Thinking Like a Historian: Normalizing Eugenics and “Racial Hygiene” in Nazi Germany

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Normalizing Eugenics and “Racial Hygiene” in Nazi Germany

The Nazi regime issued a number of laws and regulations that institutionalized racial eugenics, including the Civil Service Restoration Act (1933) and the Nuremberg Laws (1935). Notions of “racial hygiene” also penetrated the very fabric of everyday life in the Third Reich. What means did Nazi supporters use to teach Germans that racial engineering was legitimate and even desirable?

1 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The dictator of the Nazi state explained the importance of racial education in his infamous political manifesto, first published in 1925.

image If, as the first task of the State in the service and for the welfare of its nationality we recognize the preservation, care, and development of the best racial elements, it is natural that this care must not only extend to the birth of every little national and racial comrade, but that it must educate the young sapling to become a valuable link in the chain of future reproduction.

2 Joseph Goebbels, party rally speech. Propaganda Minister Goebbels sums up his view of welfare benefits in a 1938 speech, delivered to functionaries working in the Nazi welfare agency.

image Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked — those are not our objectives. Our objectives are entirely different. They can be put most crisply in the sentence: we must have a healthy people [Volk] in order to prevail in the world.

3 An anti-Semitic children’s book. In this scene from a notorious 1936 anti-Semitic children’s book, blond-haired “Aryan” schoolchildren laugh and jeer as a Jewish schoolteacher and a group of Jewish students are forcibly ejected from a German grade school. The portrayal of the Jewish teacher and students draws on the most ugly racist stereotypes. Approximately one hundred thousand copies of the book were printed by a Nazi publisher, and it was used in many German schoolrooms.
image
(akg-images)

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4 A lesson in racial biology. In 1935 educator Jakob Graf wrote a series of exercises designed to teach young students to identify a person’s “racial soul” by observing their habits and physical characteristics.

image How We Can Learn to Recognize a Person’s Race

ASSIGNMENTS

  1. Summarize the spiritual characteristics of the individual races.

  2. Collect from stories, essays, and poems examples of ethnological illustrations. Underline those terms which describe the type and mode of the expression of the soul.

  3. What are the expressions, gestures, and movements which allow us to make conclusions as to the attitude of the racial soul?

  4. Determine also the physical features which go hand in hand with the specific racial soul characteristics of the individual figures.

  5. Try to discover the intrinsic nature of the racial soul through the characters in stories and poetical works in terms of their inner attitude. Apply this mode of observation to persons in your own environment.

  6. Collect propaganda posters and caricatures for your race book and arrange them according to a racial scheme. . . .

  7. Collect from illustrated magazines, newspapers, etc., pictures of great scholars, statesmen, artists, and others who distinguish themselves by their special accomplishments (for example, in economic life, politics, sport). Determine the preponderant race and admixture, according to physical characteristics. Repeat this exercise with the pictures of great men of all nations and times.

    . . .

  1. Observe people whose special racial features have drawn your attention, also with respect to their bearing when moving or when speaking. Observe their expressions and gestures.

  2. Observe the Jew: In his way of walking, his bearing, gestures, and movements when talking.

  3. What strikes you about the way a Jew talks and sings?

  4. What are the occupations engaged in by the Jews of your acquaintance?

  5. What are the occupations in which Jews are not to be found? Explain this phenomenon on the basis of the character of the Jew’s soul.

5 Envisioning “racial decline.” Visitors to the 1935 Wonders of Life eugenics exposition in Berlin could view this poster titled “The Qualitative Decline of the Population Due to Weak Reproduction Rates Among the Highly Valued.” The poster graphs population rates, using the symbol of a chronically disabled “Lowly Valued” man that grows to tower over the “Highly Valued” figure. The text explains that “This Is How It Will End” after 120 years if each “Lowly Valued” family continues to have four children while each “Highly Valued” family has only two.
image
(bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY)
6 A lesson in mathematics. A great variety of Nazi propaganda materials—including feature films, traveling exhibits, and these 1936 math exercises—brought home the message that the chronically ill and handicapped were an expensive and ultimately unnecessary burden on German society.

image Question 95: The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million RM [Reich Marks]. How many houses at 15,000 RM each could have been built for that amount? . . .

Question 97: To keep a mentally ill person costs approx. 4 RM per day, a cripple 5.50 RM, a criminal 3.5 RM. Many civil servants receive only 4 RM per day, white-collar employees barely 3.5 RM, unskilled workers not even 2 RM per head for their families.

(a) Illustrate these figures with a diagram.

According to conservative estimates there are 300,000 mentally ill, epileptics, etc., in care.

(b) How much do these people cost to keep in total, at a cost of 4 RM per head?

(c) How many marriage loans at 1,000 RM each . . . could be granted from this money?

ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE

  1. In Source 1, why does Hitler emphasize the importance of education for the development of “the best racial elements”?
  2. Review Goebbels’s statement on the relationship between the individual and the “people” in Source 2. How do his ideas, and those expressed in Sources 5 and 6, challenge the rationale behind Christian charity and/or liberal-democratic ideals of individual human rights?
  3. How do Sources 3–6 bring Nazi assumptions about “racial hygiene” to ordinary Germans?
  4. The evidence presented here is “top down” —it was created by propagandists who supported the Nazis’ racial ideas. Given these limitations, how can historians tackle the question of reception? Can we really know what ordinary people thought about these sources?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Historians have often argued that victims of Nazi racial policy and the Holocaust — Jews, homosexuals, people with chronic mental illness, and others considered “less worthy” — were subjected to processes of dehumanization before they were persecuted or even murdered. Using the sources above, along with what you have learned in class and in this chapter, write a short essay that outlines this process. What are the most important eugenic ideas, and how are they “normalized” — made acceptable to ordinary people — in Nazi propaganda?

Sources: (1, 2) Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 202, 69; (4) George Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: A Documentary History (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), pp. 80–81; (6) Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, p. 154.