Summary: The Influence Of Eugenics In Germany

When studying the Holocaust, it is critical to understand how the science of eugenics influenced the Nazis, however it is just as important to recognize how the United States influenced eugenics in Germany.
Prior to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, the Weimar Republic was in an economic depression with uncontrollable inflation. Similar to the American Great Depression, German elitist looked for how they could save their country from complete ruin. The small community of German eugenicists, or racial hygienists, pushed for sterilizing the institutionalized “unfit.”
In The Nazi Symbiosis, Sheila Faith Weiss argues that German geneticists made a “Faustian bargain” with the Nazi Party. According to Weiss the two parties required each other to survive, the geneticists needed the power of the Nazi Party to continue their research, while the Nazi government needed the geneticists to validate their racial policies with “science.” With this agreement, Weiss asserts that the advancement of eugenics in Germany was not perpetuated by the progress made in the United States. Weiss attempts to invalidate the position taken by some of a U.S.-Germany eugenics connection by stating “…books, like Edwin Black’s War
In The Path to Genocide Christopher Browning examines the Nazi ghettoization policy and the deportation of Jews to German occupied countries. After the invasion of Poland, Jewish ghettos were quarantined from Germans with walls erected around them. Browning’s examination of the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos in Poland shows a logistic mistake was made when the ghettos were sealed off. By sealing off the Jewish ghettos from Poland supplies inside, especially food, were quickly dissolving. This policy was to be reexamined once the use of public funds to feed Jews inside the ghettos was required for their