The History Of The Nazi Eugenic Campaign

From the mid-1930’s to the mid -1940’s, the Nazi party organized ethnic, racial, and physical/mental cleansing of Germany’s citizens all across the country. The Nazis wanted to form a pure Aryan race across all of Germany and was willing to do whatever it would take to successfully establish this Aryan race. By the Nazis eugenic and racial-ethnic campaigns, they wanted a pure race without any persons having disabilities or being ethnically different. The reason that these two campaigns were separate was that the Nazis campaign on the disabled was questionable because the people with disabilities were usually Aryan, but still discriminated against, while the ethnically charged campaign was stating that people with different ethnicities were

The eugenic campaign began in the year 1933 when the Nazi party began to rise to power. The Nazis formed laws around the eugenic campaign so that these policies could eventually become engrained in the German population’s minds. The policies themselves talked about what constituted as being physically able. The Nazis wanted the population’s offspring to be pure and without ailments. By the Nazis advocating this, they wanted reproducers to be physically well and the law states, “Anyone who has a hereditary illness can be rendered sterile by a surgical operation” (Diseased Offspring Law 88). This meant that people who were born with physical or mental ailments could be forced to become sterilized in order to preserve the purity of the Aryan race. The problem with this was that the people who were being forced to be sterilized were German citizens. It didn’t matter to the Nazis that these people had rights. The Nazis were willing to do anything to craft a perfectly pure race. The ethnic campaign of the Nazis was a little different than the eugenic campaign in the sense that the Nazi Government no longer considered races such as: Jews, Romas, or Gypsies – German citizens

By the Nazis sterilizing the physically and mentally unfit and by determining what made someone Jewish while banning marriages between interracial couples. The Nazis didn’t take the person’s own wishes into consideration when ordering sterilization: “Sterilization must be carried out even against the wishes of the person to be sterilized” (Diseased Offspring Law 89). The Nazis didn’t have to budge about sterilization laws because The Hereditary Health Courts were the ones making the judgments of sterilization. The ban on marriages between Jewish and Aryan was incontrovertible. There was no say for the couple unless they wanted to leave the country to be together because otherwise there was no way the Nazis would allow interracial marriages to