1933: Nazi Book Burning, Laws Limit Jews In Public Schools, Prevention of Offspring w Hered Diseases
Last edited Thu Feb 3, 2022, 02:19 AM - Edit history (1)
- Book burning. On May 10, 1933, German students under the Nazi regime burned tens of thousands of books nationwide. These book burnings marked the beginning of a period of extensive censorship and control of culture in Adolf Hitler's escalating reign of terror.
In this short film, a Holocaust survivor, an Iranian author, an American literary critic, and 2 Museum historians discuss the Nazi book burnings and why totalitarian regimes often target culture, particularly literature. 2013. (US Holocaust Memorial Museum-USHMM).
_______
- A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin, May 10, 1933. (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Archives and Records Administration).
_______
-- Book Burning, US Holocaust Memorial Museum- USHMM.
On May 10, 1933, university students burn upwards of 25,000 “un-German” books in Berlin’s Opera Square. Some 40,000 people gather to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: “No to decadence and moral corruption!” As part of an effort to align German arts and culture with Nazi ideas (Gleichschaltung), university students in college towns across Germany burned thousands of books they considered to be “un-German,” heralding an era of state censorship and cultural control.
Students threw books pillaged mostly from public and university libraries onto bonfires with great ceremony, band-playing, and so-called “fire oaths.” The students sought to purify German literature of “foreign,” especially Jewish, and other immoral influences. - Among the authors whose works were burned was Helen Keller, an American whose belief in social justice encouraged her to champion disabled persons, pacifism, improved conditions for industrial workers, and women's voting rights.
________
- Gleichschaltung, or in English, co-ordination, was in Nazi terminology the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education". The apex of the Nazification of Germany was in the resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally of 1935, when the symbols of the Nazi Party and the State were fused (see Flag of Germany) and German Jews were deprived of their citizenship (see Nuremberg Laws)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
________
* As the Right Censors Public Libraries, Families Are Forming Banned Book Clubs*
https://truthout.org/articles/as-the-right-censors-public-libraries-families-are-forming-banned-book-clubs/
________
- First grade pupils study in a classroom in a public school in Hamburg, Germany, June 1933. Jewish pupil Eva Rosenbaum (with the white collar) is seated in the center desk on the right. On Dec. 12, 1938 Eva left for England on the 2nd Kindertransport. (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eva Rosenbaum Abraham-Podietz).
-- Law Limits Jews In Public Schools, April 25, 1933.
The German government issues the Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities, which dramatically limits the number of Jewish students attending public schools.
After Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, government at every level—national, state, and municipal—began to adopt laws and policies that increasingly restricted the rights of Jews in Germany. This new law limited the number of Jewish students in any one public school to no more than 5 percent of the total student population. According to the census of June 16, 1933, the Jewish population of Germany was about 500,000 people out of a total population of 67 million or less than 0.8 percent of the total. In 1933, 75 percent of all Jewish students attended general public schools in Germany. However, public schools also played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to German youth.
- Educators taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism. In the face of increasing persecution at public schools, Jews in Germany turned increasingly to private schools for their children...
__________
- Propaganda slide featuring two doctors working at an unidentified asylum for the mentally ill. The caption reads, “Life only as a burden.” Germany, 1934. (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Marion Davy).
-- Law for the “Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” July 14, 1933.
The German government passes the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses), mandating the forced sterilization of certain individuals with physical and mental disabilities. This new law provides a basis for the involuntary sterilization of people with physical and mental disabilities or mental illness, Roma (Gypsies), “asocial elements,” and Afro-Germans...
- Read More, https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/book-burning
__________
- Hartheim Castle (Schloss Hartheim) in Upper Austria. Nazi euthanasia center.
- Nazi era and aftermath: Hartheim Euthanasia Centre. Following Hitler's euthanasia decree in 1939, Hartheim was selected as one of six euthanasia centres in the Reich. Between May 1940 and December 1944, approximately 30,000 people physically and mentally disabled were killed at Schloss Hartheim by gassing and lethal injection as part of the T-4 Euthanasia Program, named after the infamous Berlin address "Tiergartenstrasse 4". These included about 12,000 prisoners from the Dachau and Mauthausen concentration camps who were sent here to be gassed, as were hundreds of women sent from Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944, predominantly sufferers of TB and those deemed mentally infirm.
The castle was regularly visited by the psychiatrists Karl Brandt, Professor of Psychiatry at Würzburg University, and Werner Heyde. In December 1944 Schloss Hartheim was closed as an extermination centre and restored as a sanatorium after being cleared of evidence of the crimes committed therein. In 1946, Alice Ricciardi-von Platen, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who practised near Linz, Austria, was invited to join the German team observing the so-called Doctors' trial in Nuremberg. The trial was presided over by American judges, who indicted Karl Brandt and 22 others. The 16 who were convicted included Josef Mengele; seven were sentenced to death. Her 1948 book, Die Tötung Geisteskranker in Deutschland, ('The killing of the mentally ill in Germany'), was judged a scandal by German medical professionals.
After World War II, the building was converted into apartments. Beginning in 1969, the gas chamber was opened to visitors. Hartheim Castle is now a memorial site dedicated to the thousands of physically and mentally handicapped persons who were murdered there by the Nazis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Hartheim
_________
- Schonbrunn Psychiatric Hospital, 1934 (SS photo). Killing children.
_____
- Aktion T4, Involuntary euthanasia, mass murder in Nazi Germany.
Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (Gnadentod).
In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany. About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
= new reply since forum marked as read
Not in the "Greatest Democracy in the World"
I guess that's what they tell themselves.
Last edited Thu Feb 3, 2022, 02:26 PM - Edit history (1)
and our unjust, horrible treatment of Native Americans, black people and more as well.
America's Hidden Eugenics Movement, 2014. Ed.
The United States has an imperfect history. Some of our darker chapters include slavery, the decimation of Native American populations, and atrocities committed during our various wars. A quick survey will reveal that most Americans have learned about or at least heard of these events. However, ask the average person about the “eugenics movement” and you are likely to get blank stares. We at Genetics Generation believe it is time to raise awareness of this tragic time in our country’s history. “Eugenics” comes from the Greek roots for “good” and “origin,” or “good birth” and involves applying principles of genetics and heredity for the purpose of improving the human race. The term eugenics was first coined by Francis Galton in the late 1800’s (Norrgard 2008). Galton (1822-1911) was an English intellectual whose body of work spanned many fields, including statistics, psychology, meteorology and genetics. Incidentally, he was also a half-cousin of Charles Darwin.
Galton’s first academic foray into eugenics analyzed the characteristics, such as superior intelligence, of England’s upper classes and concluded they were hereditary; therefore, desirable traits could be passed down through generations (Norrgard 2008). Galton advocated a selective breeding program for humans in his book Hereditary Genius (1869): “Consequently, as it is easy, ….. to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”
The eugenics movement took root in the U.S. in the early 1900‘s, led by Charles Davenport (1866-1944), a prominent biologist, and Harry Laughlin, a former teacher and principal interested in breeding. In 1910, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island “to improve the natural, physical, mental, and temperamental qualities of the human family” (Norrgard 2008). Laughlin was the first director. Field workers for the ERO collected many different forms of “data”, including family pedigrees depicting the inheritance of physical, mental, and moral traits. They were particularly interested in the inheritance of “undesirable” traits, such as pauperism, mental disability, dwarfism, promiscuity, and criminality. The ERO remained active for three decades. Eugenics was not only the purview of academics, and it became a popular social movement that peaked in the 1920s and 30s. During this period, the American Eugenics Society was founded, in addition to many local societies and groups around the country (PBS 1998). Members competed in “fitter family” and “better baby” competitions at fairs and exhibitions (Remsberg 2011).
Movies and books promoting eugenic principles were popular. A film called The Black Stork (1917), based on a true story, depicted as heroic a doctor that allowed a syphilitic infant to die after convincing the child’s parents that it was better to spare society one more outcast. The English eugenics movement, championed by Galton, promoted eugenics through selective breeding for positive traits. In contrast, the eugenics movement in the US quickly focused on eliminating negative traits. Not surprisingly, “undesirable” traits were concentrated in poor, uneducated, and minority populations. In an attempt to prevent these groups from propagating, eugenicists helped drive legislation for their forced sterilization (Norrgard 2008). The first state to enact a sterilization law was Indiana in 1907, quickly followed by Calif. and 28 other states by 1931 (Lombardo n.d.). These laws resulted in the forced sterilization of over 64,000 people in the U.S. (Lombardo n.d.). At first, sterilization efforts focused on the disabled but later grew to include people whose only “crime” was poverty. These sterilization programs found legal support in the Supreme Court. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the state of Virginia sought to sterilize Carrie Buck for promiscuity as evidenced by her giving birth to a baby out of wedlock (some suggest she was raped)...
More,
https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444/
