Nazi ideology added the element of racial purity to eugenics and then went far beyond exclusion. The Nazis made millions, mostly Jewish, victims in the concentration camps on the basis of this odious ideology.
In 1923, when Hitler was in prison for a year for high treason, he read about the concept of racial purity in a German anthropology book. Partly inspired by the strict sterilization laws of the United States and the anti-Semitic racial ideology of the Anglo-German writer Houston Chamberlain, Mein Kampf (1925) included an extensive chapter on eugenics and racial hygiene. The highly anti-Semitic Baltic émigré Alfred Ernst Rosenberg became the lead author of the popular description of Nazi ideology. This ensured that the Jews, who had previously defended Germany as soldiers or who had contributed to the construction of society as doctors, scholars or artists, were labeled a 'despicable race, at the bottom of society'.
Immediately after Hitler's seizure of power and taking office as Reich Chancellor in 1933, the first signs 'Forbidden for Jews' appeared in public spaces. Shortly afterwards, the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases was promulgated. It defined nine conditions that were considered to be hereditary and therefore undesirable:dementia, schizophrenia, epilepsy, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, Huntington's disease, manic depression, severe birth defects and hereditary alcoholism. Under this law, no less than half a million alleged carriers of these conditions were mandatorily sterilized in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1940.
In 1935, German eugenics policy became distinctly racial, with the introduction of the “Laws for the Protection of the German Blood,” or the “Race Laws of Nuremberg.” The first of those laws, the Reichs Burgerwet, stipulated that only Aryans were citizens of could be the Empire. Jews were deprived of much of their civil rights. Jews in government service were removed from office and Jewish entrepreneurs were prohibited from employing German women. The main purpose of the law was to determine who was German and who was not:whoever had three or four German grandparents was German; whoever had two was a half-breed and someone without German grandparents was no longer seen as a German. There was a long list of indications of who was Jewish. In doing so, the Germans deviated from the strict Jewish 'rabbinical mother lineage'.
The second law, "for the protection of German blood and German honour," prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jewish Germans. Sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews was also banned. Mixed marriages would affect the blood purity of the 'Aryan race'.
The third law was "to protect genetic health." According to Nazi philosophy, the Germanic race had to remain pure. To ensure this, couples wishing to marry were required to undergo a medical examination, during which a doctor determined whether they were genetically capable of producing "suitable children." Marriages were, among other things, prohibited if one of the partners suffered from a venereal disease, suffered from epileptic seizures or was mentally retarded.
Academic Eugenics
The academic center for eugenic research in Nazi Germany was the Universitäts-Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene in Frankfurt am Main. Its founder and director was Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a leading figure in the field of genetic research. In recognition of this, Von Verschuer was invited to the Royal Society . in 1939 to speak in London. His lecture was entitled:Twin research from the time of Francis Galton to the present time .
In 1934, Joseph Mengele, then 23, became a research assistant and PhD student at Von Verschuer. After his promotion in 1936, he became a member of the SS and did his military service. In 1940, Mengele was drafted into the Wehrmacht and volunteered to join the Waffen-SS. He served as an army doctor at the front in Russia. After being seriously injured and returning to Berlin, he was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Heinrich Himmler.
This camp, known as the largest extermination camp in the history of mankind, was seen by Mengele as his 'laboratory'. Camp doctor Joseph Mengele, the 'angel of death', was responsible for the selection of the prisoners and paid special attention to twins. He used these for some gruesome experiments. Afterwards, they too were murdered, after which their organs were removed and sent to institutions in Germany, including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin. Von Verschuer was now director there.
In total, about 6 million of the 9 million Jews in Europe were killed in World War II. Besides Jews, other groups were also victims of the Nazi regime:half a million gypsies, a quarter of a million mentally or physically handicapped persons, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, communists, partisans and no less than 3 million Russian prisoners of war. At the start of the war, the Netherlands had 140,000 Jews out of 9 million inhabitants. After the first raids in 1941 and the deportations via Westerbork, more than 104,000 Dutch Jews died in the Nazi concentration camps.
After the war, Von Verschuer was only labeled a 'follower'. He received a modest fine of six hundred Reichsmarks. After that he remained professor of Human Genetics at the University of Münster for several years. And he was certainly not the only Nazi to hold a high academic position after the war. There were simply too few uninfected colleagues.
For example, the leading racial anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eicksted became director of the newly established Anthropological Institute in Mainz after the war, where he was succeeded in 1961 by his assistant, the former Nazi Ilse Schwidetsky. She would openly admit that she had been one of the German physical anthropologists who, at the request of the National Socialists, rewrote - read:falsified - her publications on human variety in order to give a scientific basis to the Nazi racial theory. Joseph Mengele managed to avoid prosecution in time and fled to South America, where he died in 1979.
In response to the horrific Nazi experiments, a post-war debate sparked that resulted in the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association. In that statement, the WMA provided guidance on ethical principles for physicians and others involved in medical research. The Declaration of Helsinki was first published in 1964 and has since been revised several times.
Eugenics and racial theory in the Netherlands
Shortly after Galton, in 1897, the Dutch philosopher Cornelis Wijnaendts also pointed out the danger of the 'just breeding paupers'. He argued for a marriage ban for the poor, and later also for the insane, tuberculosis sufferers, the deaf and dumb, drunkards and criminals. Several people supported him, such as the Dutch sociologist Sebald Steinmetz, who stated that 'the underclass, with its large families, owed its disastrous fate to itself'. He argued in favor of promoting more children of 'more valued people'.
In 1905 the theologian and physician Jan Rutgers defended the 'marriage and birth prohibition of the poor and sterilization of hereditary taxes' as state policy. In 1915 Steinmetz also promoted eugenic measures to improve the human species. A Royal Decree from 1922 to draw up an index of genetic abnormalities in the population, however, was never implemented due to a lack of money. There were also no eugenic laws in the Netherlands, any more than in Belgium and France.
The true advocate for eugenics in the Netherlands was the Utrecht physician and cell biologist Marianne van Herwerden. She saw no danger in the strict American eugenics philosophy, which she had come into contact with during a study trip to the United States. She introduced the same theories in the Netherlands in her 1926 popular science book 'Heredity in Mensch and Eugenics'.
From 1927, Van Herwerden was Vice-President of the International Federation of Eugenic Organisations, and initiator of the – never successful – Dutch Institute for Genetic Research in Humans and for Racial Biology, founded in 1933, not long before her death in January 1934. In 1930 she united various initiatives in the field of eugenics in the Netherlands Eugenics Federation . Van Herwaarden was still quite moderate in comparison with foreign colleagues. In 1924 she disapproved of an anti-Jewish lecture on racial hygiene during a congress in Innsbruck.
In 1919, the Groningen professor of genetics, Tine Tammes, and her successor Marius Sirks in 1937, praised the eugenic ideals. Even more outspoken was the rector magnificus of the Wageningen Agricultural University, the geneticist Jan Antonie Honing. During his Dies speech in 1934, he proposed introducing regulatory genetic measures in humans as well, such as those used in agriculture and animal breeding.
The eugenics movement was also involved in the layout of the new Zuiderzee polders. The dry land had to become a model society. Eugenic selection committees assessed the aspiring settlers for their alleged hereditary physical and mental characteristics. Unemployed people were not eligible.
At the same time, several geneticists, such as the Amsterdam professor of genetics Arend Hagedoorn and his wife, were fervent opponents of eugenics. They called the eugenic idea scientifically unfounded. Parliament debated eugenic legislation a number of times, but ultimately no eugenic legal measure was actually introduced in the Netherlands.
The progressive and liberal MPs voted in favor of a proposal for compulsory genetic testing before marriage, but the confessionals held back. In the Netherlands, both Catholics and Protestants were staunchly against birth control, especially against irreversible sterilization. It went against all established beliefs.
According to Jan Noordman, who obtained his PhD on this subject at the university in Nijmegen in 1989, eugenics has never really gained a foothold in the Netherlands. Purely racist considerations never played a role here either. Nevertheless, some scientists did indeed look at the eastern neighbors with some jealousy, because they had many resources and laboratories at their disposal.
During the war, the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and the associated strict racial measures had few supporters in Dutch scientific circles. Only a few believed in 'racial purity', such as the anti-Semitic tropical doctor Nuessen, the NSB doctor Piebenga and the NSB man, biologist and later SS man Stroër. In 1942 he became a professor in Groningen, where only a few students attended his lectures. After four months, he left for Berlin again to conduct research on the material supplied by Mengele from Auschwitz.
In fact, eugenics was so little accepted in Dutch society that it was difficult for the German occupier to find doctors for a sterilization program. Even NSB doctors did not want to cooperate. Nevertheless, according to the historian professor Lou de Jong, several hundred people have been sterilized. However, the program was sloppy and sham operations were also performed so that the sterilization could easily be reversed. Only the SS man and gynecologist Van der Hoeven has actually sterilized many Jewish women. The four-year prison sentence imposed on him after the war could be commuted to service as a government doctor in New Guinea. Professor Stroër was sentenced to a year in prison.
Scientific Resistance
Before the Second World War, opinions among scientists in the Netherlands about mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews differed widely, both among the Jewish and among the non-Jewish population. Initially, alluding to the alleged specific facial and other features of the Jewish part of our population was socially accepted, just like in the rest of the Western world.
But from the moment that the glorification of the Germanic super race grew among the eastern neighbors, a turning point occurred with us. The rigid German eugenic ideals were moved away and the aversion to their approach to racial differences grew. In 1935, the anatomist Joannes Barge and in 1936 the physical anthropologist Adele J. van Bork-Feltkamp clearly distanced themselves from the growing German nationalist tendencies. They pointed to the lack of a scientific basis for the Nazis' racial doctrine.
During the German occupation, Barge – a professor and also a senator for the Catholic People's Party – gave a lecture on 26 November 1940 in Leiden on the nonsense of racial doctrine. There was no homogeneous Germanic super race, he taught, and the supposedly "pure Aryans" were nothing but a mixture of Baltic, Scandinavian, and southern German peoples. A Dutch race did not exist, any more than a Jewish race. The Jews were bound by their religion, he taught. Barge advised future doctors not to accept this racial nonsense as scientific. His students then joined the striking law students who had listened to another and still well-known protest speech by the lawyer Rudolf Cleveringa further down the Rapenburg. The following day, Leiden University was closed. Barge was deported soon after.
At the Anatomical Institute of the University of Amsterdam, resistance was fought by the general practitioner and physical anthropologist Arie de Froe. With the knowledge of his director, the resistance fighter Martinus Woerdeman, and on the advice of the director of the nearby Brain Institute Hans Ariëns Kappers, he drew up so-called 'non-Jewish' certificates from fellow Jewish citizens on the basis of extensive anthropometry. In this way he managed to save hundreds of Jews from deportation until the middle of 1943.