Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940

From Welfare to Selection: Vienna’s Public Health Office and the Implementation of Racial Hygiene Policies under the Nazi Regime

From Welfare to Selection: Vienna’s Public Health Office and the Implementation of Racial Hygiene Policies under the Nazi Regime* Herwig Czech Eugenics had been always characterized by a discrepancy between the utopian character of its ambitions and the actual possibilities for the realization of its projects. This was to change when National Socialism came to power in Germany. The phantasm of a “national body” (Volksk örper), which would be racially homogeneous (rassenrein) and free from hereditary pathologies (erbgesund), was one of the key elements of Nazi ideology and politics. The consequences of this ideology are well known: tens of thousands of inmates in German psychiatric institutions were murdered in the course of several “euthanasia” campaigns; around 400,000 persons were subject to forced sterilization between 1933 and 1945. The whole health-care system was radically restructured in order to impose the systematic discrimination of individuals according to their “worth” for the Volksgemeinschaft. Entrusted with the double competence of medical science and public authority, the “public health offices” (Gesundheits ämter) of the German Reich assumed a leading role of this major project of population policy. Unlike the health organizations of the NSDAP, only the public health administration possessed the structural requisites to put into practice the politics of racial hygiene with the desired efficiency and on a broad scale. The basis for this was the 1934 “Law for the Standardization of Health Care” (Gesetz zur Vereinheitlichung des Gesundheitswesens). Germany obtained thereby, and for the first time, a unified, centrally regulated system of public health offices and specialist doctors (Amtsärzte), which were endowed with numerous competencies. Racial hygiene, institutionalized under the label “hereditary and racial care” (Erb- und Rassenpflege), became a field of high priority for the health authorities. In this fashion, an effective instrument of bio-politics was created by the Nazi regime, allowing for the permanent and comprehensive medical policing of the whole population .1 In this chapter I shall provide an overview of the implementation of racial hygiene policies in Vienna, particularly between 1938 and 1940. In this short period, significant structural changes took place in the sphere of health care, before the war increasingly limited the scope for further change. The Department for Hereditary and Racial Care (Abteilung Erb- und Rassenpflege), founded in October 1938, played a key role in the implementation of racial hygiene policies in Vienna’s health-care system. Furthermore, it also served as the city’s central agency in regard to racial measures relating to Jews, Roma, Sinti and others.2 Following the Anschluss in March 1938, Vienna, thereafter the second largest city of the German Reich, attained a special position with regard to racial policy. One of the largest German-speaking Jewish communities resided in Vienna, and according to Nazi propaganda, the city’s population contained a high percentage of biologically “inferior people”—an assumption based on Vienna’s close proximity to Eastern and Southeast Europe and the tradition of immigration from these regions. Unlike the German case, Vienna experienced the rapid implementation of radical measures in the health-care system during a relatively short period, with the main organizational changes taking place between 1938 and 1940. In this way, Vienna could soon claim to lead the way in many areas of Nazi health policies, with public health offices often playing a decisive role. Eugenics and Public Health Care before 1938 Upon examination of the rapid, and practically unimpeded, implementation of Nazi racial hygiene after the annexation of Austria, it becomes evident that the question of the structural preconditions underpinning this process must also be studied. Did Nazi health reform really constitute a radical change in the practice of Austrian public health policies, or did it rather continue tendencies that existed before? Time and again this question leads to controversies in Austria, often focusing on the person of Julius Tandler (1869–1936), professor of anatomy at the University of Vienna.3 Until his dismissal by the Austro-fascists in 1934, Tandler was the Viennese city counselor responsible for the health and 318 “Blood and Homeland” welfare system. He was one of the central figures associated with the socio-political reform movement commonly referred to as “Red Vienna.” Tandler employed eugenic arguments in order to justify his ideas of a modern social policy; for example, he defined social policy as the rational management of human capital and differentiated between productive and unproductive costs. Thus, investment in youth welfare and health...