Preview

Eugenics During The Holocaust

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1641 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Eugenics During The Holocaust
During the barbarity of the Holocaust, thousands of Nazis discreetly committed morally atrocious acts in support of Nazi Germany, completely disregarding their inevitable and significant consequences. Influenced by Nazi propaganda, laws targeting minority groups, and the encouragement of prominent Nazi leaders, these Nazi’s participated in immoral sexual acts and kidnapped innocent children despite basic human morality. Striving to breed the Aryan race, they felt a sacred obligation to fulfill their duty to Hitler and the legacy of Nazi Germany. Kidnapping almost “400,000 children” (Court 1) and forcibly “sterilizing 400,000 people” (“The Biological” 1), their actions brutally enforced eugenics and the loss of morality. Even though the Holocaust …show more content…
As Lebensborn programs gained momentum, deliberately selected Aryan-appearing people endured various tests to be deemed fit for breeding. According to “The Nazi Eugenics,” Nazi doctors and Nazi communities actively sought out and “reported” people with mental or physical disabilities to be sterilized in order to promote eugenics and prevent contamination (1). Nazis targeted minorities for their traits and celebrated the enforcement of eugenics, establishing collectivism that strengthened the Nazi State. In fact, according to “The Biological,” the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring enforced the invasive sterilization of almost “400,000 Germans”, resulting in hundreds of fatalities (2-3). These dangerous procedures resulted in the forced sterilization of unwilling victims in unsanitary conditions, however, sterilization of impure people quickly caught on. Surprisingly, the German influence of encouraging sterilization carried over internationally. Sterilization rates significantly increased in “American states...and new laws were passed in Finland, Norway, and Sweden during the same period” (“The Biological” 1), illustrating Germany’s influential presence on the international stage. Designed to restrict impure relationships, the 1935 ‘Blood Protection Law,’ “criminalized marriage or sexual relations …show more content…
Laws targeting minorities and the disabled resulted in mass sterilizations and the encouragement of racial discrimination. Both men and women firmly believed their immoral sexual relationships protected the legacy of Nazism and fulfilled their patriotic duty. Additionally, his propaganda led to the kidnappings and abandonment of thousands of innocent children. In the modern world, some countries still face oppression from their government or extremist groups, forcing them to participate in deranged practices and dehumanizing thousands. The suffering of innocents and the horrendous beliefs and methods of their oppressors are often understated and hidden under the superficial appearance of eventful atrocities. Amidst all of the crimes committed during the Holocaust, ultimately the atrocities of the Lebensborn must never be forgotten. When basic human morality becomes abandoned and results in obscene acts under the encouragement of propaganda, the actions of the oppressors must never be forgotten to ensure history does not repeat an abominable

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The Holocaust, state-sponsored murder of the Jews in the concentration camps, is one of the darkest events in the human history. Six million people were heartlessly tortured and executed in various places in Germany, France, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, and Austria. It is impossible to deny the evil nature of the Holocaust, and scholars have been trying to investigate the essence of evil in the concentration camps. Richard L. Rubenstein, exploring the nature of the Holocaust from the Judeo-Christian perspective, rejects the idea that God who is worthy of worship would impose such evil punishment upon the Jews, while Primo Levi attributes the evil nature of the Holocaust to lack of structure in the camps and its effect of the moral degradation on its members, and Resnais ascribes the evil of the Holocaust to the ignorance of human nature and absence of moral development of…

    • 1088 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Sanger simultaneously sought to connect birth control to the eugenics movement. This would apply to mostly women of color, and most of the time women were being sterilized without their consent. She believed that in doing so poor families and families of color would have less children resulting in a more “fit” population, since they have undesirable traits such as low intelligence. McCormick was also apart of a suffrage movement that excluded black women and other minorities.…

    • 77 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout the course of humanity, we have experienced terrible transgressions in our society. Although they took place sixty-one years apart, similar horrific events from the Holocaust (1933-1945) and the Rwandan Genocide (1994) occurred. In Night, the Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis believed they were “racially superior” so they killed the Jews because they were deemed “inferior” and needed to be eliminated.…

    • 996 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    First seen with the practice of sterilization, that became popularized five months into Adolf Hitler's rise to power (1933), when the Nazi’s began legalizing and enforcing non-voluntary sterilization for those deemed to possess a hereditary disorder or disease; that would retrograde advancements of the genetically and evolutionarily superior Aryan Race. The practice of sterilization in Nazi Germany would then begin to take form as the more extreme euthanasia program, which would subsequently lead to the establishment of the Nazi extermination camps. purpose built for the effective extermination of all those determined to be “unfit” for german society including Jews, Gypsies, Mentally Insane or Handicapped, Homosexual and other gender disordered individuals, as well as of those who were opposed to the Reich such as communists or democrats with the inclusion of prisoners of…

    • 636 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Eugenics Movement, which originated in the United States, later took place in Nazi Germany in an attempt to enhance the human race. Improving the human race in Nazi Germany meant destroying people that were considered unfit for the community. For instance, people with hereditary diseases, such as mental disabilities, epilepsy, schizophrenia, deafness, and blindness, were either forced to go through the sterilization process or gradually killed. The programs that were designed to help the ill and poor people were failing rapidly, so the government decided that these are just people with hereditary abnormalities and that nothing could be done to help them. They were just wasting money and taking up a lot of space in the hospitals. The government…

    • 616 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    More than six million Jews were killed in World War II, with over two million of those killed, being children. The Jews were targeted in a mass genocide by the Nazis’, who ultimately were defeated, but not because of what they were doing to the Jews but because the allied forces were able to stop the Germans military advance. Elie Wiesel, author of Night, a biographical account of the Holocaust, does a skillful job in his narrative, showing us how hard it was for people to grasp the unbelievable possibility of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. We have to regularly remind ourselves of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust so that we are never lulled into believing that people couldn’t do something…

    • 689 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In terms of births, between 1933 and 1939, the Nazis main aim was to increase pure German Births. In order to achieve this, the Nazis brought into play financial incentives, for example marriage loans, birth grants etc. In addition to this, the Nazis improved maternity services and used methods of propaganda to raise status and self-esteem of mothers and housewives. One method in which they did this was through awards, such as the ‘Mother’s Cross’. Furthermore, penalties were introduced to encourage people to have children. These penalties included: higher taxes on childless couples; tighter penalties on abortion; and restrictions on contraception information. Measures were also introduced for compulsory sterilisation of ‘undesirables’ (i.e. those with hereditary conditions).…

    • 704 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The tragedy we know today as the Holocaust has set the mark for horrific events that followed, and to come. This catastrophe is one of the greatest examples of dehumanization, and Elie Wiesel offers his first hand account of the disaster to educate people on what took place during this time. Wiesel shares with his audience the brutality, and hatefulness of the Nazis and their followers. He presents his readers with multiple instances of people being stripped of their rights, and humanity. In correlation with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a number of rights have been broken or cease to exist.…

    • 236 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Nazi Racial Policy

    • 443 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Nazism can be regarded as the most destructive force of the 20th century in part due to the sinister implications of Nazi racial policy on civilians amidst the European war. Essentially, the impact of Nazi race ideology was most adversely felt by the Jewish people as generations of Jews in both Germany and Nazi occupied territories were subjected to denationalization and subsequently mass-exodus under the banner of aryanisation and the policy of Lebensraum. Moreover, this form of race policy inclusive of the Nazi belief in the establishment of Herrenvolk or a master race is what led to the Holocaust, claiming the lives of more than 6 million Jews. Yet, the impact of Nazi racial policy did not only extend towards extermination but also forced upon a state of…

    • 443 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Imagine you’re having a fun time with your family doing something, and then some people grab you and separate your entire family. Now you have to work at a camp with a ton of strangers if you don’t want to get killed. Those people that took you were Nazis. The camp that they took you to was a concentration camp which reeks with the stench of illnesses, diseases, and death. That’s what the Holocaust victims had to live through. This essay will be about the social injustices of the concentration camps during the Holocaust.…

    • 610 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    During the Holocaust, the Nazis perceived women as weak, inferior, and sexual objects because they were useless in contributing to the warfare. An example is the way Jewish women were treated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. As a result, the Nazis viewed Jewish women as an agent of fertility, motherhood, and homebuilders. During the Holocaust, women were considered useless, especially pregnant women and mothers of small children, due to the fact that they were unable to participate in tasks of the war. This counts for the fact as to why Jewish women were subjugated by the Nazis on a sexually violent level, such as rape, being sexually humiliated, and dehumanized. The Nazi pattern of sexual-violence started against Jewish women during the…

    • 554 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Holocaust Article

    • 1013 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Children were especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust. The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous” groups in accordance with their ideological views, either as part of the “racial struggle” or as a measure of preventative security. The Germans and their collaborators killed children both for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.…

    • 1013 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The 1933 Law for the Encouragement of Marriage (newly married couples given loan of 1000 marks - for each child produced they got to keep 250 marks and did not have to repay.) These loans were for “vouchers for furniture and other household goods, provided, of course, that the women gave up work on marriage and devoted herself to motherhood” Women who had over eight children were given the Motherhood Cross (handed out on Hitler's mother's birthday) Abortion outlawed and contraceptives hard to come by. Young women had to join the BDM which taught them how to be perfect housewives and child producers. Nazi's established 'Lebensborn' during the war - this was where unmarried women could go to meet racially pure SS men to become pregnant. Women considered 'racially undesirable' were sterilized (by 1934 - 28 000) Laws were introduced to remove women from civil service. They were gradually barred from being doctors, lawyers, judges or any role with power or politics. Petty restrictions to encourage homemaking / childbearing included: banning of make-up and wearing of trousers, hair put in plaits/bun but not dyed/permed, slimming was discouraged and women were encouraged to develop child-bearing hips.…

    • 1424 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    What changed: When the Nazi party rose to prominence in the 1930s, there was a sudden shift in a lot of German culture even in the areas of sex and gender. Though women had gained new freedoms in the post-WWI era, and sexuality could be expressed much more publically, the Third Reich passed a remarkably fast reversal of this “cultural decay,” as it was portrayed in the media. The Nazis’ main focus was the creation of a pure Aryan race – and their social policies stressed a rigid family structure that focused on giving birth to children. Starting in the 1940’s, couples needed a marriage clearance certificate to show that they had been screened for “racial purity”. Though the official ideology was of dutiful…

    • 173 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Growing up you are thought that education is the road to succeed. That school teaches you all you need to know about your countries history and the progress it has made. But in reality they hide many things from the students. For example I was thought that Christopher was the one who discover America but when I arrive to college one professor told me the opposite. So in reality who do we believe? How do we distinguish who’s right and whose wrong?…

    • 738 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays