L’influence des hygiénistes raciaux sur l’élaboration de Mein Kampf

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2018

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Yves Ternon, « L’influence des hygiénistes raciaux sur l’élaboration de Mein Kampf », Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, ID : 10670/1.i51aek


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In Mein Kampf, we find all the elements of a National Socialist worldview : a combination of Nordic racism, anti-Semitism and the desire to conquer an area crucial to the East. However, the book features no new ideas and there is not even the slightest reference to the German scholars who dedicated their careers to studying biology, genetics and racial hygiene. Ernst Haeckel’s theories of racial heredity, developed during the 19th century and founded on his obsession with racial degeneration, marked a generation of young German scientists. However, we cannot establish a direct connection between them and Hitler’s worldview, which merely captured the zeitgeist. Nevertheless, it is likely that during Hitler’s imprisonment in Landsberg, he read the second volume of the tract Human Heredity Theory and Racial Hygiene by Baur, Fischer and Lenz, which was entirely written by Lenz. Hitler then likely incorporated the principles of racial hygiene into his ideology. In the second part of Mein Kampf, written after Hitler left prison, we find evidence that he had absorbed the many theories that had been fueling the self-proclaimed scientific nationalist movement since the 19th century. Starting in 1933, the racial hygienists began taking certain heretofore unfinished ideas and making them more extreme and also helped transform the National Socialist state into a “biocracy.” They turned medicine into a pillar of the state. This process that would be carried through to its hideous conclusion : mass murders perpetrated in the name of racial hygiene.

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