Racial hygiene

Racial hygiene (often labeled a form of "scientific racism") is the selection, by a government, of the most physically, intellectually and morally superior people to raise the next generation (selective breeding) and a close alignment of public health with eugenics.

The concept of racial "purity" was developed by Arthur de Gobineau. De Gobineau argued that race created culture, and that "impure" "race-mixing" leads to chaos. Racial hygiene was historically tied to traditional notions of public health, but usually with an enhanced emphasis on heredity. The use of social measures to attempt to preserve or enhance biological characteristics was first proposed by Francis Galton in his early work, starting in 1869, on what would later be called eugenics.

In Germany
The German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz introduced the term Rassenhygiene in his "Racial hygiene basics" (Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene) in 1895. In its earliest incarnation it was concerned more with the declining birthrate of the German state and the increasing number of mentally ill and disabled in state institutions (and their costs to the state) than with the "Jewish question" and "de-Nordification" (Entnordung) which would come to dominate its philosophy in Germany from the 1920s through the second World War.

"Race" was often interchangeably used to mean "human race" as well as "German race" as well as "Aryan race", though these concepts had different implications. In the 1930s, under the expertise of eugenicist Ernst Rüdin, it was this latter use of "racial hygiene" which was embraced by the followers of National Socialist ideology, who demanded Aryan racial purity and condemned miscegenation. This belief in importance of German racial purity often served as the theoretical backbone of Nazi policies of racial superiority and later genocide. These policies began in 1935, when the National Socialists enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which legislated racial purity by forbidding marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans.

A key part of National Socialism was the concept of racial hygiene and during their rule the field was elevated to the primary philosophy of the German medical community, first by activist physicians within the medical profession, particularly amongst psychiatrists. This was later codified and institutionalized during and after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, during the process of Gleichschaltung (literally, "coordination" or "unification") which streamlined the medical and mental hygiene (mental health) profession into a rigid hierarchy with National Socialist-sanctioned leadership at the top.

Racial hygienists played key roles in the Holocaust, the National Socialist effort to purge Europe of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, the mentally retarded and the insane.

After World War II
After World War II, the racialist ideology was hailed as un-scientific and pseudoscience, although there are many supporters of the movement such as Julian Huxley, William Shockley, and Richard Lynn.