Brave New World's ideas of controlling its population by "breeding for purity" comes uncomfortably close to be realised by Adolf Hitler's plans to breed a "master race". In this chapter, I will examine how Nazi Germany's persecution of selected minorities in pursuit of a eugenical ideal changes the world's view of eugenics.
Eugenics enjoyed wide-spread support in many countries. As we find in Childs,
Before the Nazi Eugenic Sterilisation Law came into effect on 1 January 1934, however, sterilisation laws had already been enacted in thirty American states, as well as a number of other countries. (Childs 2001, 15)
As Childs also tells us the "other countries" include Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway. He goes on to say, "The thoroughness of these countries repression of awareness of their eugenical history helps to explain the shock occasioned by newspaper reports in the late 1990s of such laws" (Childs 2001, 15)
Before the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, eugenics was a hotly debated subject and its ideas were popular with many people. The popularity of eugenics gave rise to legislation in the USA and other European countries during the early part of the twentieth century which made sterilisation of some impaired people compulsory. As Britain's conflict with Nazi Germany began, Adolf Hitler continued his version of a eugenics programme to create an Aryan master race by ridding Germany of those civilians that he felt were unworthy of life. Bartov comments,
Hitler's wartime authorisation of an adult "euthanasia" programme was
conceived as an economy measure, a means of creating emergency bed-space,
and hostels for ethnic German repatriates from Russia and eastern Europe, which
anticipates and mirrors the linkages between "resettlement" and murder later evident in the Holocaust... In the eastern areas of the Reich, SS units under
Eimann and Lange were sub-contracted to shoot psychiatric patients in a parallel
operation. The Chancellory of the Führer established an elaborate covert
bureaucracy ...whose task was to organise the registration, selection, transfer and
murder of a previously calculated target group of 70,000 people, including
chronic schizophrenics, epileptics and long-stay patients. (Bartov 2000, 53)
As we read in Rhodes, Eimann and Lange oversaw the murder of an estimated total of 4,500 patients. For example, in Neustadt,
Trucks delivered the disabled to the forest. The first victim was a woman about fifty years old; Eimann personally dispatched her with a Genickschuss, a shot in the neck from behind ... During November 1939, further victims were transported from Danzig, filling the Neustadt pits with some 3,500 bodies. (Rhodes 2003, 7)
These murders are referred to in the post-modern novel Time's Arrow (1991) by Martin Amis, as Vice remarks,
This figure comes from Tod's past, and from Lifton's discussion of the pre-war "euthanasia" project directed against the mentally and physically disabled, and the transportation of patients to killing centres (Vice 2000, 37)
Novels about the Holocaust, especially work about the murder of disabled people in that event are comparatively rare. Sue Vice remarks that,
Over forty years after Auerbach's study Mimesis was published,
novels about the Great War are no longer received in anything like the
scandalized fashion which greets Holocaust fiction, as the success of Pat Barker's
Regeneration trilogy (1991, 1993, 1996) shows. The trilogy was widely hailed as the recasting- the regeneration- for our time of an 80 year-old
history, suggesting that proximity is a significant factor in disquiet about Holocaust fiction. (Vice 2000, 8).
The fact that writers such as Martin Amis, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut have written fantasy/science fiction stories centred on the holocaust bears out what Vice says.
They have tried to distance the reader from the horror by setting the stories in fantastical worlds, thus negating the effects of proximity in time.
When an estimated quarter of a million disabled people were among the many millions more killed in the Nazi eugenics programme, most people distanced themselves from the concept. However as Barnes remarks, "whilst the atrocities of the German death camps put an end to the overt persecution of disabled people in Europe, there remains tacit support for these ideas among sections of the British population" (Barnes, 1992: 10).
Even after witnessing the horrific extremes of the Holocaust, eugenics was still supported, although not as vociferously as before 1939. The fact that the Galton Institute, formerly known as the British Eugenics Society until it changed its name in 1989, is still in existence as are a number of organisations who support s similar ideal such as the American Eugenics Society and the Marie Stopes Foundation bears out Barnes' assertion. Diane Paul tells us that in Marie Stopes's view it was disgraceful that middle class taxpayers were only able to rear one or two children while society allowed, "the diseased, the racially negligent, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst of members of the community to produce innumerable tens of thousands of warped and inferior infants" (Stopes 1921a, 236) (Paul 1995, 94-95).
To summarise then, the theory of eugenics, already popular in several European countries and America and Britain was perverted by the Nazis to suit their ambition to create a "master race". The Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, began a programme intended to purify the German nation that involved the slaughter of many thousands of disabled people. This horrific use of eugenical ideas forced a change in the concept -although eugenics has continued support, its plan for a wide-spread eradication of disabled people has been discredited.
