotations in the interest of improving either punctuation or grammar, but hopefully in no case has the intended sense of any quotation been lost. If it has, of course the blame for that or any other errors in the text lies exclusively at the author's door.

1 Michael Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol. 1, No. 1, 2000), p. 62. Koltsov was a Russian biologist and geneticist. Following denunciation of his theories as "fascistic nonsense" by disciples of Stalin's favourite, the agronomist, supporter of the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters, and charlatan, Trofim Lysenko, Koltsov was allegedly poisoned by the NKVD in 1940. Under Stalin a complete ban on the practice and teaching of genetics, condemned as a "bourgeois perversion", was imposed,.

2 Hugh Gallagher, What the Nazi "Euthanasia Program" Can Tell Us About Disability Oppression (Journal of Disability Policy Studies, Vol.12, No.2, 2001) 96–99, p. 96.

3 Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 10–13.

4 Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 36–37.

5 Marius Turda, 'A New Religion'? Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre-First World War Hungary (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol.7, No. 3, September 2006), p. 308.

6 Ibid., p. 308.

7 Ibid., p. 309.

8 Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 15.

9 Turda, 'A New Religion'?, p. 324, note 46.

10 Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor—Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p. 362.

11 Most sources attribute first use of the word to Galton in his 1883 work "Human Faculty", although the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary dates its first appearance to 1833.

12 Rachel Iredale, Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care, (Nursing Ethics, 7 (3), 2000), p. 206.

13 Michael Burleigh, Ethics and extermination: Reflections on Nazi genocide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 144.

14 Iredale, Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care, p. 206.

15 Daniel J Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 291.

16 Reinhard Heydrich, who died on 4 June 1942 following an assassination attempt by Czechoslovakian patriots nine days earlier, held this position.

17 Philip Boobbyer, Moral Judgements and Moral Realism in History (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2002), p. 85.

18 Ibid., p. 86.

19 Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From 'Euthanasia' to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1995), p. xxii

CHAPTER 1: TOWARDS UTOPIA

If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating crétins. – Francis Galton (1865)1

In today's society applied eugenics is not a utopia anymore, and it will be even less so in the society of the future.

– Jenő Vámos (1911)2

Charles Darwin published his On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, creating a controversy from which Judeo-Christian theology in particular has since never recovered.3 For all of its unintended subsequently malign influence, the book contained no racial theories. The suggestion that he would have endorsed such ideas would have horrified Darwin, who was a notably tolerant person. In fact, except by implication, the work contained little reference to Homo sapiens, essentially being concerned with the evolution of other animal life and that of plants.4

Long before Darwin shook the foundations of religious belief, there had been much supposedly scientific debate concerning the development of human characteristics. In the 1820's what became known as recapitulationist theory emerged. This posited that childhood in the white race was the equivalent of savagery or primitivism in evolutionary terms. Thus adults of "inferior" groups were deemed to be at the mental and emotional level of white male children or adolescents. Nor was this pseudo-science to be applied solely to non-white races. The "inferior" groups could (and did) consist of the anti-social, criminals, women, and any other disliked nationality the defining group chose to include. Although overtaken by Darwinism, the influence of such thinking on later eugenic theorists will become apparent.5

Two years before Darwin's Origins of Species appeared, in 1857 the French psychiatrist, Benedict Augustin Morel, had published his hugely influential work Traite des degenerescence physique, et intellectuelles et morales de l'espece humaine (Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degeneracy of Mankind), in which he proposed a theory of "degeneration." Morel suggested that many illnesses, whether physical, intellectual, or moral, were all caused by a single process: degeneration. He concluded that most illnesses are the result of an incurable hereditary disorder. Allowing those suffering from such disabilities to reproduce presented a genetic risk to the nation. The causes of such a condition were, in Morel's view, the over-consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and opium. Morel believed that those damaged by overindulgence in these and other appetites developed illnesses which weakened their heredity value. This weakened state was passed on to future stock, for the effects were cumulative, so that after approximately four generations the degenerate line would end because the children of the ultimate generation would be born sterile imbeciles.

Degeneracy was a 'one size fits all' theory that neatly explained a wide variety of diseases. If the symptoms of those diseases were ostensibly different, to Morel they were simply alternative expressions of a single underlying disorder: degenerate heredity. The importance of Morel's theory on the development of eugenic thinking cannot be over emphasized, for as Morel wrote: "We are not dealing with the individual, the single human being, but with society as a whole and the means to such important an end have to be measured accordingly".In this sentence can be seen the rationale for all that was to follow.

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