The Eugenics Movement: Improving The Human Race In Nazi Germany

The Eugenics Movement, which originated in the United States, later took place in Nazi Germany in an attempt to enhance the human race. Improving the human race in Nazi Germany meant destroying people that were considered unfit for the community. For instance, people with hereditary diseases, such as mental disabilities, epilepsy, schizophrenia, deafness, and blindness, were either forced to go through the sterilization process or gradually killed. The programs that were designed to help the ill and poor people were failing rapidly, so the government decided that these are just people with hereditary abnormalities and that nothing could be done to help them. They were just wasting money and taking up a lot of space in the hospitals. The government
wanted to improve and reimpose the health and physical well being of the whole population and thus they forced everyone with heredity diseases to get sterilized involuntarily. This movement continued for a decade and as soon as Hitler gained power, Racial Hygiene kicked in and targeted people of all ages, who had a variety of mental and physical disabilities. Many doctors were trained in identifying and sterilizing people with genetic disorders. Robert N. Proctor, in his article “Nazi Doctors, Racial Medicine, and Human Experimentation,” states, “Doctors in fact joined the Nazi Party earlier and in greater numbers than any other professional group. By 1942, more than 38,000 doctors had joined the Nazi Party, representing about half of all doctors in the country” (Proctor 19). It is very shocking to know that doctors, who are supposed to save lives, were actually destroying lives of many ill people. The Nazi doctors were “selectively breeding” in order to improve the nation and make the society a healthier place for all. The doctors wiped out everyone who were weak and unproductive. They selected and killed people and covered up their sins. No one were able to differentiate between right and wrong at that time and thus all this discrimination continued to happen. This Racial Hygiene program of Hitler would not have been possible without the medical community in Germany. They applied the pseudoscience ideologies and committed mass extinctions of the less capable people. The physicians in Nazi Germany considered those incapable human beings as living deads. Those beings were used as elements for scientific research. For instance, scientists utilized twins for research on the nature versus nurture idea. They separated twins by putting them in two different places to determine the impact of racial and social surroundings. They also used people for testing pharmaceutical drugs in an attempt to figure out which medicines will effectively preventing contagious diseases. For instance, they tested some immunizations in order to see which ones will effectively stop diseases like malaria and tuberculosis from spreading. In conclusion, eugenics eventually led to racial hygiene and nazi medicine. Scientists tested abundant methods to see which ones will be the most efficient and inexpensive in sterilizing the racial minorities, including Jews, Roma, and other groups of people that Nazis considered to be a threat to the community due to their race and health. The people who were mainly targeted to be destroyed in Nazi Germany were the people living in public institutions, such as the hospitals, who were considered unworthy of life due to their heredity diseases. Doctors were surprisingly the first people who joined this program to wipe out the ill people. Doctors are supposed to help improve the health of sick people and save lives, but instead were doing more bad than good. They were committing sinful deeds and were not able to distinguish between what was right and what was wrong. Hence, the eugenics movement in Germany eventually resulted in racial hygiene and nazi medicine.