(Mirror.)

The passing of the Mental Deficiency Act serves as a direct connection between British eugenics biopower and that of the [Third Reich’s] eugenics program. Whereas British eugenics shifted from class and race to feeblemindedness, the [Third Reich’s] eugenics program, aimed at Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”), focused first on those with physical or mental disabilities and then extended to a racialized eugenics that targeted non‐Aryans. While [Fascist] sterilization laws were modeled after the American eugenics program, the language to describe the need for such laws has roots in the British eugenics rhetoric of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.³⁸

Much like British eugenics, such rhetoric predates the formal proposal, or, in the case of the [Third Reich], implementation, of a eugenics program, but nevertheless creates the culture for such a proposal to be made. The defining factors of these groups were couched in a scientific rhetoric that both emulated British eugenics and embodies power/knowledge as biopower.

In the 1920 book that coined the term “life unworthy of living,” Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (The Permission to Destroy life Unworthy of Life), the authors, lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, made claims to scientific authority in their justification of killing those deemed “incurable idiots.” Hoche argues, “the physician has no doubt about the hundred‐percent certainty of correct selection [and] proven scientific criteria” of his actions regarding the killing of “a mentally dead person.”³⁹

The claim to authority is defined by criteria that are created by the very people using this authority, thus perpetuating that authority: couched in claims of certainty, questioning the doctor’s authority on this account would be to question a doctor’s authority as a doctor.

[…]

Claims for national health justified the power of scientific and medical discourse to ensure this health, which allowed for the creation of further knowledge to expand the powers of this very discourse. Thus, classificatory systems derived from biological claims of authority, based largely on what was seen in Britain, became central to the [Third Reich’s] eugenics rhetoric.

The creation of the Nuremberg Laws, for instance, has roots in the same biological classification seen in early British eugenics regarding class distinctions; when situated historically as a response to the economic crisis of the 1930s, these roots are even more pronounced. Moreover, the shift to expand eugenics from those deemed mentally deficient to include Jews (and eventually others) demonstrates the deliberate blurring of biological difference to justify the segregation and extermination of any group deemed unfit by the dominating party.

Again, power (eugenics as policy) is determined by the very knowledge (eugenic claims to a science of difference) that justifies its existence and recreates this knowledge (the expansion of such claims of difference). The Nuremberg Laws, then, continued and expanded the eugenics rhetoric that empowered the medical and legal communities.

The Laws, which controlled the sexual and marital activity of Jews and Germans, prohibiting the mixing of “races,” categorized Jewishness as strictly biological (dismissing conversion or religious activity) and traced back Jewish blood through heritage lines, modeled after Galton’s own work.

Creating such hereditary hierarchies and divisions justified policies and the power to regulate them, which allowed for the creation of further hierarchies — such as the Untermensch, with connections to Galton’s “residuum” — and the perpetuation of this power that continues to create knowledge to justify itself.

Quoting Gerwin Strobl’s The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain, page 88:

Other aspects of racial policy provided more promising evidence. In November 1937 the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung acquainted its readership with the life and work of Sir Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics.¹⁰⁸ The article was part of the régime’s wider attempts to ensure at least tacit acceptance of its eugenic measures. But, even so, the mere existence of the article is remarkable. Here was an attempt to popularise a key [Reich] policy by invoking its British roots.

Perhaps just as striking is the fact that the experience of other nations went unmentioned. For in terms of more recent eugenic expertise, the record of other countries was more substantial than that of the United Kingdom. This was particularly true of the United States, which has the dubious distinction of leading the field here in the twenties and early thirties. [Fascist] racial scientists acknowledged their debt to America freely before 1933.¹⁰⁹

Yet it was Britain and Francis Galton that featured in the weekend paper of the German middle classes and not the United States. Invoking American precedent might have been counterproductive (nor would it have been popular with the leadership in the later thirties). Yet, once again, this is surely revealing about German attitudes to Britain — both within the party and outside it.

Hans Günther, the father of [Fascist] Rassenkunde, also concentrated on Britain in his attempt to popularise eugenics. He sought, for instance, to exploit British literature for his purposes. In particular, he attempted to demonstrate that Shakespeare had possessed an instinctive grasp of the issues involved, and pointed eagerly to the first Sonnets (‘From fairest creatures we desire increase […]’).

Only the Elizabethan poet Sir Thomas Overbury had put it more succinctly, he thought: ‘Myself I cannot chose, my wife I may,/ in that choice of her it much doth lye/ to mend myself in my posterity’.¹¹⁰ That was the best explanation, Günther suggested, of the Third Reich’s own aims.

And the fact that there was nothing like this in German literature, with its familiar refrain about the universal brotherhood of men, added to the glow of the British example. The SS newspaper had reached similar conclusions: ‘This happy breed of men’, which Shakespeare had extolled, was the result not of nature but ‘of deliberate breeding’.¹¹¹