Hektor wrote:
...If Hitler was in charge right now, the simple truth is that I would be sterilized or more likely murdered because I might pollute the Aryan race with my imperfections. And the scary thing would be only a small drop of evil committed by the government
That is absolutely true: Hitler's first victims were people that he considered to be a threat to the Aryan gene pool.
Nazi Persecution of the Mentally and Physically Disabled. Emphasis mine:
Quote:
Nazi Germany was not the first or only country to sterilize people considered "abnormal." Before Hitler, the United States led the world in forced sterilizations. Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 people in twenty-nine states were sterilized, many of them unknowingly or against their will, while they were incarcerated in prisons or institutions for the mentally ill. Nearly half the operations were carried out in California. Advocates of sterilization policies in both Germany and the United States were influenced by eugenics. This sociobiological theory took Charles Darwin's principle of natural selection and applied it to society. Eugenicists believed the human race could be improved by controlled breeding.
Still, no nation carried sterilization as far as Hitler's Germany. The forced sterilizations began in January 1934, and altogether an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people were sterilized under the law. A diagnosis of "feeblemindedness" provided the grounds in the majority of cases, followed by schizophrenia and epilepsy. The usual method of sterilization was vasectomy and ligation of ovarian tubes of women. Irradiation (x-rays or radium) was used in a small number of cases. Several thousand people died as a result of the operations, women disproportionately because of the greater risks of tubal ligation.
Most of the persons targeted by the law were patients in mental hospitals and other institutions. The majority of those sterilized were between the ages of twenty and forty, about equally divided between men and women. Most were "Aryan" Germans. The "Sterilization Law" did not target socalled racial groups, such as Jews and Gypsies, although Gypsies were sterilized as deviant "asocials," as were some homosexuals. Also, about 500 teenagers of mixed African and German parentage (the offspring of French colonial troops stationed in the Rhineland in the early 1920s) were sterilized because of their race, by secret order, outside the provisions of the law.
Hitler imported his eugenics "science" directly from the United States.
It is incorrect to attribute the eugenics movement in the U.S. to Darwin's work. "Social Darwinism" became the name for the "science"/ideology well after its theories and prescriptions had been promulgated in Europe and the U.S. Spencer and the other advocates of eugenics never understood Darwin's work.
Login
Register
FAQ
