Destruction of life unworthy of life

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"Destruction of life unworthy of life" is a eugenic catchphrase . It was developed at the time of the Weimar Republic by the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and the criminal lawyer Karl Binding , who jointly published the brochure The Release of Destruction of Unworthy Life in 1920 . During the time of National Socialism , the “ Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases ” made possible the forced sterilization of supposed “ hereditary diseases ” and alcoholics , in the sense of the so-called “racial hygiene” . With the beginning of the Second World War , the concept was expanded to:

In his novel Doktor Faustus , which Thomas Mann wrote between 1943 and 1947, the author dresses his interpretation of the National Socialist mass murder of the physically, mentally ill and mentally handicapped in the form of a prediction that he weaves into the fictional debates of a Schwabing intellectual circle in 1919 . It says there:

“Undoubtedly one would […] justify the non-preservation of the sick on a larger scale, the killing of the incapacitated and feeble-minded, if one went over to it one day, based on national and racial hygiene, while in reality […] it is a matter of far deeper decisions the rejection of all humane effeminacy that had been the work of the bourgeois epoch would be: about an instinctive getting into shape of humanity for hard and dark runs that mock humanity. "

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. eBook at Project Gutenberg
  2. Lars Winkler: An ominous script and its century
  3. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl: Racial hygiene, National Socialism, euthanasia . P. 11.