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The "racial and biological regeneration" of the German people was one of the ideological foundations of the Third Reich. The ideas of an organic improvement and of a racial selection of peoples originated in the utopias of eugenics and racism that were developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany and Europe. Eugenics laws were already in place since the early twentieth century in the United States, and later in Switzerland and Scandinavia. However, it was only in the Nazi Germany that racism and eugenics were able to intertwine and be fully realized into a wide and articulated legislative system aimed at the "defense" of the "racial and genetic integrity" of the German people. Statistics, genetics, demographics, anthropology, and medicine contributed, with their true or alleged scientific nature, to give the discriminatory and racist Nazi ideology an aura of objective certainty. The dangerous combination of these factors was systematically and organically implemented within the proposals of the anti-Semitic, "blood and soil" ruralism. These culminated in the "zootechnical" utopia, consisting of a selective breeding of a new Nordic peasant nobility, the future ruling class of the German racial society. The combination of eugenic and racist instances did not remain confined within utopian projects, but found its dramatic fulfillment in the policies of elimination, namely euthanasia and the Shoah.
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Keywords
- Agriculture and state
- eugenetics
- Eugenics
- Government policy
- Historiography
- History
- National socialism and science
- Nazi Germany
- Peasantry
- Politics and government
- Racism in anthropology
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose