Racial hygiene

Racial hygiene was a set of early twentieth century state sanctioned policies by which certain groups of individuals were allowed to procreate and others not, with the expressed purpose of promoting certain characteristics deemed to be particularly desirable. The most noteworthy example is the extensive implementation of racial hygiene policies by Nazi Germany but similar policies were implemented throughout Europe and North America.

The concept of racial "purity" was developed by Arthur de Gobineau. De Gobineau argued that race created culture, and that "impure" "race-mixing" leads to chaos. Racial hygiene was historically tied to traditional notions of public health, but usually with an enhanced emphasis on heredity. Francis Galton began work in 1869 to find a statistical science of heredity which could encourage voluntary care in selecting partners, and in 1883 introduced the term "eugenics" for this subject, but in the early 20th century a eugenics movement adopted ideas of Mendelian genetics and promoted negative eugenics to prevent those thought to be unsuitable from having children, and eugenics was misused to legitimise policies of racial hygene.

In Germany

File:EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg

Propaganda for Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too." from the Office of Racial Policy's Neues Volk.

The German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz introduced the term Rassenhygiene in his "Racial hygiene basics" (Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene) in 1895. In its earliest incarnation it was concerned more with the declining birthrate of the German state and the increasing number of mentally ill and disabled in state institutions (and their costs to the state) than with the "Jewish question" and "de-Nordification" (Entnordung) which would come to dominate its philosophy in Germany from the 1920s through the second World War.

"Race" was often interchangeably used to mean the "Aryan race" which was said to represent an ideal and pure master race. In the 1930s, under the 'expertise' of eugenicist Ernst Rüdin, it was this latter use of "racial hygiene" which was embraced by the followers of National Socialist ideology, who demanded Aryan racial purity and condemned miscegenation. This belief in the importance of German racial purity often served as the theoretical backbone of Nazi policies of racial superiority and later genocide. These policies began in 1935, when the National Socialists enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which legislated racial purity by forbidding marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans as Rassenschande or racial pollution.

A key part of National Socialism was the concept of racial hygiene and during their rule the field was elevated to the primary philosophy of the German medical community, first by activist physicians within the medical profession, particularly amongst psychiatrists. This was later codified and institutionalized during and after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, during the process of Gleichschaltung (literally, "coordination" or "unification") which streamlined the medical and mental hygiene (mental health) profession into a rigid hierarchy with National Socialist-sanctioned leadership at the top.

Racial hygienists played key roles in the Holocaust, the National Socialist effort to purge Europe of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, trans people, political dissidents, the mentally retarded and the insane.

After World War II

After World War II, the racialist ideology was hailed as un-scientific and pseudoscience by many, although there were some supporters of the movement such as nobel prize winner William Shockley and Julian Huxley. Richard Lynn has also been associated with the idea of eugenics.

See also

• Ethnic cleansing
• Genetic pollution, a controversial term because of its similar connotations
• Eugenics in Japan
• Pure blood theory in Korea
• Mental hygiene
• Nazi eugenics
• Racial policy of Nazi Germany
• White supremacy
• Black supremacy
• Rassenschande

Further reading

• Glad, John. (2008). Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century. Hermitage Publishers.
• Joseph, J. (2004). The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope. New York: Algora. (2003 United Kingdom Edition by PCCS Books)
• Joseph, J. (2006). The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes. New York: Algora.
• Paul, Diane B. Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995.
• Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.