Racial Hygiene Society

The Society for Racial Hygiene was founded on June 22, 1905 by the physician and private scholar Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) in Berlin . The society wanted to establish “racial hygiene” as a science and contributed to its establishment in Germany. In 1945 it went out.

history

The Society's statutes begin with the words "The International Society for Racial Hygiene aims to promote the theory and practice of racial hygiene among white peoples". At the end of the year in which the society was founded (1905), 31 members were registered. In addition to Alfred Ploetz, the psychiatrist and brother-in-law of Ploetz Ernst Rüdin , Ploetz's childhood friend Gerhart Hauptmann , the writer Wilhelm Bölsche , the hygienist Max von Gruber , the doctor Wilhelm Schallmayer , the doctor Agnes Bluhm , the ethnologist Richard Thurnwald , the explorer Wilhelm Filchner , the lawyer Anastasius Nordenholz , the zoologists Ludwig Plate and Konrad Günther , the botanist Erwin Baur , the doctor Wilhelm Weinberg , the hygienist Ignaz Kaup and the social democratic social hygienist Alfred Grotjahn . After Berlin, other local groups were founded in Munich, Freiburg and Stuttgart. Honorary members were the zoologist Ernst Haeckel , the geneticist August Weismann and the gynecologist Alfred Hegar .

In 1909, Ploetz described the society as a "community of peers of outstanding moral, intellectual and physical ability, whose lifestyle should help to realize the basic features of the new science". From the data obtained through self-examinations, these scientists were supposed to create a basis of scientific material by collecting "biologically and racially important, normal and pathological, physical and mental properties, from which laws and rules can later be deduced and practical measures and recommendations can be derived" . Initially, society was opposed to “positive” breeding utopias , as propagated by Willibald Hentschel in particular .

In 1916 the company was renamed "German Society for Racial Hygiene". In 1925 she got competition; the “ German Association for Popular Appearance and Heritage ” appeared with the aim of “maintaining and distributing eugenics in a very popular form that everyone can understand”. Increasingly, the ideas of a “Nordic superman” came into play in the societies and the “Berlin society” was accused of being infiltrated by Jews . Representatives of the original Society for Racial Hygiene, in turn, spoke out vehemently against the idea of ​​a Nordic superman . Max von Gruber, for example, who had already positioned himself clearly anti-racist in an article in the Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift in 1903 , gave the heavily controversial lecture “The racial hygienic ideal” in Munich on January 28, 1926, as in Würzburg and Tübingen before. In this he warned against overestimating the pure-bred, sole blissful Nordic ideal. He postulated that “it was precisely mixtures of different genes that produced the most important men” and named Goethe, Schiller, Luther, Leibniz , Mozart, Beethoven, Moltke and many others. In the end, the moderate line prevailed in the elections to the board of the "Society for Racial Hygiene" in 1929, it united with the "Bund für Volksaufartung" and wanted the racist component by renaming it to "German Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics)" eliminate.

In 1933, however, the German Society for Racial Hygiene went completely on the government course under Ernst Rüdin . Through the National Socialist racial hygiene and advice on racial policy measures, she influenced important legislative projects, such as the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring , with which the Nazi regime disguised as euthanasia mass murders of the sick and the disabled , forced sterilization, etc. justified.

Magazines

The archive for racial and social biology functioned as a “scientific organ” at times . From 1926 to 1944 the society published the illustrated, monthly magazine Volk und Rasse . From 1929 the editor was the anthropologist Bruno K. Schultz .

literature

• Alfred Ploetz: Societies with racial hygiene purposes. In: Archives for Racial and Social Biology including Racial and Social Hygiene . Vol. 6, 1909, ZDB -ID 211533-5 , pp. 277-281.
• Peter Weingart , Jürgen Kroll, Kurt Bayertz : Race, Blood and Genes. History of eugenics and racial hygiene in Germany. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988 ISBN 3-518-57887-1 .
• Paul Weindling : Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism. 1870-1945. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1989, ISBN 0-521-36381-0 .
• Bernhard vom Brocke : Population science - quo vadis? Possibilities and problems of a history of population science in Germany. With a systematic bibliography. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1998 ISBN 3-8100-2070-2 .
• Jürgen Peter : The breach of racial hygiene in medicine. The effect of race-hygienic thinking on thought groups and medical fields from 1918 to 1934 (= Mabuse-Verlag Wissenschaft. 70). Mabuse-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-935964-33-1 .

Web links

• State Center for Civic Education Hamburg (Source: Ernst Klee: German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. 2nd edition Frankfurt a. M. 2001.)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 26.
2. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 (= Fischer 16048). 2nd Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 32.
3. ↑ Max Gruber : Does hygiene lead to the degeneration of the race? In: Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift. Volume 50, 1903, pp. 1713-1718 and 1781-1785.
4. ↑ Helmut Gruber (Ed.): Ridge walks. Memoirs of Wolfgang Gruber (1886–1971). Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2018, p. 465.
5. ↑ ZDB -ID 211533-5 , journal database (ZDB), accessed on March 8, 2016.
6. ↑ ZDB -ID 201180-3 , journal database (ZDB), accessed on March 8, 2016.