Eugenics is described as one of the most brutal acts aimed at perfecting the human race. This concept, which dates back to ancient times, was first put forward by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1883.
You can more or less guess what it means when we say perfecting the human race. Let’s look at the details of the “eugenics movement” in which tens of thousands of babies are slaughtered just because they look a little unhealthy and people are forcibly sterilized.
The eugenics movement, which was also practiced in civilized times, was followed by many countries in Europe.
As we mentioned before, the concept of eugenics was put forward for the first time in history by Francis Galton. In fact, this method was used in many parts of the world, including Ancient Greece and Egypt, until 1883, but the name was never qualified as eugenic.
Eugenics simply refers to the killing of people who are considered unhealthy or rotten in the human race. At the same time, this concept opposes the reproduction of unhealthy or bad individuals.
Even though he was his cousin, Darwin always opposed Galton’s ideas by finding them heretical and always argued that human life is more important than science. Galton also respected Darwin’s view and did not share his book “Research on Human Faculty and Development”, which he produced until his death, on the concept of eugenics.
One of the first countries to embrace the eugenics movement was Germany, as you can imagine. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, a close friend and supporter of Darwin, was one of the first people in Germany to support the eugenics movement.
The Nazis rejected those who embraced the eugenics movement, despite following the same path as Haeckel
After the Nazis came to power, Haeckel, who soon became a major eugenics advocate, led the practice of eugenics through various pretexts. Interestingly, however, the Nazis denied that they had followed Haeckel’s legacy, stating that they did not follow his example.
Even though their claims were in this direction, the first action of the Nazis regarding the concept of eugenics was the “Law for the Inhibition of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring”. Nearly 200 Hereditary Health Courts were established for the sterilization of unhealthy and useless people, and in line with this law, 400,000 people were sterilized without their consent.
Of course, Germany was not limited to this. Taking things a step further, on 1 October 1939, he killed 18,000 people with disabilities, mental illness, and incurables, together with Action T4 (Tiergartenstraße 4). These people perished in the gas chambers at the Hartheim Euthanasia Center by the brutal decisions of the Nazis. 18 thousand was, of course, the number of people killed in the first place. The Nazis killed more than 70,000 people as part of the T4 action.
European countries such as Italy, England and France were not far from Germany.
The eugenics movement, which started in the age of civilization, continued in Europe, and one of the first names outside of Germany was the former prime minister of Italy, Benito Mussolini. Mussolini, who took a step in Italy by adopting imperialist and fascist concepts, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and killed 15 thousand people in total as part of the eugenic movement. Mussolini, who insulted Ethiopians for being black, stated that Ethiopians should feel lucky to be ruled by a superior race like the Italians.
In France, the situation was not much different. In the 1900s, the French government gave the famous psychologist Alfred Binet a new task within the eugenics movement. Binet’s task was to separate the disabled children who came to the examination from normal children and put a label on them, so to speak.
Children born out of wedlock in the USA for a period were also subjected to the eugenics movement.
The eugenics movement was one of the most interesting points of academicians in America. Eugenics became a social movement that reached its peak especially in the 1920s and 1930s, many communities across the country supported this movement, and the “American Eugenics Society” was founded on this issue.
Due to concepts such as “better family” and “better baby”, more than 65,000 people in America at that time were sterilized without their consent. At the same time, the murder of children born out of wedlock and rape in the womb was also on the agenda of America. US Supreme Court Justice Wendell Holmes made a series of statements in which he stated that it was a better option for children who did not fit into society to be born at all than to grow up needy.
Of course, the eugenics movement did not only consist of methods such as sterilization and execution. Many countries, especially Nazi Germany, carried out hundreds of experiments in laboratories in order to create their own perfect race. Although the eugenics movement was a concept followed in the 1920s, with the defeat of the Nazis, this movement began to lose its influence in many countries in the 1940s.
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