Nazi Eugenics

This is the information that I plan to include in the section of my paper that discusses how the Nazis took advantage of societal beauty to destroy other races. The sentences found under each category are quoted from an article about Nazi Medicine.

Analysis of Nazi Aesthetics:
A. Transition from physigonomy
-show how it bloomed from physiognomy (p--> social darwinism--> eugenics)
one can trace the intellectual origins of Nazi racial hygiene to the theory of Social

Darwinism

-define eugenics
-foreboding final sentence

(Nikolas Rose and Robert Proctor suggest that the ‘enhancement’ of the German race

implied that both positive eugenic measures had to be taken to strengthen the quality of

the ‘germplasm’ and negative eugenic measures to eliminate the procreation of ‘unfit’

individuals.)

-in 1895...Alfred Ploetz warned of the degeneration of the German race. Providing medical care to the ‘weak’ was ‘counter-selecting’ the ‘unfit’ elements in the race and was thus causing the weak to multiply at faster rates than the talented and the gifted. Other mechanisms of counter-selection included wars and revolutions, which resulted in the death or injury of the young and able-bodied, while the provision of welfare to the misfits and the poor further impoverished the genetic stock of the race.

--->intelligent racial hygiene might eliminate the need for a struggle for existence altogether)

-trying to stay that the only way to achieve eugenics was to dispose of other

inferior races.

B. The Birth of Eugenics from Aesthetics
-Pose question- how was such a manipulated form of aesthetic beauty able to take root

in German culture and result in such dire results?

-almost half of the nazi government were professional or aspiring artists

-Nazi propaganda consistently blurred the lines between the ‘beautiful’ and the

‘good’

-depict precise arrangements of disciplined, masculine bodies in synchronic

motion, taking their positions around the Fuhrer. Their faces are shaved, their hair

cut, their uniforms clean

-The Nazi spectacle aimed to recruit German aesthetic judgment on the side of

Nazi rhetoric...The beauty inherent in the biological purity of the German race was

first sensed...and thus presented as a goal: an ideal that could be sought by

means of racial purification.

C. Death in the Name of Beauty

-Now that Aryanism is established as beautiful, Germany takes more intense actions

-Nazi policy on racial hygiene progressed from the sterilization of supposed

‘homozygous’ carriers of genetic diseases...to preventing ‘inter-racial’ marriage

between Jews and non-Jews, to the extermination of mentally ill patients starting

in August 1939...and the ‘Final Solution’ to exterminate all Jews at the start of 1941...to destroy all concentration camp inmates not willing or able to work

-In the case of the Nazis, the metaphor of the Body of the Volk, given in holistic terms, allowed an ontological definition of disease to be mobilized. Disease was thought to be caused by some ‘germ’: the Jew, the insane, the homosexual, the Gypsy. This ‘optimistic’ conception of disease meant that Nazi agents could get rid of the ‘parasites’ that had invaded the body of the Volk.