Eugenics and Racial Hygiene: Applied Research Strategies before, during, and after National Socialism

Abstract

Eugenics was an international movement that began its triumphant sweep through the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet the role of eugenics in the sciences and the humanities differed considerably from one country to the next. In Germany the connection between racial hygiene—as it was generally called in German—and genetics was rather weak as compared to the stronger connections with anthropology and, above all, to psychiatry. As an applied science, eugenics in Germany was concerned primarily with supposedly hereditary mental diseases. Leading racial hygienists contributed to the implementation of the National Socialist Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, urging that the Nazi sterilization program be expanded, even though there were still many questions regarding the hereditability of the diseases and disabilities mentioned in the law. This can be traced back to the dual character of eugenics as a science and a sociopolitical movement.