Darwinism was a major influence on the Nazi party’s conclusion that not only were certain races and ethnic groups inferior, but mental patients were also genetically inferior. Part of the reason was because it was then believed that heredity had a major controlling influence on mental illness (or that the mentally ill may have non-Aryan blood in them) and, consequently, those persons with “bad blood” had to be destroyed. Jewish historian Leon Poliakov notes that many intellectuals in the early 1900s accepted telegony, the idea that “bad blood” would contaminate a race line forever, or that “bad blood drives out good [blood], just as bad money displaces good money.”65 Only extermination would permanently eliminate these inferior genetic lines, thereby furthering evolution.
Darwin even compiled a long list of cases where bad blood polluted a white gene line, causing it, he concluded, to produce impure progeny forever.
Numerous respected biologists, including Ernst Rudin, a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich and also headed the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, and many of his colleagues—including Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, Francis Galton and Eugene Kahn, later a professor of psychiatry at Yale—actively advocated this hereditary argument. These scientists either directly or indirectly influenced the German compulsory sterilization laws designed to prevent those with defective or “inferior” genes from contaminating the Aryan gene pool.
Later, when the “genetically inferior” were also judged as “useless eaters,” massive killings became justified. The groups judged inferior were gradually expanded to include a wide variety of races and national groups. Later, it even included less healthy older people, epileptics, persons with both severe and mild mentally defects, deaf-mutes, and even persons with certain terminal illnesses.66
The list of groups judged “inferior” was later expanded to include persons who had Negroid or monogoloid/eafures, Gypsies, and those who did not pass a set of ingeniously designed overtly racist tests now known to be worthless. After Jesse Owen won several gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler Reportedly chastised the Americans for permitting blacks to enter the contests.67 How the weak were to be “selected” for elimination was not consistent nor were the criteria used to determine “weak.”68 The justification of these programmes was that “leading biologists and professors” advocated them. According to psychiatrist and author Frederic Wertham, Dr. Karl Brandt reasoned that since the learned professors were in support, the programme must be valid and “who could there be who was better qualified [to judge the programme] than they?”69
World History
