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Adolf Hitler
"You, you National Socialist doctors, I cannot do without you for a single day, not a single hour....For what good are our struggles if the health of the people is in danger?"1
-- Adolf Hitler, 1933
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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."
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Print and Video Resources
• Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene by Gotz Aly (Johns Hopkins University Press) 1994.
• 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.
• Video: Witness to the Holocaust, Segment 1: "The Rise of the Nazis" (source: The Film Library).
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Overview
When Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, he vowed to turn the nation into a "racial state." That decision affected virtually every institution in Germany and eventually became part of the Nazis' rationale for the Holocaust--the mass murder of millions of Jews, "Gypsies," and other "inferior peoples." Hitler did not transform Germany into a "racial state" all at once. The change took place step-by-step, decree-by-decree. Each new policy went a little further than those enacted earlier. for a timeline.
At each step of the way, Hitler had the support of eugenicists like Fritz Lenz. Lenz hailed Hitler as the first politician "of truly great import, who has taken racial hygiene as a serious element of state policy."2 He and his colleagues saw Hitler's rise as an opportunity to make their nation "the first in world history" to apply "the principles of race, genetics, and selection to practical politics." Although some eugenicists, including Lenz, had reservations about Hitler's antisemitism in the 1920s, by the 1930s they were actively supporting the new regime. They wrote essays and books in defense of Nazi policies, created eugenic laws and decrees, and then helped the Nazis implement those measures. Many American eugenicists shared their enthusiasm for building a "racial state."
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The National Socialist Physicians' League
Hitler had reason to praise the nation's physicians. Its leaders boasted that the National Socialist Physicians' League "proved its political reliability to the Nazi cause long before the Nazi seizure of power, and with an enthusiasm and an energy, unlike that of any other professional group."3 In 1929, the League had 44 members. By 1933, over 2700 physicians belonged to the group--six percent of the medical profession. By contrast, only 2.3 percent of the nation's engineers and 1 percent of its judges belonged to the Nazi party. By 1934, over 11,000 physicians were members of the League. Ultimately about half of the nation's doctors became members. The strongest support came from physicians under the age of 40--doctors trained in the years after World War I.
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