Entire Section 5: Racial State Flashcards
What was social darwinism? When was this theory adopted?
1) A theory widely discussed in the 19th century.
2) Social darwinists adapted Charles Darwin’s scientific principles of natural biological selection to rather unscientific theories about human society to justify ideas of racial superiority and the theory of eugenics.
How did Hitler view human society?
1) Hitler’s obsession with a ‘biological struggle’ between different races easily fitted with his view of the Jews.
2) He viewed humanity of consisting of a hierarchy of races: The Jews, black people and the Slavs were inferior races, while the Herrenvolk was the Aryan peoples of northern Europe and was superior.
3) Hitler believed that it was the destiny of the Aryans to rule over the inferior races.
4) In order to ensure their success in this racial struggle, it was vital for Aryans to maintain their racial purity.
What was Hitler’s concept of social darwinism?
1) All or nothing. Biologically and culturally, the Jews were to be treated as posing a deadly threat to the German volk.
2) There could be no compromises and no exceptions.
3) Conversion to christianity could make no difference, nor could medals won in the first world war.
4) The germ had to be eliminated.
What did ‘racial hygiene’ justify?
1) It justified the sterilisation (or elimination) of the mentally and physically disabled, the Roma, and other ‘racial undesirables’ such as homosexuals, pacifists and Jehovah’s witnesses.
1) What was the Nazi concept of the Volksgemeinschaft?
2) How did one qualify to be in the Volk?
1) People’s community.
2) To qualify as a member of the Volk it was essential to be a true German, both in terms of loyalty and racial purity.
3) To protect the volk, it was essential to ruthlessly eliminate all un-German elements, especially the Jews.
4) The best way to describe the volk came through identifying the racial enemies to be excluded from it, rather than the people who naturally belonged to it.
1) Who was the Membership of the Volksgemeinschaft reserved for?
2) Which groups were excluded from the Volk?
1) Reserved for those of Aryan race, members of which were expected to be genetically healthy, socially efficient and politically reliable.
2) Political enemies, asocials, racial enemies and those with hereditary defects.
1) Where did the ideal of Lebensraum originate?
2) How did it link to the Nazis?
1) In the later 19th century, many European thinkers had proposed opening up space for the expanding populations of the superior white race.
2) In Germany, there was widespread support for the idea that the country was already overpopulated and that industrious German farmers needed more land.
3) Nazi ideology fitted in with the ideas of Germany’s destiny to expand eastwards.
How did Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum differentiate from other concepts?
1) Lebensraum would not only allow for the Germanisation of the eastern lands and bringing the ‘lost germans’ back to the Reich.
2) More importantly, it would provide the battleground for a war of racial annihilation, wiping out the inferior Slav races and smashing Bolshevism in Russia.
What is eugenics?
1) The theory that a race or group of people could be genetically improved through selective breeding, first formulated by Darwin’s cousin in 1883.
How did the Nazis view the mentally ill and physically disbaled?
1) They were considered to be ‘biological outsiders’ from the Volk because their hereditary ‘defects’ made them a threat to the future of the Aryan race.
What law did the Nazis introduce in July 1933 and what did this do?
1) They passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny (Sterilisation Law).
2) This introduced compulsory sterilisation for certain categories of ‘inferiors’.
What diseases did the Law for the Prevention of hereditarily Disabled allow sterilisation?
1) Feeble-mindedness
2) Schizophrenia
3) Manic-depressive illness
4) Epilepsy
5) Hereditary blindeness and deafness
6) Severe physical malformation.
Was the Law for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny ever amended?
1) Yes, it was amended in 1935 to permit abortion cases where those deemed suitable for sterilisation were already pregnant.
2) In 1936, sterilisation of women over 38 years old was introduced due to greater risk of offspring with mental and physical disabilities.
How many people were sterilised during the 3rd Reich?
1) 400,000
How did the Regime use Euthanasia? When was it authorised?
1) By October 1939, the regime had authorised euthanasia for the mentally and physically disabled.
What was the Nazi solution to get rid of the ‘burden’ of the long term ill and disabled?
1) The solution was to pass new legislation allowing mentally and physically disabled children to be ‘mercifully’ to put to death.
Describe the first euthanasia programme for disabled children. When was it?
1) Early 1939.
2) The child’s father wrote a personal letter to Hitler asking for his child to be put to sleep.
3) The Chief of the Fuhrer’s party office made sure that the letter was brought to Hitler’s attention. Hitler sent a senior SS doctor to examine the baby, and the report advised euthanasia for the child.
4) Hitler approved the report and issued a directive announcing that he would personally protect from persecution the doctors who carried out ‘mercy killings’.
What was the effect of the first euthanasia programme?
1) It was the catalyst for the entire euthanasia programme.
2) Such actions were to be secret.
3) Children were sent to special hospitals to be starved to death or given lethal injections. Parents were assured their children had died in spite of receiving the best treatment.
1) What was the T4 programme?
2) What was the basis of the T4?
1) T4 was the rapid expansion of the euthanasia programme from October 1939 and was the name of the headquarter of the programme in Berlin, Tiergarten 4.
2) The basis of T4 was bureaucracy and paperwork. Forms about patients were to be filled in at clinics. and asylums, and passed on to assessors, who were paid on a piecework basis to encourage them to process as many patients as possible
How did the end of the T4 programme come about?
1) By 1941, rumours about the policy of euthanasia were spreading widely and aroused opposition.
2) Proceedings got nowhere, but they worried the regime.
3) The Pope issued a statement claiming that the direct killing of people with mental or physical defects was against the ‘natural and positive law of God’
Why was the euthanasia programme halted? When was it halted?
1) In August 1941, Catholic Archbishop Galen of Munster preached a sermon making an emotive attack on euthanasia, back with specific evidence. Galen’s sermon was designed to mobilise mass protest in the Rhineland.
2) Thousands of copies of Galen’s sermon were printed and widely distributed, sparking further protests and public demonstrations.
How did Nazi policy towards ‘asocials’ develop over time?
1) In September 1933, the regime began a mass round up of ‘tramps and beggars’. ‘Orderly’ people who were able to work were given a permit and forced to work for their accommodation but ‘disorderly’ were considered to be habitual criminals and sent to concentration camps.
2) In 1936, before the Olympics, the police rounded up large numbers of tramps and beggars from the streets of Berlin in order to project an image of a hard working and dynamic society to the world.
3) In 1936, an ‘asocial colony’ was setup in Northern Germany. This ‘asocial colony’ was meant to re-educate the asocials so that they could be integrated into society.
4) In 1938, there was an even bigger round up of ‘beggars, tramps, pimps and gypsies’. Most of these were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where few survived the harsh treatment.
What was policy towards homosexuality like before the Nazis?
1) In common with most other European countries at the time, homosexuality was outlawed in Germany 1933.
2) In the relatively liberal climate of the Weimar Republic however, homosexuality flourished in Berlin and other large cities.
What was Nazi policy towards homosexuals like?
1) Most Nazis regarded homosexuality as degenerate, perverted and a threat to the racial health of the German people.
How did the regime begin persecution against homosexuality?
1) In 1933, the Nazis began a purge of homosexual organisations and literature. Clubs were closed down, organisations for gay people were banned and gay publications were outlawed.
2) In May 1933, Nazi students attacked the institute of sex research, a gay organisation, and burned its library. They also seized the institute’s list of names and addresses of gay people.
3) In 1934, the Gestapo began to compile lists of gay people. In that same year, the SS eliminated Rohm and other leaders of the Nazi SA who were homosexuals.
4) The law on homosexuality was amended in 1935 to widen the definition of homosexuality and to impose harsher penalties for those convicted. After the law was changed, over 22,000 men were arrested and imprisoned between 1936 and 1938.
How many people were arrested for homosexuality?
1) 100,000 men were arrested, and about 50,000 were convicted.
2) Even when men who had been arrested had served their sentence, they were immediately re-arrested by the Gestapo or SS and held in concentration camps.
What did homosexuals in concentration camps suffer from in camps?
1) They had to wear a pink triangle to distinguish them from other prisoners and they were subjected to particularly brutal treatment by some guards.
2) Many of those imprisoned were subjected to ‘voluntary castration’ to ‘cure’ them of their ‘perversion’.
3) Gay men who would not agree to abandon their sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps where they were subjected to unusually harsh treatment. Many were beaten to death.
4) 60% of gay prisoners died in concentration camps.
Which religious sect shows the most hostility towards the Nazis? What did this sect believe?
1) Jehovah’s witnesses.
2) The believed that they could only obey Jehovah led them into conflict with the regime since they refused to take a loyalty oath to Hitler. They also refused to give Hitler the salute or participate in Nazi parades.
How many Jehovah’s witnesses had been arrested by 1945?
1) Around 10,000 had been imprisoned and many had died.
How were gypsies discriminated against?
1) In 1936, the SS set up a new Reich Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsy Nuisance.
2) The SS began the process of locating and classifying gypsies.
3) In 1938, Himmler issued a Decree for the Struggle against the Gypsy Plague, which led to a more systematic classification of Gypsies.
4) After war broke out in 1939, gypsies were deported to Poland from Germany.
1) When did the Nazis impose a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses?
2) How did Hitler justify this?
1) April 1933.
2) Hitler claimed that this action was justified retaliation against Jews in Germany and abroad who had called for a boycott of German goods.
3) Goebbels organised an intensive propaganda campaign to maximise the impact of the boycott.
