The historiography of National Socialism was profoundly transformed by the research on the so-called “forgotten victims” of the Nazi regime that was produced by a new generation of scholars starting in the 1980s. These scholars changed historians’ understanding of race, racism, and Rassenpolitik (racial policy) in Nazi Germany by widening their historical lens beyond Nazi antisemitism and investigating the Nazi persecution of a whole spectrum of groups whom the Nazis had labeled as biologically “inferior.” Most of this research examined the persecution of five different categories of “forgotten victims”: the forced sterilization of Germans who were supposedly afflicted with “genetic diseases”; the systematic killing of institutionalized patients with mental or physical disabilities; the persecution of people whom the Nazi regime categorized under the discriminatory label “Zigeuner” (mostly Sinti and Roma); the persecution of persons categorized under the no less derogatory term “Asoziale” (literally “asocials,” men and women whose behavior deviated from Nazi norms with regard to work, sexuality, residence, and other factors); and the persecution of homosexual men. Taken together, this research revealed that the spectrum of persons that the Nazi regime sought to “weed out” from the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) by means of what the Nazis called Erb- und Rassenpolitik was not limited to those categorized as Jews but included a series of groups whom the Nazis defined as “inferior” either by placing them in certain racial or medical categories or by labeling them as socially or sexually deviant and interpreting this deviance as evidence of biological defects.Footnote ¹

The research on the “forgotten victim groups” – synthesized in Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman’s The Racial State (1991) – made several important contributions to our understanding of Nazi Germany.Footnote ² First, at a time when functionalist–structuralist interpretations of the Nazi regime were gaining ground, it refocused historians’ attention on racial ideology as central to Nazi policies. Second, it transformed and expanded historians’ conception of Nazi racism by showing that all the different targets of persecution were connected by the same underlying logic of “weeding out” members of the population according to criteria of supposed biological inferiority and superiority. Third, it demonstrated the crucial role of medicine and the biosciences in Nazi crimes and expanded the spectrum of perpetrators by revealing the widespread complicity of German doctors, academics, and other professionals. Fourth, research on the forgotten victim groups suggested that the boundaries of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft – the line between inclusion and exclusion – could not be reduced to the dichotomy of “Aryan” versus “non-Aryan” citizens and were, in fact, much less clear-cut than is often assumed. Finally, Burleigh and Wippermann’s synthesis argued that Nazi racial and social policies were deeply intertwined because the racial, eugenic, and social (deviance-based) criteria used to screen the population regulated both inclusion and exclusion; the “weeding out” of the biologically “inferior” found its counterpart in policies of state support for the biologically “superior” members of the Volksgemeinschaft.

Despite these achievements, the pathbreaking scholarship on forgotten victim groups and Burleigh and Wippermann’s synthesis of this research in what we might call the “racial state” paradigm also present a number of difficulties, three of which shall be briefly addressed here.Footnote ³

First of all, the research on the forgotten victims struggled with how to conceptualize an expanded notion of Nazi racism that would connect the persecution of all these different groups. The search for a more expansive definition of Nazi racism was reflected in a proliferation of new terms for different “subtypes” of Nazi racism. Thus Gisela Bock coined the term “hygienic racism” to refer to eugenics and argued that hygienic racism and “anthropological racism” must be understood as two equally important varieties of Nazi racism.Footnote ⁴ Scholars working on the persecution of “Asoziale” added the term Sozialrassismus (social racism) to designate the persecution of those who deviated from social norms – a term that was soon criticized as problematic because all forms of racism are socially constructed. Footnote ⁵ Other scholars, finally, introduced the term “scientific racism” to highlight the role of science in the legitimation of Nazi policies of persecution, sterilization, segregation, and extermination.Footnote ⁶

The major drawback of conceptualizing all the different types of persecution of forgotten victim groups – including forced sterilization and the persecution of “Asoziale” and homosexuals – as varieties of Nazi racism or Rassenpolitik is that this makes it difficult analytically to distinguish those forms of persecution that relied on the categories and language of race from those forms that did not (using the language of medical diagnosis or social deviance instead). Because I consider such analytical distinctions essential for understanding both similarities and differences among Nazi policies of exclusion and persecution, I will be using the concept of “Nazi biopolitics” – rather than Nazi racism or racial policy – as an umbrella term for Nazi policies that sought to “weed out” members of the population on the basis of three different types of criteria: racial criteria (primarily targeting persons whom the Nazi classified as Jews, Sinti, or Roma), eugenic criteria (targeting individuals labeled as suffering from genetic diseases), and the criterion of deviance (targeting those whose deviance from social or sexual norms supposedly revealed their biological inferiority). My definition of biopolitics is not derived from Michel Foucault’s or Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the subject, but draws on Gisela Bock’s lucid analysis of the thinking that held together what she calls Nazi “Rassenpolitik,” namely, the classification of humans in a hierarchy of value.Footnote ⁷ I thus use the term “Nazi biopolitics” to refer to the ensemble of Nazi policies that were legitimated by reference to a hierarchy of human value based on supposedly biological traits. By analogy with the distinction between negative and positive eugenics (the former seeking to minimize the procreation of those deemed genetically inferior, while the latter seeks to maximize the procreation of those deemed genetically superior), one might say that the Nazis engaged in both negative and positive biopolitics, with the latter being realized through social policies. Owing to constraints of space, however, this chapter will focus solely on the negative biopolitics realized through policies of racial, eugenic, and social selection.

A second difficulty presented by the “racial state” paradigm as developed in Burleigh and Wippermann’s The Racial State – which has exerted a powerful influence in the Anglo-American historiography over the last thirty years – is that it focuses almost exclusively on the connections among (rather than the differences between) different areas of Nazi biopolitics. Since Burleigh and Wippermann sought to synthesize the disparate research on the forgotten victim groups, this focus made good sense; but it gave the impression that Nazi biopolitics was far more coherent than it actually was. As a result, the numerous differences and conflicts that existed both in racial science and in Nazi biopolitics were neglected. By contrast, this chapter will seek to convey the diversity, competition, and conflict among different racial theories as well as the rivalry among different state, party, and SS agencies over the control of Nazi biopolitics. Applying the lessons of Karl Schleunes’s work on Nazi antisemitic policy to the larger field of Nazi biopolitics, this account will therefore highlight the role of improvisation and conflict in Nazi policy-making.Footnote ⁸ In this respect, I seek to make the well-established insight that Nazi Germany was a polycratic regime fruitful for a better understanding of the interaction of racial scientists and political actors seeking to gain control over Nazi biopolitics. Even as this chapter highlights the role of improvisation and conflict in a polycratic regime, it also seeks to analyze the long-term radicalization of Nazi biopolitics.

Third, Burleigh and Wippermann’s claim that “racial anthropologists, biologists, and hygienists” played a key role in providing a comprehensive “conceptual framework” for the “implementation of Nazi racial policy” suggested a much better fit between racial science and Nazi biopolitics than is warranted.Footnote ⁹ In fact, especially during the early years of the Nazi regime, the field of racial science was characterized by a diversity of competing racial theories, which frequently contradicted one another and some of which presented significant drawbacks if translated into racial policy. When assessing the relationship of the biosciences to Nazi biopolitics, two points therefore need to be stressed. First, it is important to separate the question of scientists’ complicity with the Nazi regime from the question of the influence of scientific theory on Nazi biopolitical policy. Whereas the complicity of most German doctors, human geneticists, and physical anthropologists has been demonstrated beyond doubt, the actual influence of their scientific theories on Nazi policy differed widely. Which brings us to the second point: the influence of contemporary scientific theories (theories that are by now almost universally rejected and were often by no means uncontested at the time) in the related fields of racial science, physical anthropology, human genetics, and eugenics on Nazi biopolitics differed drastically between different policy areas. Whereas this influence was strong in sterilization policy and Nazi policy towards Sinti and Roma, for instance, it was much weaker in Nazi antisemitic policy.

If we leave aside “positive” biopolitics (social policy measures designed to support those deemed of superior biological value), “negative” Nazi biopolitics consisted of three different types of measures: measures of eugenic selection (based on individual medical diagnoses), racial selection (based on supposed membership in a racial group), and social selection (based on a finding of socially or sexually deviant behavior attributed to biological inferiority, a finding usually made by the police). A comprehensive survey of negative Nazi biopolitics in the years 1933–9 would therefore have to cover Nazi eugenic policy (forced sterilization; marriage health law), racial policy (targeting Jews as well as Sinti and Roma), and measures of social selection (referred to as Sozialrassismus in some of the German literature) targeting “deviants” of supposedly inferior biological worth, including male homosexuals, “professional criminals,” and the amorphous and malleable category of “Asoziale.”

Since this chapter cannot provide a full survey of Nazi biopolitics in the years 1933–9, it will focus on three topics: (1) Nazi sterilization policy, the area of Nazi biopolitics in which the biosciences had the most direct impact; (2) the protracted conflict between two competing racial theories during the first two years of the regime and the impact of the conflict’s outcome on the drafting of racial legislation culminating in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, a process during which the victorious racial theory, Nordicism, turned out to be more of an obstacle than an asset, and which therefore led to a key change in racial terminology; and (3) the 1937–8 turn to a biopolitical policy of preventive detention in concentration camps, on the orders of the police, which centralized previously scattered efforts to round up “Asoziale,” a category that included beggars, vagrants, homeless persons, prostitutes, and potentially anyone exhibiting behavior considered socially deviant; in this area of Nazi biopolitics, I argue, the claim that most socially deviant behavior was the result of hereditary defects served as a veneer of scientific legitimacy to justify a drastic escalation of social control.

As we examine these specific aspects of Nazi biopolitics, it is important to keep two general points in mind. First, even though it is analytically useful to distinguish measures of eugenic, racial, and social selection, we must bear in mind that these three modes of biopolitics could overlap. Thus, when, in 1937, the children of German mothers and Africans who served as French colonial troops during the occupation of Rhineland were forcibly sterilized, a group selected according to racial criteria was subjected to eugenic measures. Since the sterilization law did not include racial criteria, these sterilizations took place illegally, without the required legal process before a sterilization court. Similarly, the people whom the Nazis persecuted under the derogatory label of “Zigeuner” (mostly Sinti and Roma) were persecuted not only on the basis of supposedly racial criteria but also because their itinerant lifestyle was considered socially deviant. The second general point to keep in mind is that the persecution of many of the groups targeted by biopolitical measures was also motivated by longstanding prejudices that had nothing to do with notions of biological inferiority: thus Nazi antisemitism owed at least as much to conspiracy theories of Jewish world domination as it did to biological race thinking; the persecution of Sinti and Roma also derived from age-old prejudices against “Zigeuner” as criminal; and the persecution of homosexual men had as much to do with prejudices against gay men as immoral and a threat to youth as it did with biological theories of homosexuality.

Eugenics: The 1933 Sterilization Law and Conflicts over Sterilization Policy

As Eric Kurlander explains in Chapter 11 in this volume, eugenics was neither a Nazi invention nor a specifically German phenomenon. Since the turn of the century, eugenics had grown into a transnational movement that had strong support in many countries. In Germany, the eugenics movement drew support from across the political spectrum, from the right to the socialists. Although the Weimar Republic did not pass a sterilization law, in 1932 the Prussian Health Council produced a draft law that the Nazis drew on when they came to power. After 1945, the fact that eugenics had enjoyed transnational support made it easy for German physicians to argue that the Nazi sterilization program had nothing to do with Nazi Rassenpolitik. Such postwar apologetics were rather successful in dissociating Nazi sterilization policy from the racial aspects of Nazi biopolitics until 1980s research on the forgotten victims of Nazism insisted that the Nazi sterilization program be seen as an integral part of Nazi biopolitics. If, as I have proposed above, we define Nazi biopolitics as the ensemble of policies legitimated by reference to a hierarchy of human value based on (ostensibly) biological traits, there can indeed be little doubt that eugenics is as much a part of Nazi biopolitics as anthropological racism. In fact, among all the areas of Nazi biopolitics, Nazi sterilization policy was the one in which biomedical scientists exerted their greatest influence.

Hitler and the Nazi party had long favored eugenic measures, and the right wing of the eugenics movement – which preferred the term Rassenhygiene to Eugenik – was eager to cooperate with the new regime to achieve its goals. Eugenics was therefore a policy area in which the Nazi regime could move quickly to pass major legislation. The person who made this happen was Arthur Gütt, a physician, eugenicist, and Nazi Party member, who was hired to head the health section of the Reich Interior Ministry on 1 May 1933, and quickly established himself as the most important player in Nazi eugenic policy. Gütt immediately made the passage of a sterilization law his highest priority, pursued with the full support of Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, one of three Nazi ministers in the cabinet. The law was drafted with unprecedented speed and passed into law by the Hitler cabinet only two and a half months later, on 14 July 1933. To generate scientific and political support for the project, Gütt formed an Expert Advisory Council for Population and Racial Policy (Sachverständigenbeirat für Bevölkerungs- und Rassenpolitik), which was chaired by a leading eugenicist, the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, an international authority in psychiatric genetics, who headed the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. Gütt and Rüdin collaborated to their mutual advantage. Rüdin was eager to use the new regime to see his hardline eugenic agenda passed into law, while Gütt wanted Rüdin’s scientific prestige to lend legitimacy to the Nazi legislation. Although the Advisory Council was brought in at key points, the hands-on drafting of the law was the work of Gütt, Rüdin, and the Nazi jurist Falk Ruttke, all of whom co-authored the semi-official “commentary” on the law, which was published as a book and guided the law’s implementation. Footnote ¹⁰ Rüdin’s key role makes the sterilization law, among all of the Nazis’ biopolitical measures, the one most directly influenced by an academic expert from the biosciences.

The most important difference between the 1932 draft law produced by the Prussian Health Council and the Nazi sterilization law was that the latter imposed compulsory rather than voluntary sterilization. While the 1933 law was more radical in this respect, it was, however, more restrained in another. Whereas the Prussian draft had proposed sterilizing carriers of any hereditary disease, the Nazi law limited sterilization to nine specific diagnoses: “congenital feeblemindedness” (angeborener Schwachsinn), schizophrenia, manic depressive disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, serious hereditary physical malformations, and severe alcoholism. About two-thirds of all sterilizations were performed for “feeblemindedness,” which was the most elastic category; the second most common diagnosis was schizophrenia (20 percent). The third key feature of the Nazi law was that it created a judicial framework, consisting of over 200 Hereditary Health Courts to which doctors had to report patients who fit one of the diagnoses. These sterilization courts were composed of two physicians and one jurist, who heard each case and could then order compulsory sterilization by majority vote; verdicts could be appealed to thirty regional Superior Hereditary Health Courts.

The law took effect in January 1934. Until 1939, approximately 300,000 Germans were sterilized under the law; another 100,000 during the war. Although the gender ratio of the sterilizations was almost even (48% men, 52% women), the operation was more dangerous for women, who made up the majority of the approximately 3,000 people (just under 1%) who died as a result of postoperative complications. The total of 400,000 persons sterilized was equivalent to about 1% of the German population aged 14 to 50. More people were sterilized in Germany than in all other countries combined.Footnote ¹¹

Although the Ministry of Justice had successfully objected to including criminals in the sterilization law by arguing that the role of heredity in criminal behavior remained poorly understood, Rüdin and Gütt used their position as co-authors of the semi-official “commentary” to promote an aggressive interpretation of the law in order to sterilize not just criminals but any person deviating from certain social or moral norms. Whereas in German psychiatric terminology “feeblemindedness” referred only to intellectual disabilities, they expanded the definition to include persons suffering from “disturbances in emotions, will, drives, or ethical sentiments” and argued that: “With great probability feeblemindedness is present if the person concerned is unable to earn a living in a regular occupation or to integrate themselves socially. … Even if defects of intelligence in the usual sense can rarely be detected … such persons are nevertheless feebleminded.”Footnote ¹² This attempt to introduce social deviance as a criterion for sterilization through the back door of “feeblemindedness” was criticized by some superior courts. Thus, in 1935, the Superior Hereditary Health Court of Kiel ruled that a recidivist criminal with fourteen previous convictions should not be sterilized because the term “feeblemindedness” only referred to “intelligence defects,” whereas “defects” in will, emotion, or character had been “intentionally left out of the sterilization law.”Footnote ¹³

A year later, in 1936, a major attack on sterilization policy was launched from an unexpected quarter: by none other than Reichsärzteführer Gerhard Wagner, the leader of the Nazi Physicians Association, who, up until that point, was known as a firebrand in matters of racial and eugenic policy. Reacting to complaints from party members who had been targeted for sterilization, Wagner delivered a speech in which he criticized the sterilization courts’ schematic use of intelligence tests for diagnoses of feeblemindedness. To guard against such abuses, he argued, Nazi Party representatives should be included on the sterilization courts. In 1937, Wagner elaborated his complaints in a memorandum presented to Hitler in which he attacked Gütt as a “health bureaucrat who ha[d] gone off the rails” and Rüdin as a “eugenics fanatic.” Although Wagner did not succeed in getting Nazi Party representatives included in the sterilization courts, there is evidence that, by 1937, sterilization courts felt pressured to show more restraint in diagnosing feeblemindedness. Even if we allow that part of the motivation for Wagner’s campaign was to strengthen the influence of the party on eugenic policy, the fact that a Nazi race fanatic like Wagner perceived Rüdin and Gütt’s sterilization policies as out of control provides remarkable evidence that by 1936–7 at least some Nazi leaders were beginning to fear that the eugenic “weeding out” of the population was going too far. Footnote ¹⁴

Competing Racial Theories, 1933–1935

While Hitler and the Nazi leadership endorsed eugenics, antisemitism was a much more fundamental element of Nazi ideology.Footnote ¹⁵ Nevertheless, it took the regime much longer to pass comprehensive antisemitic legislation – in the form of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws – than it did to pass the sterilization law. One of the factors that complicated the drafting of racial legislation was the fractiousness of racial science and racial theory. Whereas eugenic measures enjoyed a broad consensus among the medical profession, both the scientific discipline of anthropology and the race thinking propagated by the völkisch movement were characterized by competition and conflict among different racial theories, which was reflected in a confusing array of competing racial terms, including “Aryan race,” “Nordic race,” and “German race.”Footnote ¹⁶

The first official use of the term “Aryan” in Nazi Germany occurred in the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, which targeted civil servants who were “politically unreliable” or of Jewish descent. The law itself did not mention “Jews” but provided that – with certain exceptions, including men who had performed frontline military service during the First World War – “civil servants that are not of Aryan descent” (nicht arischer Abstammung) were subject to mandatory retirement. It was left to an administrative decree, issued on 11 April, to define the term “non-Aryan”: “A person is considered non-Aryan [nicht arisch], if they are descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparent is non-Aryan. This is to be assumed especially if one parent or grandparent has belonged to the Jewish religion.”Footnote ¹⁷ To enforce these provisions, any civil servant who had entered public service after August 1914 was obliged to provide proof of “Aryan descent,” the Ariernachweis. The administrative decree’s awkward formulation “non-Aryan, especially Jewish” seemed to suggest that there were other categories of “non-Aryans” – without, however, specifying what these were. Although in practice only Jews were targeted, the use of the term “non-Aryan” gave rise to protests from foreign countries, including Turkey and Japan, who perceived the law as labeling them as racially inferior.Footnote ¹⁸

The Civil Service Law’s use of the term “Aryan” was completely out of line with contemporary racial theories. To be sure, Hitler had used the term, popularized by the French writer Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, in Mein Kampf. German anthropologists, however, were in general agreement that the term “Aryan” referred to a family of languages rather than a racial group. With the concept of an “Aryan” race sidelined, the major conflict in Rassenforschung (racial research) at the time of the Nazi seizure of power pitted Hans Günther’s “Nordic” racial theory against Karl Saller and Friedrich Merkenschlager’s conception of a dynamic, evolving “German race” (Deutsche Rasse).

Günther, a self-taught racial anthropologist, was the author of the best-selling Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922), which had popularized Nordic racial theory, and had been appointed to a chair in social anthropology at the University of Jena in 1930. According to Günther, the German Volk consisted of six races – the Nordic, Eastern, Western, Dinaric, East Baltic, and Phalian races – with the Nordic race being superior to the rest. Concerned that the Nordic race was becoming diluted by racial mixing, Günther called for a policy of “Nordification” (Aufnordung) through racial selection. Günther’s theory made no references to an “Aryan” or “German” race. The main threat to the Nordic race came not from the Jews (whom Günther considered racially mixed) but from its dilution by the other races of which the German people was composed.Footnote ¹⁹ Günther’s Nordicism became the official racial policy of the SS in 1931, when Heinrich Himmler introduced Nordic racial criteria for SS recruits and their prospective brides to ensure that the SS and its offspring would represent a Nordic racial elite. When the Nazis came to power, there was therefore some concern, especially among southern Germans (who were thought to have a lower proportion of Nordic racial heritage), that if Günther’s Nordicism were adopted as official racial policy, it might create invidious racial distinctions among the members of the Volksgemeinschaft, some of whom might be relegated to second-class racial status. This was one reason why some Nazi leaders preferred the notion of a “German race” to Günther’s Nordicism.

The notion of a “German race” was propagated by Karl Saller, a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Göttingen, and Friedrich Merkenschlager, a botanical geneticist at the Biological Reich Institute for Agriculture and Forestry in Berlin. Fierce critics of Günther’s Nordic racial theory, Saller and Merkenschlager used a dynamic, rather than static, conception of race to argue that the best way to conceptualize the German population in racial terms was to understand it not as a mixture of six different races but as one constantly evolving “German race.” Races, they argued, could not be defined as fixed types characterized by specific physiological, genetic, or psychological characteristics. Instead, all races were malleable: states of equilibrium reflecting the influences of heredity and environment, subject to constant transformation. Compared with Günther’s Nordicism, Saller and Merkenschlager’s concept of a “German race” offered the advantage of making German Rasse and German Volk fully congruent and thus eschewing any racial distinctions among the German Volk.Footnote ²⁰

For the first two years of the Nazi regime, from early 1933 to early 1935, the key actors trying to shape racial policy were engaged in a protracted conflict over whether policy should be guided by Günther’s Nordicism or by the concept of a “German race.” This was much more than an academic matter, because racial legislation depended on a consensus on how to conceptualize the German population in racial terms. The most prominent advocates of the concept of a “German race” were Reichsärzteführer Gerhard Wagner and Achim Gercke; Gercke had built up a large card-index of German Jews and was appointed as the Reich Interior Ministry’s Expert for Racial Research after the passage of the 1933 Civil Service Law, so that he could check the Ariernachweise with the help of his card-index. Both were longstanding party members and notorious antisemites; clearly, they were not worried that the concept of a “German race” might somehow lead to the inclusion of German Jews. They were, however, concerned that Nordic racial theory might lead to invidious racial distinctions among the German Volk.

The key figure opposing the notion of a “German race” was Walter Groß, a physician who had joined the Health Section of the NSDAP Central Party Office in 1932. Right after the Nazi seizure of power, Groß took the initiative to create the Information Office for Population and Racial Policy, which in May 1934 became the Nazi Party’s Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) and reported directly to the Führer’s Deputy, Rudolf Heß. Unlike Wagner and Gercke, Groß feared that the concept of a dynamic “German race” might open the door to including German Jews. Determined to ban the concept, he forged a strategic alliance with the SS, which was fully invested in Günther’s Nordicism, and managed to win Gütt’s support as well. Groß struck the decisive blow in January 1935. When it looked like Wagner and Gercke were about to take the matter to Hitler, Groß issued an official ban on the concept of a “German race” and prevailed on the Minister of Research and Education to revoke Saller’s teaching credentials, thus ending his academic career. Merkenschlager had already been fired from his position. Groß’s success in getting the concept of a “German race” banned demonstrated that he had established the Nazi Party’s Office of Racial Policy not just as the agency in control of racial propaganda and training but as the ultimate arbiter of the permissible boundaries of research on race. Footnote ²¹

Preparations for Racial Legislation, Spring and Summer 1935

It took the Nazi regime more than two years to pass comprehensive racial legislation. Although this delay was due to a complex host of factors, including Nazi worries about economic and foreign repercussions, the delay was, most likely, also related to the protracted conflict between Nordicists and advocates of a “German race.” It is therefore probably not a coincidence that concrete preparations for the racial legislation that resulted in the Nuremberg Laws began only after the two-year conflict over racial theory was resolved in January 1935.

The two working groups that were set up to draft racial legislation in the spring and summer of 1935 – a Nazi Party group headed by Reichsärzteführer Gerhard Wagner and a ministerial group formed by the Interior and Justice Ministries – faced a series of questions. Given the triumph of Nordicist theory, the most fundamental question was whether Nazi racial policy would extend the racial policies of the SS to the entire population by imposing a Nordicist racial hierarchy on the German Volk as a whole and pursuing a policy of racial “Nordification.” After all, the opponents of Nordicism had feared exactly that. When Groß decided the conflict between “German race” and Nordicism in favor of the latter, he had, however, insisted that racial differences among the German Volk should be downplayed. Footnote ²² And those drafting racial legislation in 1935 do not seem to have contemplated that the German Volk should – in addition to the eugenic selection effected by the sterilization law – be subject to racial selection in the sense of Nordification. Instead, four other questions were salient. First, given that Nordic racial theory characterized the German Volk as a racial mixture, what racial terminology should be used to define the portion of the German Volk that was to be protected against “alien” races? Second, from which “alien races” should the legislation protect the German people? Only from the Jews or also from others? Third, given that contemporary racial theory considered Jews racially mixed, how should racial legislation define the Jews? Finally, should marriage prohibitions for eugenic and racial reasons be regulated in the same law or in two separate laws?

The two working groups that started drafting racial legislation in 1935 gave different answers to these questions. In April 1935, a group convened by Reichsärzteführer Wagner at Nazi Party headquarters in Munich produced a draft for Rassengesetzgebung (racial legislation) that created a quadripartite racial classification. Its awkward definitions revealed the difficulty of using Nordicist racial theory to justify the prohibition of certain types of “racial mixing”; for Nordicism regarded both “Germans” and “Jews” as racially mixed groups. To specify which types of “racial mixing” were to be proscribed, the Wagner group’s draft defined four racial groups: Deutschstämmige (“descendants of the racial mixture that has arisen in the Germanic area between the Nordic-Phalian race as the main race and the East-Baltic, Dinaric, and Western races”), Nachbarstämmige (the populations of neighboring countries), Fremdstämmige (defined as alien racial groups such as “Japanese” or “Chinese”), and Judenstämmige (“persons who are descendants of the Jewish racial core [Rassekern], even if they have mixed with other racial cores”). The proposed law called for a ban on marriage and extramarital sexual relations not only between Deutschstämmige and Judenstämmige but also between Deutschstämmige and Fremdstämmige. Footnote ²³

In a parallel effort, in July 1935, a working group convened by the Reich Justice and Interior Ministries drafted a Law against Marriages Harmful to the Volk (Gesetz gegen volksschädliche Ehen) that combined racial and eugenic marriage prohibitions. In addition to three eugenic exclusions – depriving persons subject to sterilization proceedings, people with mental illnesses, and carriers of communicable diseases of the right to marry – the law prohibited marriages if “offspring jeopardizing the purity of German blood is to be expected” (“wenn mit einer die Reinhaltung des deutschen Blutes gefährdenden Nachkommenschaft gerechnet werden muß”). Although this formulation suggested that a multitude of “alien races” might be targeted, the Foreign Office had warned that marriage prohibitions targeting “alien races” other than Jews would provoke protests abroad, and there is some evidence that the Justice and Interior Ministries decided to limit the racial marriage prohibition to Jews.Footnote ²⁴

The July 1935 ministry draft differed from the Wagner group’s in two crucial respects. First, unlike the Wagner draft, it combined eugenic and racial marriage prohibitions. This might have reflected an effort to camouflage the antisemitic marriage prohibition within a larger eugenic law in the hope that this might mitigate foreign criticism. Second, the ministry draft introduced the terminology of “German blood,” which found its way into the final law adopted at Nuremberg in September. What is most remarkable here is the contrast: while the working group convened by Reichsärzteführer Wagner, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi and radical antisemite, wrestled earnestly with the difficulties of defining racial groups in ways that acknowledged that, according to Nordic racial theory, both “Germans” and “Jews” were racially mixed groups, the ministerial bureaucrats completely ignored the complexities of Nordic racial theory and, instead, introduced the metaphorical language of “German blood,” whose “purity” the marriage prohibitions were supposed to protect. The bureaucrats who came up with this solution may well have recalled the language of “blood” used in the 1920 Nazi Party program – “None but those of German blood, regardless of their religion, may be members of the nation” – and in Mein Kampf, where Hitler wrote that, by engaging in racial mixing, “the Aryan gave up the purity of his blood.”Footnote ²⁵ That it was the ministry bureaucrats, rather than Wagner’s Nazi Party group, who came up with this solution shows that committed antisemites in the Nazi Party took the complexities of racial theory seriously and thus bolsters the case for the relevance of racial theory for the history of Nazi racial policy.

Nuremberg: Blutschutzgesetz and Erbgesundheitsgesetz

On 10–16 September 1935, the Nazi Party held its annual Reichsparteitag in Nuremberg. Against the background of increasing antisemitic agitation during the summer, Hitler demanded that antisemitic legislation be formulated in a matter of days, in time to have it passed by the Reichstag at a special session. After the war, a key participant, Bernhard Lösener, the Interior Ministry’s legal expert on racial matters, highlighted these circumstances to present the Nuremberg Laws as the result of ad hoc legislation; further research, however, has revealed that the legislative work at Nuremberg – in which Wagner, Gütt, Groß, Interior Minister Frick, and senior officials from the Interior and Justice Ministries participated – drew heavily on the preparations we have just discussed.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (Blutschutzgesetz), passed into law on 15 September 1935 as part of the “Nuremberg Laws” (which also included the Reich Citizenship Law, which deprived Jews of full citizenship), resolved the issues posed by the competing earlier drafts in the following ways. First, the Wagner group’s proposals to protect Deutschstämmige not only against Jews but also against “alien races” such as “Japanese, Chinese” were abandoned, presumably due to foreign policy considerations; instead, the text of the Blutschutzgesetz targeted only Jews. Second, the ministries’ proposal to combine racial and eugenic marriage prohibitions in a single law was also dropped. With both “alien races” and eugenics removed from its subject matter, the Blutschutzgesetz became a purely antisemitic law.Footnote ²⁶ Third, following the recommendations of Wagner’s working group, the Blutschutzgesetz prohibited not only marriage but also extramarital sexual relations. This transformed the law from one regulating marriage, a matter of public law, into a criminal law that imposed criminal penalties (imprisonment) for men (but not women) who violated the prohibition on sexual relations, which became known as “race defilement” (Rassenschande).

The thorny problem of how to define the two groups that were to be prohibited from marrying, even though Nordicist racial theory taught that both “Germans” and “Jews” were racially mixed groups, was resolved by, first, adopting the language of “German blood” proposed by the ministries draft in the slightly expanded formulation of “German and kindred blood” (deutsches und artverwandtes Blut); and second, on the Jewish side, by abandoning the camouflage tactics of the 1933 Civil Service Law (which referred to “non-Aryans”) and the ministries draft (which did not name the source of the “threat” to the purity of German blood) and explicitly naming the “Jews” in the law. The key provision of the first article of the Blutschutzgesetz thus read: “Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden”; the law’s second article added the prohibition of “extramarital intercourse” between these two groups. The precise definition of who would count as a “Jew” was left to an administrative decree, issued in the middle of November, which provided that only persons descended from three or more Jewish grandparents would be counted as “Jews,” whereas persons with two Jewish grandparents would be considered either “Mischlinge” (a derogatory term for persons of “mixed race”) or Jews, depending on whether they themselves belonged to the Jewish faith or were married to a Jew. As with the Civil Service Law, the Jewishness of the grandparents would be ascertained on the basis of membership in Jewish congregations, that is, on the basis of religion.

The eugenic marriage prohibitions of the ministries draft were enacted in a separate law, the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German people (Erbgesundheitsgesetz) passed a month later, on 18 October 1935, which prohibited the marriage of any person suffering from the genetic diseases enumerated in the sterilization law. Whereas the sterilization law had depended on doctors to report patients suspected of being carriers of “hereditary diseases,” the Erbgesundheitsgesetz promised to expand eugenic screening by requiring anyone seeking to get married to obtain an Ehetauglichkeitszeugnis (certificate of eligibility for marriage). However, the implementation of this requirement was put on hold because it would have overwhelmed the public health system; instead, marriage officials were instructed to demand such certificates only in cases that aroused eugenic or racial suspicion.

Nazi Antisemitic Legislation, Eugenics, and Racial Science

The genesis and final form of the Blutschutzgesetz and the Erbgesundheitsgesetz are instructive for understanding the relationship between the Nazi regime’s antisemitic and eugenic legislation. On the one hand, the fact that the Interior and Justice Ministries prepared a draft that combined racial and eugenic marriage prohibitions in a single law – an option that was still considered at Nuremberg – demonstrates that key Nazi officials, including Gütt, thought of eugenic and racial policy as closely connected, a finding Gisela Bock cited as evidence for her claim that eugenics and anthropological racism were inextricably connected. Footnote ²⁷ On the other hand, we must also consider that, in the end, Nazi policy-makers decided to split eugenic and racial prohibitions into two separate laws. Although the reasons for this decision are not articulated in the surviving documentary record, the most plausible explanation relates to the criminalization of extramarital sexual relations. As we saw, the Wagner group’s draft had criminalized “interracial” extramarital sexual relations, most likely due to the “contagionist” belief that a single instance of sexual intercourse between a deutschstämmige woman and a judenstämmiger man made it impossible for that woman to produce “racially pure” offspring thereafter. Once it was clear that Wagner and the radical antisemites were going to prevail on this point, the proponents of eugenic marriage prohibitions, above all Gütt, were faced with the prospect of either criminalizing extramarital sexual relations between carriers of “hereditary diseases” as well or abandoning the joint legislative project and enacting eugenic marriage prohibitions separately. Hence the most likely explanation for the uncoupling of racial and eugenic legislation at Nuremberg is that Gütt, who was very concerned about the public perception of eugenic legislation, did not want to criminalize extramarital sexual relations between carriers of “hereditary diseases” and therefore opted for separate eugenic legislation.Footnote ²⁸ This separation set Nazi antisemitic policy on a very different track from that of eugenics. Whereas the inclusion of extramarital relations in the Blutschutzgesetz gave rise to criminal prosecutions for Rassenschande, which became an important part of the escalation of antisemitism in the following years, the Erbgesundheitsgesetz barred supposed carriers of heritable diseases from marriage only, and there were no subsequent efforts to criminalize extramarital sexual relations between such persons.

The Blutschutzgesetz also provides insights into the relationship between antisemitic legislation and racial science. Resolving the conflict between Günther’s Nordicism and Saller and Merkenschlager’s concept of a “German race” helped pave the way for drafting comprehensive racial legislation because the planners needed to know which system of racial classification to use. The triumph of Nordicism, however, actually made the job of drafting racial legislation harder. If the theory of a “German race” had prevailed, the drafters could have used the term “German race” to define the racial group that was to be “protected” from Jews and other Fremdrassige. Günther’s Nordicist theory, by contrast, made it difficult to come up with a term for the “in-group” to be protected since it regarded both “Germans” and “Jews” as racially mixed groups. This difficulty was recognized by officials trying to draft racial legislation, who acknowledged that racial theories could not provide the categories necessary for racial legislation. Footnote ²⁹

Faced with this quandary, it was the bureaucrats from the Justice and Interior Ministries who came up with the idea of using the term “German blood” to justify the antisemitic marriage prohibition. To be sure, Hitler had sometimes used the language of Blut in Mein Kampf; far more frequently, however, Hitler spoke of Rasse, and he acknowledged Günther’s racial distinctions within the German Volk.Footnote ³⁰ Likewise, Walther Darré had famously written about “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden), but, for Darré, too, who was a strict adherent of Nordicism, blood was little more than a metaphor for race and heredity.Footnote ³¹ Research on blood groups seeking to identify the biological markers of “Jewish blood” or “German blood” had failed. By the standards of contemporary racial science, the Nuremberg Laws’ reference to “German blood” was purely metaphorical.

The introduction of the language of blood in the Nuremberg Laws must therefore be recognized as a remarkable sleight of hand: it conveyed a sense of racial unity and even purity, even though Nordic racial theory actually provided neither. For in the Nordicist conception the group whose “purity” was to be protected – the German Volk minus the “Jews” – was a mixed racial group and thus anything but racially “pure.” The strange disjunction between the Nuremberg Laws’ invocation of the purity of “German blood” and Nordic theory’s insistence on the German Volk’s racial heterogeneity is palpable in an awkward explanation contained in a January 1936 administrative circular from Interior Minister Frick: “The German Volk is composed of the members of different races (nordische, fälische, dinarische, ostische, westische, ostbaltische) and their mixtures. The resulting blood present in the German Volk is the German blood.” (“Das danach im deutschen Volk vorhandene Blut ist das deutsche Blut.”)Footnote ³² Another administrative circular introduced the term Deutschblütiger as the administrative short form for persons “of German and kindred blood.”Footnote ³³

The gap between the Nuremberg Laws’ insistence on the “purity of German blood” and Nordic racial theory shows that, far from exerting a powerful influence on racial legislation, Nordic racial theory was more of an obstacle in the drafting of Nazi antisemitic legislation. This is not to diminish the responsibility of the racial scientists who legitimated and participated in Nazi racial policy, but rather to point out the paradox that they did so despite serious contradictions between Nazi racial policy and contemporary racial science, a fact that only increases their moral culpability. The limited and ambivalent role of racial science suggests that the major factors influencing the course of Nazi antisemitic legislation must be sought in the political realm. This conclusion reveals an important distinction: whereas academic experts played a major role in shaping Nazi eugenic policy, racial science had only a minor influence on Nazi antisemitic policy.

Biopolitical Measures Based on Deviance: The Persecution of “Asoziale”

Space prohibits me from offering more than a bare-bones introduction to Nazi policy towards “Asoziale.” Nazi sterilization policy, as conceived by Gütt and Rüdin, operated on the assumption that “feeblemindedness” and socially deviant behavior were frequently connected. Starting in 1937–8, the Nazi regime implemented a policy that tackled the nexus between “hereditary defects” and deviance by targeting people who exhibited deviant behavior without bothering with a medical diagnosis. Whereas the sterilization program targeted individuals on the basis of ostensibly medical criteria and had set up a judicial procedure (sterilization courts), the new policy targeted individuals purely on the basis of supposedly deviant behavior and dispensed with judicial procedures; instead, it gave the police full discretion to impose the sanction of internment in a concentration camp.

Persons labeled as asozial had been targeted from the outset of the Nazi regime, but until 1937–8 policy consisted mostly of improvised local measures lacking central direction.Footnote ³⁴ The initiative for a more centralized policy came from Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and, since 1934, of the Prussian political police (Gestapo), who had designs for taking over the leadership of the entire German police. At a meeting with Hitler in October 1935, Himmler argued that the political police must expand beyond combating political opponents to include the broader fight against all forms of socially deviant, “asocial” behavior.Footnote ³⁵ Convinced by Himmler’s arguments, Hitler decided to nationalize the German police and appointed Himmler Chief of the German Police in June 1936. To implement Himmler’s expanded vision of policing, the newly created Reich Office of the Criminal Police (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt) started drafting a decree on vorbeugende Verbrechensbekämpfung (preventive crime-fighting), which was issued by the Interior Ministry in December 1937. This decree (Grunderlaß) gave the police a new tool for indefinitely detaining certain categories of persons in concentration camps without judicial proceedings. Whereas “protective detention” (Schutzhaft), the existing procedure for detention in a concentration camp, was supposed to be limited to political opponents (a restriction not always observed in practice), the police could now order the “preventive detention” (Vorbeugungshaft) of “habitual,” “professional,” or “dangerous criminals” and of persons who “endangered the public through their asocial behavior.”Footnote ³⁶ Whereas the first three categories were tied to evidence of criminal behavior, the category of “asocial behavior” gave the police unprecedented discretion to determine whether someone’s behavior constituted enough of a threat to public order to justify their arrest and indefinite detention. What exactly constituted “asocial behavior” was explained by the April 1938 regulations for implementing the December 1937 decree, which listed the following groups: “beggars, vagrants (Zigeuner),Footnote ³⁷ prostitutes, alcoholics, persons suffering from infectious diseases, especially venereal diseases” as well as persons “who fail to comply with the duty to work and leave the responsibility for their upkeep to society”; it also stated that enforcement should focus on “asocials without fixed residence.”Footnote ³⁸

Officially authorized to use the tool of “preventive detention” against persons exhibiting deviant behavior, the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt launched two major national roundups of social outsiders, in April and June 1938, targeting homeless persons and people who could not prove regular employment. In the June raid, approximately 10,000 “asocial” persons – overwhelmingly men – were arrested and interned in concentration camps, whose population expanded dramatically, tripling over the course of the first six months of 1938. By the fall of 1938, Germany’s concentration camps held over 24,000 prisoners, of whom about 70 percent were “Asoziale,” identifiable by a black triangle on their camp uniform.Footnote ³⁹ Since instructions for these raids explicitly included the category of “Zigeuner and persons traveling in the manner of Zigeuner” they also resulted in the internment of about 2,000 Germans and Austrians whom the authorities labeled as “Zigeuner.” The term “Zigeuner” was a discriminatory label imposed from the outside; in this case by the German police on persons exhibiting behavior considered “socially deviant” by the authorities. The closest English equivalent is the term “gypsy.”

The biopolitical targeting of “Zigeuner” as “Asoziale” on the basis of their itinerant lifestyle overlapped with the racial targeting of Sinti and Roma by the newly created Reich Center for Combating Zigeuner, whose persecution of “Zigeuner” was lent scientific legitimacy by the racial scientist Robert Ritter and his Rassenhygienische Forschungsstelle. Footnote ⁴⁰ The persecution of male homosexuals, which was coordinated by a newly created Reich Center for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, should also be understood as targeting “asocial” behavior while at the same time realizing a more specific – in this case, homophobic – racial–biological agenda.Footnote ⁴¹

Several drafts for a Law on the Treatment of Community Aliens (Gesetz über die Behandlung Gemeinschaftsfremder; the word Gemeinschaftsfremd was a synonym for Asozial), prepared by the Justice Ministry from 1939–44, demonstrate that the regime planned to further radicalize the screening of the German population for “asocial” persons. The planned law – which came close to going into effect in 1944, but in the end did not – reveals the Nazi regime’s dystopian vision that anyone whose behavior deviated from its norms should be segregated in a concentration camp.Footnote ⁴²

Even though it was based on neither racial nor eugenic criteria, the internment of “Asoziale” through preventive detention was a genuinely biopolitical form of persecution because it was justified by the claim that socially deviant behavior was routinely associated with hereditary deficiencies, and was thus legitimated by reference to the classification of humans in a hierarchy of biological value, the key characteristic of biopolitics. Whereas Nazi sterilization policy was based on medical diagnoses (however flimsy) and a judicial process (however skewed), the preventive detention of “Asoziale” in concentration camps made no such pretense: here the biopolitical claim that social deviance reflected genetic “defects” simply provided general scientific legitimation for a radicalized policy of social control and “preventive” crime-fighting exercised by the police. Almost any kind of social deviance could be interpreted as evidence of racial–biological “inferiority” justifying detention in camps; and, as the death toll in concentration camps began to soar, especially among “Asoziale,” starting in late 1938,Footnote ⁴³ it became clear that segregation in camps would increasingly mean death.

Conclusion

This chapter has distinguished three different types of biopolitical measures implemented by the Nazi regime during the prewar years: (1) measures whose targets were defined in racial–anthropological terms, as was the case for Nazi antisemitic policies and the persecution of “Zigeuner”; (2) eugenic measures, that is, measures designed to improve a population’s gene pool by encouraging the reproduction of persons with desirable heritable traits and discouraging or preventing the reproduction of persons with undesirable heritable traits, such as the Nazi sterilization program; and (3) measures that did not derive from the logic of eugenics or anthropological racism but were nevertheless legitimated by reference to a hierarchy of biological value and that relied on the criterion of deviance, such as the persecution of “Asoziale” through indefinite “preventive detention” in concentration camps. The persecution of male homosexuals, which could not be examined here but formed an integral part of Nazi biopolitics, would also fit into this third category, of biopolitical measures operating with the criterion of deviance, in this case sexual deviance.

Even though the proponents of biopolitics insisted that their policies were based on the scientific identification of heritable traits, skeptical scientists at the time recognized that it was not at all certain that the traits in question were biological, let alone heritable. The claim that undesirable social behavior, such as vagrancy, reflected heriditary traits such as “feeblemindedness” was even more dubious. The interpretation of certain traits as “racial” was similarly controversial in the fields of anthropology and human genetics. Given this shaky scientific basis, it should not be surprising that the biopolitical justifications for persecution were almost always mixed with preexisting prejudices against each target group, which continued to be important motivating factors; these included non-racial forms of antisemitism as well as longstanding prejudices against Sinti and Roma, homeless persons, sexually independent women, Black Germans, or homosexuals.

In this overview, I have sought to demonstrate that Nazi biopolitics was a contentious arena, riven by conflicts between rival political actors and agencies who were competing for influence. I have also sought to show that the influence of the biosciences on Nazi biopolitics varied greatly among different areas of Nazi biopolitics. As evidenced by Ernst Rüdin, the influence of medicine and genetics on Nazi eugenic policy – especially the sterilization law and its implementation – was very strong. Nazi antisemitic policy, by contrast, presents a different picture. On the one hand, key policy-makers took a great interest in racial science and expected it to supply scientific racial categories for drafting racial legislation; that is why the protracted 1933–5 conflict between the Nordicists and proponents of a “German race” was more than an academic matter. On the other hand, our analysis of the preparations for the Nuremberg Laws showed that Nordicism turned out to be more of an obstacle than an asset in drafting racial legislation. In the place of scientific racial categories, the Nuremberg Laws therefore adopted the metaphorical language of blood. At least in the years 1933–5, Nazi ideology and other political factors were far more important than racial science in shaping antisemitic legislation.

By comparison, the role of racial science in the persecution of persons who were categorized as “Zigeuner” was much more significant. Although those labeled as “Zigeuner” were at least in part persecuted because their itinerant lifestyle was considered deviant, the measures taken to identify, classify, and segregate “Zigeuner” in concentration camps – resulting in their mass murder – were directly connected to the “scientific” research of “Zigeuner expert” Robert Ritter and his Rassenhygienisches Institut. The role of the biosciences in Himmler’s policy of “preventive detention” of “Asoziale” was probably the weakest among all areas of Nazi biopolitics. While the police leadership justified this policy with the claim that socially deviant behavior reflected hereditary “defects,” this conviction was not backed up by a scientific consensus in criminology or research on social deviance.Footnote ⁴⁴

The three different sets of biopolitical policies analyzed in this chapter derived from different power centers within the Nazi regime. Whereas sterilization policy was directed by Arthur Gütt at the Interior Ministry, the key decisions in the passage of the Blutschutzgesetz came from the Nazi Party leadership. Even though the Interior and Justice Ministries provided draft legislation, Reichsärzteführer Wagner’s access to Hitler gave him a crucial advantage over Gütt. The initiative for the third strand of Nazi biopolitics, the persecution of “Asoziale” through preventive detention in concentration camps, came from Heinrich Himmler, who by 1936 controlled both the police and the SS.

The coordinated policy of preventive detention for “Asoziale” introduced by Himmler in 1937–8 represented a major escalation of Nazi biopolitics. Unconstrained by medical criteria or judicial procedure, it gave the police virtually unlimited discretion. Moreover, preventive detention soon turned out to be a potentially lethal sanction. After the mass arrests of “Asoziale” in 1938, mortality rates in the concentration camps rose significantly; after the outbreak of the war, the policy of “annihilation through labor” endorsed the killing of inmates as an official purpose of the camps.

The period covered by this chapter (1933–9) concluded with a drastic radicalization of Nazi biopolitics in the fall of 1939: the murder of institutionalized patients with mental or physical disabilities. The question of whether the so-called “euthanasia” murders should be regarded as the logical conclusion of eugenic thinking or as a major rupture is a difficult one. On the one hand, it can be argued that the distinction between biologically “inferior” and “superior” humans introduced by eugenics set the stage for moving from eradicating “inferior” individuals from future generations to eliminating them from the present generation by killing them. It can also be argued that forced sterilization normalized the state’s physical intervention in people’s bodies against their will and that, once the right to bodily integrity had been breached, it was only a gradual step toward state-sanctioned killing. On the other hand, eugenics and the “euthanasia” killings differed in crucial respects. Whereas the sterilization program was established by passing a law and setting up judicial procedures, the “euthanasia” program was introduced in secret and had no judicial process. More importantly, recent research has shown that the decisive criteria for determining which patients would be killed had to do with their ability to work rather than their medical diagnosis regarding heritable diseases, that is, with economic rather than eugenic considerations. Therefore, the murder of institutionalized patients was, above all else, a program to kill people who were not considered productive members of society. In this respect, the logic of the “euthanasia” program was closer to Himmler’s biopolitical persecution of the “Asoziale” than it was to eugenics: like the persecution of “Asoziale,” the “euthanasia” program targeted people who were seen as playing no useful role in the Volksgemeinschaft.Footnote ⁴⁵