EUGENICS, RACIAL PURITY & PERSECUTION
There are nine posts in this series on Nazi Germany. Each post touches briefly on the subject given that there are already numerous research papers, articles and books, covering each topic in depth. Many links are included in each post. For the reasoning behind writing these posts, read the Introduction HERE.
0 INTRODUCTION - Why this Series of Posts?
1 UN CHARTER & UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS - Why WWII Drove The Creation Of The UDHR.
2 EUGENICS, RACIAL PURITY AND PERSECUTION - The US Influenced Nazi Germany's Eugenics Program. A Snapshot of the Diverse Groups Persecuted and Imprisoned in Concentration Camps. The Nuremberg Trial, Which Dealt With Racial Purity - RuSHA (USA vs. Ulrich Greifelt et al).3 FORCED AND SLAVE LABOUR - Without Forced and Slave Labour the Nazi War Machine would have Collapsed and Brought the War to an Abrupt End. A Brief History of Forced and Slave Labour Before, During and After World War II. Details of The Nuremberg Trials for German Industrialists - Flick, Krupp and IG Farben.
4 FORCED PROSTITUTION, SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND RAPE - Sexual Crimes Were Not Tried at Nuremberg even though There Were Established Laws Condemning These Crimes. Information About Nazi Military Brothels and Concentration Camp Brothels. Evidence and Testimonies from Witnesses. Both Axis and Allied Forces were Guilty of Sexual Violence and Rape.
5 NAZI DOCTORS EXPERIMENTS AND TRIALS - The Nazi Doctors' Nuremberg Trial and Details of Their Experiments. Names of Nazi Doctors who Escaped Prosecution. Information about Post War Unethical Experiments Without Informed Consent, in the USA, Russia, South Africa and Israel.
6 STERILIZATION AND EUTHANASIA PROGRAMS - Life “Unworthy of Life” A Brief History of the Sterilization and the Euthanasia Programs and German Public Opposition. Using Cost Benefits Analysis in Nazi Medicine to Educate Children.7 WORLD WAR II BY DESIGN – THE ECONOMY AND FOREIGN INVESTORS - An Important Component of Nazi Germany's War Infrastructure. Brief History of the German Economy and Hermann Goering's Four Year Plan. Role of Jewish Public Protests and their Boycott of German Goods in 1933 and Germany's Retaliatory Actions. The Real Role of Neutral Countries During the War. Post War Looting of German Patents, Cover Up of German Research on Tobacco and Cancer and the Removal/Kidnap of Nazi Experts to Allied Countries. The Role of Foreign Subsidiaries/Investors before and during World War II in Germany.
8 UNWCC (UNITED NATIONS WAR CRIMES COMMISSION) LAW REPORTS - The UNWCC prepared and published a 15 volume set of law reports covering 89 War Crimes Trials From World War II. This post contains links to all of these law reports and a list of the cases in each volume. Some information on CROWCASS (Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects).
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EUGENICS, RACIAL PURITY & PERSECUTION
As we know today some of the groups persecuted and discriminated against during WWII are also present day victims.WHO INFLUENCED ADOLF HITLER?
Extracts From Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California Connection By Edwin Black
Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people married only other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power.
Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype.
Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as US national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 (USA) states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning.
Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries. Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
During the '20s, the Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics.
America Funded Germany's Eugenic Institutions
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity -- an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense -- to no avail. They were found guilty.
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Other Books and Articles By Edwin Black
Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 65 bestselling editions in 14 languages in 61 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel. His work focuses on genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropy abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation.
His book - War Against The Weak - How American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele — and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."
The Transfer Agreement is Edwin Black's compelling, award-winning story of a negotiated arrangement in 1933 between Zionist organizations and the Nazis to transfer some 50,000 Jews, and $100 million of their assets, to Jewish Palestine in exchange for stopping the worldwide Jewish-led boycott threatening to topple the Hitler regime in its first year.
IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust Nazi Nexus is the long-awaited wrap-up in a single explosive volume that details the pivotal corporate American connection to the Holocaust. The biggest names and crimes are all there. IBM and its facilitation of the identification and accelerated destruction of the Jews; General Motors and its rapid motorization of the German military enabling the conquest of Europe and the capture of Jews everywhere; Ford Motor Company for its political inspiration; the Rockefeller Foundation for its financing of deadly eugenic science and the program that sent Mengele into Auschwitz; the Carnegie Institution for its proliferation of the concept of race science, racial laws, and the very mathematical formula used to brand the Jews for progressive destruction; and others.
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RACIAL PURITY AND PERSECUTION
Charts of Prisoner Markings and Identification Badges in Concentration Camps are widely available. They give a snapshot view of people considered racially impure, persecuted and imprisoned. The Nazis viewed Poles and other Slavs as inferior to themselves.
Link to US Holocaust Museum About the Badge Identification System in Camps.
The most common forms of badge in camps were:
RED TRIANGLE — Political Prisoners (Social Democrats, Trade Unionists, Liberals, Communists, Freemasons, Anarchists.) Some Anarchists, and other "Enemies of the State," were also given a BLACK TRIANGLE.
GREEN TRIANGLE "Habitual Criminals"
BLUE TRIANGLE - Foreign Forced Laborers, Emigrants.
PINK TRIANGLE — Homosexuals and Sexual Offenders.
PURPLE TRIANGLE — Religious Dissidents, Bible Students as Jehovah's Witnesses were then known
BLACK TRIANGLE — people who were deemed "Asocial Elements," included Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) (later assigned a BROWN TRIANGLE), The Mentally Retarded, The Mentally Ill, Alcoholics Vagrants and Beggars, Aristocrats, Intellectuals, Pacifists, Conscription Resisters, The Habitually "Work-Shy", Prostitutes and some anarchists.
BROWN TRIANGLE — Roma (Gypsies) (previously wore the BLACK TRIANGLE).
YELLOW STAR - Jews were required to wear the Star of David (a double triangle) not only in the camps but throughout most of occupied Europe.
A quick note about how Jews were Identified. All Germans were required to prove their Aryan ancestry and racial purity by tracing back their blood line to 1750. Jews were immediately identified by being members of a synagogue, of a known Jewish family and with four Jewish Grandparents. In the 1935 Nuremberg Laws expanded the definition of a Jew to
- Anyone who was descended from three or four Jewish grandparents
- Anyone with two Jewish grandparents and who belonged to the Jewish religion, or were married to a Jew as of the date of the adoption of the Laws
The word "Mischling" was introduced and is similar in meaning to the English "half-breed" or "mongrel".
- Mischling First Degree were those with two Jewish grandparents, but who did not belong to the Jewish religion and were not married to a Jew.
- Mischling Second Degree were people descended from one Jewish grandparent.
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In addition to color-coding, some groups had a letter insignia on their triangles to denote country of origin.
A Red triangle with a letter: "B" (Belgier, Belgians), "F" (Franzosen, French), "H" (Holländer, Dutch), "I" (Italiener, Italians), "N" (Norweger, Norwegians), "P" (Polen, Poles), "S" (Republikanische Spanier, Republican Spanish) "T" (Tschechen, Czechs), "U" (Ungarn, Hungarians). More Information Go HERE
Religious Institutions
The Catholic Church was particularly suppressed in Poland because of the Church's opposition to many of Nazi Party's beliefs. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members, 18% of the Polish clergy were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 different countries were also killed.
It is common knowledge Jews had no choice whereas Jehovah's Witnesses did. Alone of all the groups targeted by the Nazis, the Jehovah's Witnesses became victims because of what they Refused To Do. They would not enlist in the army, undertake air raid drills, stop meeting or proselytizing. They would not say the words ‘Heil Hitler.’ Their dissent was irksome, disciplined and systematic. Over 12,000 Witnesses were sent to the concentration camps, and estimated 2,500-5,000 died in the Holocaust.
Skin Colour
European and American Blacks were also interned in the Nazi concentration camp system. More Information HERE at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Homosexuals
Victims of the Nazi Era And the Future. More Information HERE (PDF) at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
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WHICH NUREMBERG TRIAL IDENTIFIED PRINCIPAL PLAYERS?
In the RuSHA Trial (USA vs. Ulrich Greifelt, et al.) from 20 October 1947 - 10 March 1948, 14 officials from various SS organizations responsible for the implementation of the Nazi "pure race" programme (RuSHA, RKFDV, VoMi and The Lebensborn Society) were charged with crimes against humanity relating to racial cleansing and resettlement activities, murder, deportation, and torture on political, racial, and religious grounds. 13 officials were found guilty on one or more of the following charges:
1. Crimes Against Humanity by implementing "racial purity" programmes by kidnapping children, forcing "non-Aryan" pregnant women to undergo abortions, plundering, deportation of populations from their native lands in occupied countries and resettling of so-called "ethnic Germans" on such lands, sending people who had had "interracial" sexual relationships to concentration camps, and general participation in the persecution of Jews.
2. War Crimes for the same reasons.
3. Membership of a criminal organization, the SS.
Maria Dolezalova, a 15-year-old Czech girl kidnapped by the Germans, testified for the prosecution at the RuSHA Trial.
Children were kidnapped from their parents in conquered countries. They were racially screened for possible adoption by German parents in the SS Lebensborn ("Fount of Life") program. Children chosen for Germanization were given German names, forbidden to speak other languages and reeducated in SS or other Nazi institutions. Clearly physical appearance played a far more significant role than racial purity/blood lines.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Clearly States:
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Clearly States:
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
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PREVIOUS POSTS TO JUSTICE WILL BE SERVED ON THE SAME THEME
Discrimination and Persecution of Atheists, Agnostics and Irreligious People
Emile Zola & The Alfred Dreyfus Affair - "J’Accuse ...!” - So Do I!
Go To This Post For Numerous UDHR Translations:
UDHR (Universal Declaration Of Human Rights) in Arabic, Czech, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian & Spanish - Also Includes links to 359 translations of the UDHR.
UDHR (Universal Declaration Of Human Rights) in Arabic, Czech, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian & Spanish - Also Includes links to 359 translations of the UDHR.
