Eugenics in Germany: Antisemitism, Eugenics, and German Jews

Antisemitic sign reading, "Jews Are Unwanted Here." Germany, circa 1935-1945. Source: USHMM.

"In the youth of every German Jew there comes the painful moment which he will remember for the rest of his life, when for the first time he becomes conscious that he has come into the world as a second-class citizen, and that no ability or accomplishment can liberate him from this condition."¹
-- Walter Rathenau

Overview

In 1900, Germany was a powerful nation with a huge empire. Twenty years later, the empire was gone and the nation was in ruins. Humiliated by the treaty that ended World War I, many Germans looked for someone to blame for everything that had gone wrong. They targeted not only the disabled but also the Jews. Initially, antisemitism was not central to the German eugenics movement. Alfred Ploetz, the founder of the movement, considered Jews part of the "Nordic race." By the 1920s, German eugenicists increasingly viewed Jews as members of a separate race that threatened "Nordics" or "Aryans."²

Jews as Outsiders

Jews, like other minorities in Germany, were regarded as outsiders. Until the mid-1800s, most were confined to ghettos, sections of cities or towns enclosed by walls and guarded by Christian gatekeepers. The effects of this rigid separation lingered long after the ghetto walls crumbled and Jews received civil rights.

In the late 1800s, old myths about the Jews took on new life as racism captured the imagination of many Germans. In the past, Jews were viewed with suspicion because their religious beliefs differed from those of their neighbors. Now, they were distrusted because race scientists claimed that Jews belonged to a separate and inferior "race." Unlike one's religion, a person's race cannot be altered. The word antisemitism, which literally means "against 'Semites,'" was coined to describe this new opposition to Jews.

Myths and Reality

In the years after World War I, groups like Adolf Hitler's Nazi party fostered the myth that Jews controlled everything and acted so secretly that few could detect their influence. The charge was absurd, but many Germans, including some eugenicists, came to believe it. Historian Victoria Barnett observes, "Although many Germans blamed the uncertainties of [1919-1933] on too much Jewish influence in the government, for example, only four of the 250 government ministers during the entire Weimar Republic were Jewish."³ One of those ministers was Walter Rathenau, Germany's first Jewish foreign minister. On June 24, 1922, a nationalist group murdered him on the streets of Berlin.


	More Alike Than Different In the late 1800s, scientists who tried to show flaws in "scientific racism" were ignored. For example, after studying seven million Jewish and Aryan children, the German Anthropological Society concluded that the two groups were more alike than different. Historian George Mosse writes: This survey should have ended controversies about the existence of pure Aryans and Jews. However, it seems to have had surprisingly little impact. The idea of race had been infused with myths, stereotypes, and subjectivities long ago, and a scientific survey could change little. The idea of pure, superior races and the concept of a racial enemy solved too many pressing problems to be easily discarded. The survey itself was unintelligible to the uneducated part of the population. For them, Haeckel's Riddles of the Universe was a better answer to their problems.⁴

¹ Quoted in Prophets Without Honour: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World by Frederic V. Grunfeld (Holt) 1979, p. 17.
² "Eugenics Among the Social Sciences: Hereditarian Thought in Germany and the United States," in The Estate of Social Knowledge by Robert Proctor (Hopkins University Press) 1991, p. 89.
³ For the Soul of the People by Victoria Barnett (Oxford University Press) 1992, p. 124. 349.
⁴ Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism by George Mosse (Fertig) 1978, p. 92. 349.


	Facing History Resources • Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 8, "The Nazi Connection."
	Print and Video Resources • The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann (Cambridge University Press) 1991. • The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl (Oxford University Press, New York) Chapter 2, 1994. • Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 1988.