1 of 9
Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship, by Brigitte Hamann, translated from the German by Thomas Thornton, Oxford University Press, 1999, 482 pp.; $17.95, paper
Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris, by Ian Kershaw, Norton, 1999, 845 pp.; $21.95, paper
Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis, by Ian Kershaw, Norton, 2000, 1115 pp.; $35, paper
On a gray June day in the summer of 1999, I visited Herrsching, a beautiful resort on Ammersee, a lake in southern Germany. Herrsching was the home of physician Alfred Ploetz, the founding father of the race hygiene or eugenics movement in Germany, whose goal was to improve human heredity by rationally controlling reproduction. I'd come to examine his correspondence and papers. My host was Ploetz's 87-year-old son, Wilfried Ploetz, still living in the medieval manor house bought by his father, who conducted scientific experiments on heredity there.
After Herr Ploetz graciously picked me up at the train station, I cautiously asked harmless questions about his father. Uncertain about how he viewed his father and the movement he led, especially the Nazi connection, I proceeded gingerly. But Herr Ploetz himself unabashedly introduced the topic of Nazism, relating to me several stories about the Nazi period involving his father or him. While admitting that his father made some mistakes, he clearly tried to distance his father and other leading eugenicists—many of whom he knew personally from their frequent visits with his father—from the Nazis and Nazi racism.
Scholars continue to probe and debate the extent of involvement between German science and the Nazi regime, and the influence of scientific and pseudo-scientific thought on Nazi ideology.[1] Clearly Alfred Ploetz was no Hitler. He experimented on rabbits, not on humans. Left to their own devices, probably neither Ploetz nor most other German eugenicists would have perpetrated the evil deeds we associate with Hitler, especially the Holocaust. Ploetz opposed the Nazis before they came to power, according to his son, and based on what I know from other sources, this is credible.
Nevertheless, ideas have consequences. Herrsching is just a 44-minute train trip from Munich, Hitler's early headquarters, where he began his drive to power in early 1919. About the same distance from Munich in a different direction is Dachau, site of the Nazi's first concentration camp, which I likewise visited. Ploetz's ideas, blended with those of other eugenicists and racists into a coherent Nazi program, had disastrous consequences once they were implemented by a strong-willed leader with both the political power and a cadre of like-minded assistants to carry them out.
The Nazi eugenics program began in earnest in January 1934 when a law requiring sterilization for persons with congenital illnesses went into effect. Evidently, since this program promised to fulfill the goals for which Ploetz had struggled and sacrificed, he ceased to oppose Nazism and thus became a tool of the regime. Compulsory sterilization, of course, was only the first step for the Nazis. Later they would implement more radical eugenics measures in their "euthanasia" program, murdering about 70,000 mentally and physically handicapped people in 1939-41. And "euthanasia" was once again only a preliminary step toward the ultimate program of racist eugenics: the Holocaust. This was the slippery slope with a vengeance.
Especially given the contemporary resurgence of eugenics, albeit often in covert form, we must not make the mistake of treating the Nazi era as the expression of an anomalous, incomprehensible evil, whether the emphasis falls on the evil of the German people, or the evil genius of Hitler, or both. By doing so, we keep the Nazi experience at a safe distance from our own historical moment. Only from a patient, scrupulous accounting of what happened in those years in all its specificity can we hope to gain usable lessons for the present.
share this page
RSS Feed
