b) The September 1939 national euthanasia program. The debate over euthanasia was launched by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche’s 1920 book Legalizing the Destruction of Life Not Worth Living. The authors, a lawyer and a physician, made a strictly economic argument. While there may have been some peripheral eugenic argument to be made with regard to the sterilization legislation, the euthanasia question had nothing whatsoever to do with eugenics, since persons who were already institutionally segregated and in many cases sterilized could not possibly have had any procreation.
To their credit, German eugenicists vehemently attacked euthanasia proposals. In 1926 the eugenicist Karl H. Bauer, for example, stated that if selection were used as a principle for killing people, “then we all have to die”; the eugenicist Hans Luxenburger in 1931 called for “the unconditional respect of the life of a human individual”; and in 1933 the eugenicist Lothar Loeffler argued not only against euthanasia, but also against eugenically indicated pregnancies. Hitler, however, regarded the institutionalized as “useless eaters.” When, in September 1939, he issued a secret order initiating a national euthanasia program he did so strictly to free up as many as 800,000 hospital beds for expected war casualties.
c) The persecution of Jews and gypsies and their mass murder toward the end of the war.
It is true that Hitler, partly under the influence of a manual on human heredity written by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, supported eugenics, but he did not hate the Jews because he had been taught by eugenicists to classify them as intellectually inferior. On the contrary, he regarded them as powerful competitors of the Aryan race he proposed to champion. The Jews were blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I and for the humiliations of the Versailles treaty.
It is not accurate to regard the eugenics movement as the ideological engine of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it is equally undeniable that there were German eugenicists who allowed themselves to be co-opted by the regime and that they created a climate of legitimization of policies of hatred for other ethnic groups. But this was not the driving force behind National Socialism that it is popularly made out to be. Rather, it was an argument that could be conveniently twisted by the Nazi government over the explicit objections of the movement’s leaders.
An enormous, albeit fully understandable, confusion has taken place. Meanwhile the Jews are disappearing.