Racial hygiene

The German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz introduced the term "racial hygiene" ('') in 1895 in his Racial Hygiene Basics'' ('). He discussed the importance of avoiding "counterselective forces" such as war, inbreeding, free healthcare for the poor, alcohol and venereal disease. In its earliest incarnation it was more concerned by the declining birthrate of the German state and the increasing number of mentally-ill and disabled people in state-run institutions (and their costs to the state) than it was by the "Jewish question" and the "degeneration of the Nordic race" (') which would come to dominate its philosophy in Germany from the 1920s to the Second World War. During the last years of the 19th century, the German racial hygienists Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmayer regarded certain people as inferior, and they opposed their ability to procreate. These theorists believed that all human behaviors, including crime, alcoholism and divorce, were caused by genetics. == Nazi Germany ==

checking the facial characteristics of a Romani woman, as part of her racial studies During the 1930s and 1940s, institutes in Nazi Germany studied genetics, created genetic registries and researched twins. Nazi scientists also studied blood, and developed theories on the supposed racial specificity of blood types, with the goal of distinguishing an "Aryan" from a Jew by examining their blood. In the 1940s, Josef Mengele, a doctor in the Schutzstaffel (SS), provided human remains that were taken from Auschwitzblood, limbs and other body partsto be studied at the institutes. Harnessing racial hygiene as a justification, the scientists used prisoners from Auschwitz and other concentration camps as test subjects for their human experiments. In the 1930s, under eugenicist Ernst Rüdin, National Socialist ideology embraced this latter use of "racial hygiene", which demanded Aryan racial purity and condemned miscegenation. That belief in the importance of German racial purity often served as the theoretical backbone of Nazi policies of racial superiority and later genocide. The policies began in 1935, when the National Socialists enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which legislated racial purity by forbidding sexual relations and marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans as Rassenschande (racial shame). and hereditarily unfit'' under the Nazi regime as a result of his mixed race heritage Racial hygienists played key roles in the Holocaust, the German National Socialist effort to purge Europe of Jews, Romani people, Slavs, Blacks, mixed race people, and physically or intellectually disabled people. In the Aktion T4 program, Hitler ordered the execution of mentally-ill patients by euthanasia under the cover of deaths from strokes and illnesses. A key aspect of National Socialism was the concept of racial hygiene and it was elevated to the primary philosophy of the German medical community, first by activist physicians within the medical profession, particularly amongst psychiatrists. That was later codified and institutionalized during and after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, during the process of Gleichschaltung (literally, "coordination" or "unification"), which streamlined the medical and mental hygiene (mental health) profession into a rigid hierarchy with National Socialist-sanctioned leadership at the top. The blueprint for Nazism's attitude toward other races was written by Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz, and Eugen Fischer and published under the title Human Heredity Theory and Racial Hygiene (1936). == After World War II ==

After World War II, the idea of "racial hygiene" was denounced as unscientific by many, but there continued to be supporters and enforcers of eugenics even after there was widespread awareness of the nature of Nazi eugenics. After 1945, eugenics proponents included Julian Huxley and Marie Stopes, but they typically removed or downplayed the racial aspects of their theories. == See also ==