Eugenics and the Monstrous Objective of “Racial Purity”

The Nazi Party embraced an ideology of purifying their population from anyone deemed genetically inferior—to create a master race that would take their “rightful place” as the masters of Europe. It was at the top of Hitler’s agenda and he and his henchmen worked hard to make it happen.  Although much has been published on the concentration camps that sterilized and exterminated European Jews, along with gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables,” most people don’t know about the preceding systematic sterilization and, finally, execution of the mentally ill.   

By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, the field of Eugenics was firmly established in Europe, the United States and other nations.  It was based on the faulty extension of Darwin’s work to humanity, initially promoted by Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, in 1883.  Mental disorders, and particularly schizophrenia, were believed to be genetically transmitted as a Mendelian recessive gene in the population.  Nazis reasoned that if those with these disorders or other imperfect characteristics were prevented from reproducing, then these genes would disappear from the general population. 

Part of the justification for later “euthanasia,” endorsed by many prominent psychiatrists in both Europe and the US, was economic.  Educational campaigns in Germany emphasized how much each mentally ill patient cost the government and the taxpayers, especially between the World Wars when cash-strapped Germany was suffering from economic retribution by the victors of WWI.   

The eugenics field recommended sterilization of the mentally ill and it became common practice in many Western countries.  In the US, Indiana required it by law in 1907, and by the 1930s the majority of states followed suit.  Heinous forced and improperly disclosed sterilizations were also performed by the US government on Black, Puerto Rican and Native American women through the 1970s with the express purpose of reducing their populations.

The Nazi regime in Germany became fanatical about eugenics and racial purity, taking it further than any other country.  They required psychiatrists to fill out forms about all their patients to provide a database of those who should be prevented from reproducing.  Many psychiatrists enthusiastically supported the government policy and the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring was passed in 1933.   Approximately 400,000 Germans, many living in the community, were subjected to involuntary sterilization.  An estimated 26% had schizophrenia. 

Hitler and his cronies wanted to take it further, but they knew they had to be careful of public opinion, even in Germany.  The quiet authorization of the T4 program to murder mental health patients was signed by Hitler himself. It was backdated to September 1, 1939, the start of WWII and the invasion of Poland, in order to link the order with the war. They were judged as “useless eaters” having “life unworthy of life.” “As the fanatical Dr. Pfannuller in the Nazi program put it: ‘The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum.’”  (The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton) Using the records collected earlier, 70,273 patients in mental hospitals were exterminated in the program.  

In order to expedite the execution of so many people in such a short period of time, the German authorities invented fake shower rooms for the administration of carbon monoxide to kill a groups of compliant and unsuspecting patients. When the program was dismantled, many of the psychiatrists and other workers were transferred to the concentration camps where they continued to refine this “efficient” method of mass execution. 

There were German psychiatrists and doctors whose job it was to make up medical reasons to put on the death certificates of these murdered patients, because the Nazis knew it would not be popular and they loved orderly paperwork. After families began noticing the link between having their loved one transferred to a new facility, then getting a death notice shortly afterward, protests began, including by Catholic and Protestant churches.

As a result, the formal T4 executions were ended in August 1941, but the killing didn’t stop for psychiatric patients, it just changed form.  Institutionalized patients were divided into two groups and given two different diets.  Those who could work for the state were given a diet with minimal calories and those who could not were given starvation diets.  And starve they did.  In the end, 200,000 to 275,000 patients with schizophrenia were eliminated.  That was estimated as 70 – 100% of the schizophrenic population in Germany and was expected to reduce or eliminate transmission of the disease to the next generation. 

But the evil intentions of the Nazis failed in this as well.  Yes, after the war there was a very low incidence of schizophrenia because the individuals from that generation had been killed, but in the succeeding generation, there was an INCREASED incidence of schizophrenia in the population relative to other countries and the previous historical rate.

How can that be?  Well it turns out that schizophrenia arises from a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors.  Rather than a single recessive gene causing the disease, there are hundreds, or even thousands, of genes that slightly increase susceptibility to the disease, and these genes are widely distributed within the population.  So although there is an increased risk of someone being diagnosed with schizophrenia if they have a relative with the disease, the risk is still pretty low.  Even for identical twins, with identical genes, the chances of the second twin getting the disease if the first one has it, is only ~50%.  So it would have been impossible for the Nazis, or anyone else for that matter, to eliminate the gene pool that lends susceptibility to schizophrenia. 

Also, if you consider environmental factors, things were pretty grim for the German populace after WWII.  There was famine, disease and widespread poverty, as well as the humilation of a second defeat in war.  That is the most likely reason more individuals with potentially susceptible gene combinations were affected in utero and during their life experiences to develop schizophrenia.   Thankfully, after the war and the atrocities of the Nazis came to light, eugenics was abandoned by the Western World.  The hubris of these scientists and psychiatrists led to immense evil because they forgot their humanity and did not have the humility to understand they could be wrong, and they were.