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According to the Nazi ideology, races were divided into three basic categories. The first was "civilization-creating races," the Germans and other northern peoples. "Civilization-following races" were those which had no power to push civilization forward, but which were "ordinary" races capable of imitating it. Hitler counted nations such as the Chinese and Japanese as being in this category. The third category consisted of "civilization-destroying races" such as Jews, Slavs and Africans.
Nazi ideology considered the intermingling of the German race with other "inferior" races as a "biological mistake." Hitler said: "The mixing of the higher and lower races is clearly against the intent of nature and involves the extinction of the Aryan race... Where Aryan blood has mixed with that of lower peoples the result has been the end of the bearers of culture."88
For this reason, from the moment the Nazis came to power they tried to correct this so-called "evolutionary mistake." Hitler passed a number of laws to that end in 1933, and the process of cleansing between the races began. Only those with German blood were allowed to be considered as citizens, and were given preferential treatment. In June 1933, a law was brought out weeding gypsies, Africans, Jews and the handicapped out of society. Hitler defended the policy:
Hybridism, with the resulting degradation of the biological level of the race, was the sole reason of the decadence of the old civilisations. For it is a fact that nations do not perish in consequence of lost wars, but in consequence of the loss of that force of resistance which has its only origin in the preservation of racial purity. For everything which is not racially pure is mere chaff.89
Hitler believed that once the inferior races had been done away with, humanity would be grateful towards him for its development. Inspired by Darwin, Hitler described the young people of the so-called "superior race" he wanted to create in these words:
My pedagogy is strict. I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth... There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... That is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication.90
But how did Hitler intend to create his "powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth?" Propaganda methods alone would not suffice. Nazi racial theory saw man as a species of animal, and considered that he could be improved by the same methods used by farmers.
Therefore, the Nazis embraced the theory of "eugenics" and pursued its implementation. As we saw earlier in this book, eugenics is a policy that seeks the "improvement of mankind," which has its roots in the ancient Greek pagan city of Sparta, and was resurrected by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 19th century. Ernst Haeckel described how eugenics could be carried out, and defended the killing of deformed babies from the time of birth, and that unhealthy people and the weak or mentally handicapped should be sterilized.
The Nazis lost no time in implementing this inhumane policy. When they came to power in 1933 they instituted "racial hygiene" laws. According to these laws, the mentally handicapped and the sick were to be sterilized, and thus, prevented from reproducing. They were even to be weeded out of society, and for this reason, were gathered together in special centers. The Nazis set up these centers without delay, and threw large numbers of people into them, where they treated them like animals. The Nazi Hereditary Health Courts reviewed nearly 80,000 proposals to sterilize persons in their first two years of operation, and they approved the vast majority of these petitions.91
In time, German eugenic policy became steadily more perverse, eventually resulting in large scale "euthanasia" of retarded persons, the insane, and other desirables. In other words, these people were killed. Films and photographs of this period make light of the tragedy of the killing of the mentally or physically ill by being injected with poison by Nazi doctors. The elderly and little children as well were subjected to this sort of savagery.
As Nazi Germany unflinchingly executed such barbarity, it also pushed "positive eugenics," encouraging the union of Aryan women and men to produce children who Nazi public officials believed would be endowed with superior genes.92 With this in mind, select females with the necessary "superior race" traits (being blond and strong, with blue eyes) were even placed in special homes, and were impregnated by as many Nazi officers as possible.
The aim was to produce a great "Aryan race," like breeding a cow or horse. But the results were a disappointment to the Nazis, the IQs of the children that resulted being lower than that of the parents, and regressing toward the population mean.93
Hitler had defended his policies of eugenics and the purification of the race by saying:
If Germany every year would have one million children, and would eliminate 700-800,000 of the weakest, the end result would probably be an increase in [national] strength.94
Hitler argued in a 1939 speech that for the sake of the health of the social organism, the state must take responsibility, "Let us spend our efforts and our resources on the productive, not on the wastrel." In another place he exhorted, "Rid the earth of dysgenic peoples by whatever means available so that we may enjoy the prosperity of the fatherland."95