History of the Holocaust Aryan Race A strong nation is a healthy nation o Health is important to Nazi view of the world Key idea contradiction between health and degeneracy o As people in Europe in 19th century began to think about what defines a race or what makes a race different from culture they though a lot about it in terms of evolutionary biology Darwin s ideas fittest survive o Society must adapt and be strong in a biological way traits are passed on from generation to generation Eugenics ways in which society can manage reproduction o There were two categories positive and negative o Positive desirable traits you want to see in the next generation o Negative Eugenics way to stop people with undesirable genes from passing them o German society will be stronger if they are as a race healthier racial purity on national strength o They promoted the idea of motherhood through concrete proposals o Pre and post natal care for mothers with positive eugenics o Mother cross modeled on military cross a soldier would get on field if you had five or six good children you get this cross o Magda Goebbels the perfect mother 1945 in May they decide it is a crime to let children grow up in a society that is not Nazi they commit suicide and kill their children o A lot of emphasis on getting people to internalize the Nuremberg laws o Racial Consciousness Racial heredity is a crucial part of who they are o Are your eyes blue Nazi color classification test Racial ideology Aryan and Undesirable Gypsies transnational people they migrate no homeland o Tend to be living at the margins of society they do odd jobs o Many of them speak a language called Romany o Often living on margins of the community o They don t conform to respectable middle class life o Tend to have a darker skin color poorer and darker o Associated with theft and criminality o Nazis defined them as subhuman o During WWII there was a sense of a Gypsy question that needed to be solved o Mass murder of Roma wasn t systematic like Jews it was a lower priority o Many sent to Poland many Gassed or killed Homosexuals Handicap o Illegal in Germany but during Vimar republic there was flourishing homosexuality o Germany was a threat to the mage of male power the Nazis wanted to promote 1 1933 law passed which made possible compulsory sterilization In cases where doctors knew men or women had hereditary diseases it was legal for the doctor simply to sterilize that person you did not need any consent 2 Protection of German blood and honor forbidding Jews and Germans to marry to help prevent hereditary diseases 3 Passed a law that any couple that wanted to marry to be tested for battery of hereditary disease If one of them or both had come up positive with a disease they would be forbidden to marry 4 There is life unworthy of life that is in the worst cases of hereditary illness it might be in the best interest of society to terminate that life They wanted to popularize this idea 5 Cost benefit analysis of the handicapped Is the cost of keeping this person alive and cared for worth it They would calculate the value of the disabled State sponsored policies in Euthanasia In context of Nazi regime doctors deciding for people that that person should be killed for benefit of society o In late 1938 Hitler used specific case to make a policy A man petitioned because he had a child who was deeply physically deformed and he wanted the doctors to kill the child Hitler sent own doctor and secretary an gave them the power to decide what type of future this child should have and they made a decision to approve euthanasia They then came to berlin and decided to expand this into a policy o Hitler kept the number of people involved in this as small as possible The whole thing is run out of a personal chancellor of Hitler No laws or written decrees were issued to the public They set up a fake research institution with the idea they were gathering data so doctors would send in data Some doctors wanted to be involved it would help the Nazi regime it would help benefit your career T4 Project Summer of 1939 extended this beyond children to adults project referred to as the T4 project Some doctors are skeptical because they say it is legal now but in 20 years what if they are persecuted for this Hitler issues an authorization for the murder of the disabled They sent out questionnaires about patients who are epileptic or feeble minded they would assess who should be murdered Families were not informed why if they requested information they were denied they were not told where the people were transferred too The patients were sent to killing centers Hartheim Castle was a killing center Most were killed with lethal injection until the scale was larger and they needed a new way of killing One of the ways it was determined to kill someone humanely was through gas but there was no technology to do this in 1940 so the technology had to be invented Gas chambers were designed to look like showers to give the appearance of normality to the killing process They would cremate the victims after they gassed them o All this smoke was going up in Germany from crematory People became suspicious The Catholic Church speaks out Bishop of the church speaks out against euthanasia about human rights threatened a public debate the Nazi party does not want August 1941 Hitler closes T4 institutions o 70 000 people murdered key technicians in Nazi regime have learned how to organize killing you can recruit the right personal giving incentive experimented in different ways they can kill people and cover up the killings they learn that Germans will be upset if they see smoke like the crematory outside their village