This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

This book focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Proctor demonstrates that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.

A concise and gripping account of eugenics from its origins in the twentieth century and beyond.

The notion of a superior ‘Germanic’ or ‘Nordic’ race was a central theme in Nazi ideology. But it was also a commonly accepted idea in the early twentieth century, an actual scientific concept originating from anthropological research on the physical characteristics of Europeans. The Scandinavian Peninsula was considered to be the historical cradle and the heartland of this ‘master race’. Measuring the Master Race investigates the role played by Scandinavian scholars in inventing this so-called superior race, and discusses how the concept stamped Norwegian physical anthropology, prehistory, national identity and the eugenics movement. It also explores the decline and scientific discrediting of these ideas in the 1930s as they came to be associated with the genetic cleansing of Nazi Germany. This is the first comprehensive study of Norwegian physical anthropology. Its findings shed new light on current political and scientific debates about race across the globe.

Establishing the context within which organizers who staged spectacular popular science exhibitions for urban middle-class audiences and the physicians as well as activists who provided commentaries functioned; this dissertation is a study in social history that seeks to determine how presentations of what it meant to be German evolved from the 1870s to the eve of the Great War in 1914. Research topics include: * Hagenbeck's Ethnographic People Shows * The Berlin Hygiene Exhibition of 1883 * The Berlin Trade & Colonial Fair of 1896 * Karl August Lingner, mouthwash magnate, philanthropist and innovator of the textbook-style exhibit * Taking the first major international health exhibition from idea to reality * The International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911 *** [Reprint of Dissertation with Minor Corrections and New Pagination]

The Faustian bargain—in which an individual or group collaborates with an evil entity in order to obtain knowledge, power, or material gain—is perhaps best exemplified by the alliance between world-renowned human geneticists and the Nazi state. Under the swastika, German scientists descended into the moral abyss, perpetrating heinous medical crimes at Auschwitz and at euthanasia hospitals. But why did biomedical researchers accept such a bargain? The Nazi Symbiosis offers a nuanced account of the myriad ways human heredity and Nazi politics reinforced each other before and during the Third Reich. Exploring the ethical and professional consequences for the scientists involved as well as the political ramifications for Nazi racial policies, Sheila Faith Weiss places genetics and eugenics in their larger international context. In questioning whether the motives that propelled German geneticists were different from the compromises that researchers from other countries and eras face, Weiss extends her argument into our modern moment, as we confront the promises and perils of genomic medicine today.

Traces the development of racial hygiene theory and eugenics research in Germany from the end of the 19th century through the Third Reich. Discusses particularly the work of Alfred Ploetz, a leading propagator of racial hygiene, and his anti-Jewish views. It was argued that German medical science had fallen prey to the "Jewish spirit" and was thus in need of reform. Argues that the biological, medical, and anthropological variants of racism were not only concerned with antisemitism but also influenced Nazi health and social policy. Eugenicists of Jewish origin became victims of the system they had helped to construct. Analyzes how racial hygiene theories were incorporated into Hitler's racial antisemitism and became the basis for the Nazi sterilization and euthanasia programs which, in turn, became the basis for the mass murder of the Jews.