Eugenics In Nazi Germany

During World War II in Nazi Germany, over 200 doctors conducted painful, barbaric, and typically lethal experiments on concentration camp prisoners, often against their will. The overt purpose of these experiments included increasing survival odds of military personnel, testing pharmaceuticals and treatments to cure illnesses and injuries, and researching methods to promote “German nationalism.” However, the covert purpose of many of these medical experiments was for the Nazi’s to implement the “Final Solution,” a plan which ultimately resulted in the extermination of over 6 million Jews.1 While perhaps only the highest ranking Nazi doctors were privy to the grand Nazi strategy concerning medical experimentation on prisoners, a rather wide

range of doctors was involved in this brutal and inhumane research. To this day, social scientists still debate about what motivated doctors to not only violate any Hippocratic oath they may have taken, but also what motivated them to participate at all, in these medical atrocities. At a different time in a different place, these doctors might have enjoyed professional status commensurate with their qualifications and abilities. However, in the extreme environment of the Nazi concentration camp, a doctor’s status was utterly redefined by his role in the camp. A doctor’s role determined his status, and his efforts to improve his status explained his motivation to participate. For instance, the lowest status doctors in the camps were the prisoner doctors; they were motivated to participate largely to increase their chances of survival. Next, the middle-status non-prisoner doctors were typically motivated to participate in the hopes that it would advance their careers. Lastly, the highest status elite Nazi doctors were motivated to participate by dreams of power that some might say should only be in the hands of God. Thus, the extraordinary circumstances of the concentration camp “work environment” created a new system of social stratification among the doctors. In the camps, these three groups of doctors were able to reset any moral code many of them may have previously followed. The doctors participated in medical experiments on prisoners no longer deeming them unethical, since their work served a higher purpose. It was the doctor’s relative level of social status in the camps that explained his higher purpose, and which drove him to redefine or to ignore his moral breach, becoming involved in activities of extraordinary depravity.
In order to understand the connection between social status and medical ethics in Nazi Germany, both the development of the eugenics movement (a movement to improve a population through controlled breeding), and the geopolitical climate at the time, must be considered.

First, the global history of the eugenics movement is contextually relevant to this study since eugenics policies provided the backbone which legitimized the prisoner medical experimentation program in Nazi Germany. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species, in which he elucidated his Theory of Evolution through natural selection. Darwin suggested that species arise and thrive through inherited variations that increase the species’ ability to compete, survive and reproduce in order to pass on favorable traits to offspring. Sociologist Herbert Spencer took Darwin’s Theory of Evolution one step further, by proposing that societies behave like organisms and also evolve through natural selection. Spencer believed that strong cultures containing individuals with genetically advantageous characteristics would eventually overpower weak cultures containing individuals with genetically disadvantageous characteristics. Spencer’s theory, later named Social Darwinism, expanded globally in the 1870’s providing the basis for a subsequent eugenics movement. As Richard Weikart of Johns Hopkins University, wrote “The eugenics movement emerged…forthrightly based on Darwinian presuppositions”2 [SHOULDN’T THIS FOOTNOTE ‘2’ BE AT END OF SENTENCE?]because it allowed for a scientific explanation to justify why the population should be controlled. Thus, scientists and nations sought to implement Spencer’s theory, and embraced eugenics as a means to create a better world. Eugenicists believed that in order to have a successful society with the more desired traits, individuals with “negative” characteristics should not be permitted to reproduce. One of the world’s first eugenics movements, the

American eugenics movement, was inspired in 1880 by Englishman Sir Francis Galton. Galton contended that the social positions of the British upper classes were determined by their superior genetic makeup. [INSERT CITATION FOR THIS?]Through subsequent years, funding from American organizations such as the Carnegie Institution, and from private donors such as the Harriman railroad family, allowed American reformers and scientists to pursue eugenics projects and legislation. Perhaps the most notable event in the progression of the American eugenics movement occurred in 1927, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states had the right to sterilize “feeble-minded persons” in the case Buck v. Bell.3
While the American eugenics movement spread, Germany was eager to embrace the new pseudo-science, as well. In 1923, Dr. Fritz Lenz, a German physician-geneticist and an advocate of forced sterilization, would “berate his countrymen for their backwardness in the domain of sterilization, as compared with the United States.”4 Furthermore, American eugenics supporters became active participants in the global expansion of eugenics. For example, the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the largest patrons of the American eugenics movement, helped fund various eugenics programs in Germany, including the one that was established at Auschwitz. Additionally, eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin, who helped write the U.S. model eugenic sterilization laws, in 1935 provided the inspiration and the basis for the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws on racial hygiene. One such regulation, the “Blood Protection Law,” criminalized “marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans.”5 The American eugenics movement handed Nazi Germany a legitimized solution to “the Jewish problem” and the Nazi government was so appreciative, that in 1936 Laughlin was invited by Hitler to accept an honorary doctorate at Heidelberg University for his work on the science of racial cleansing. Thus, it was the U.S. that was a critical influence in the creation of eugenics policies in Nazi Germany.
Equally contextually important as was the global history of the eugenics movement, was the unstable political environment of Germany at the time. By the end of World War I in 1918, Germany was left in relative disarray. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Germany was forced to accept blame for the war, to pay reparations to the Allied Nations, to reduce its army, to destroy its air force, and to give up its colonies.6 The provisions of the treaty not only left the previously proud German people humiliated and angry, but it also created a very unstable economic environment which incited civil unrest. The “economy in Germany steadily grew worse, eventually devaluing [its currency] to an exchange rate of 4.2 trillion marks to one U.S. dollar…[and leading] to the German policy of passive resistance.”7 The ruling government at the time, the Weimar Republic, was unable to return national pride to the Germans, to reverse the high unemployment rate and extreme inflation in the German economy, or to otherwise calm its citizens. Furthermore, a leadership vacuum created by the weak Weimar Republic provided an opportunity for extremist German political parties to fill the leadership void. In 1931, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), or Nazi Party, was formed. The Nazi Party became very powerful in German politics leading to Hitler’s political takeover in 1933. Shortly thereafter, Hitler set into motion his plan to end German democracy and began to spread his racial purification ideology. Through his extraordinarily effective use of propaganda, Hitler united his people and identified a common enemy to blame for Germany’s lost national pride, economic depression, and anger: the Jews.8 Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic depression after World War I, and called them a “threat to Germany’s very survival.”10 Having identified the Jews as the cause of Germany’s woes, he implemented a master plan to, as Hitler suggested, cure Germany of the Jewish disease. Ultimately, to implement his racial purity ideology and to support German nationalism, Hitler created the first concentration camp for “undesirables” in Dachau in 1933. While, initially, Dachau primarily was used for detention and labor, as more people were designated undesirable, additional labor camps such as Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Breitenau were established and their functions were expanded. Thus, in the early 1940’s, Hitler’s master plan became more radical and concentration camps evolved from forced labor camps to medical experimentation and extermination camps.