Deaf People in Hitler's Europe

Targeting the “Unfit” and Radical Public Health Strategies in Nazi Germany

49 Targeting the “Unfit” and Radical Public Health Strategies 49 Targeting the “Unfit” and Radical Public Health Strategies in Nazi Germany Nazi ideology identified Jews and Gypsies living within and without the Reich borders as foreign and parasitic elements that threatened the German body politic, and targeted them on biological bases for discrimination and destruction. Yet, even within the German “racial community,” there were components of that population that constituted a biological and economic danger: “hereditarily compromised” (erblich belastet), “asocial,” and “unproductive” people who ostensibly made no significant “contribution” to society and whose existence placed a genetic and financial burden upon the state. Thus, Nazi political and medical authorities increasingly divided their community (Volksgemeinschaft) into its “fit” and “unfit ” members.1 In the twelve years of the National Socialist dictatorship , the government promoted measures that sought to nurture and maintain the genetically, racially, and socially “valuable,” while on a parallel course, it embraced strategies aimed at marginalizing the “unvaluable” and reducing the cost these people placed upon the social welfare network. The targets for these efforts against the unfit were various and fluctuated over time, but included congenitally and hereditarily ill people, institutionalized mentally and physically disabled people, the learning-impaired and “work-shy,” and those “asocials” who did not conform to Nazi Germany’s societal or political norms. Because the definition of “unfit” had genetic or biomedical implications, the National Socialist leadership adopted a series of radical public health measures—usually implemented by public or private medical professionals—to accomplish these objectives (see Friedlander and Proctor, this volume). These strategies began with compulsory sterilization and escalated with the Patricia Heberer 50 Patricia Heberer radicalization of racial and territorial policies, ending in the regime’s first program of systematic mass murder. Much of Nazi ideology and policy focusing on the “unfit” grew from eugenic theories, which gained currency with the flourishing of the natural sciences in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The term “eugenics” (or “good birth”) was coined by the English naturalist and mathematician Sir Francis Galton in 1883; its German corollary, Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), was first invoked by the economist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. At the core of the movement’s belief system was the conviction that human heredity was fixed and immutable, a concept that gained adherence with the advance of Darwinism—especially Social Darwinism—and with the rediscovery in the late nineteenth century of Mendelian genetics. For eugenicists , the ravaging social ills that attended modern society—mental illness, alcoholism, illegitimacy, prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis, criminality, and even poverty—stemmed from hereditary factors. It scarcely occurred to many proponents of eugenics that the societal problems that they perceived burgeoning about them might have their origins in social or environmental factors , or that these evils in fact did spring in large part from the rapid industrialization and urbanization that marked the last half of the nineteenth century in Western Europe and the United States. Adherents of eugenic theories noted only that in this new age of progress, society itself seemed to languish in a state of degeneration and hoped to mobilize “modern” science to arrest the perceived cycle of decay. Eugenics advocates championed three primary objectives: to discover and enumerate “hereditary” characteristics that contributed to the social ills that plagued Western society, to develop biological solutions for these scourges, and to campaign actively for public measures that might combat them. While the “science” of eugenics was to find its most radical interpretation in Germany, its influence was by no means limited to that nation alone. Eugenic research institutions sprang up throughout most of the industrialized Western world, most notably in the United States and Great Britain.2 Whether in England, America, or in Wilhelmine Germany, most eugenicists lobbied for “positive” eugenic 51 Targeting the “Unfit” and Radical Public Health Strategies measures aimed at supporting and maintaining physically, racially, and hereditarily “healthy” individuals through social welfare for “deserving” families, marriage counseling, and motherhood training to encourage the “better” (generally middle class) families to have more children. Dovetailing with efforts to sustain and cultivate the “fit” and “productive” came initiatives to hinder and circumscribe society’s “unproductive” elements and to redirect social and economic resources from the “less valuable” to the “worthy.” Many members of the eugenics community, in Germany as well as in the United States, promoted strategies that might marginalize segments of society with limited mental or social capacity and limit their reproduction...