The Second World War and the Mass Murder of the Sick and Handicapped

Abstract

“All eugenicists know that war means a frightful extermination of the most virile and most viable elements of a nation, both for the victor and the conquered.” Consequently, Ernst Rüdin, the author of this 1934 comment, went on to say that all eugenicists are bound together by the “fervent desire for peace among all nations.”¹ At the International Congress for Mental Health in 1937, he was even more moving: “Not loud enough, not grandly enough, not often enough can eugenics raise its voice of warning against mass destruction, which is a hostage of war.” From the standpoint of race hygiene in general and from that of “eugenic prophylaxis of the mentally disturbed” in particular, modern mass war is to be condemned as a phenomenon that “carries off the most hereditarily virile persons before they have children” and “leaves behind the intellectually hereditarily inferior with all their progeny.”²