---
title: "Racial hygiene"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_hygiene"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:30:24.017753+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The doctors who carried out experiments on the prisoners in concentration camps specialised in racial hygiene and used the supposed science to back their medical experiments. Some of the experiments were used for general medical research, for example by injecting prisoners with known diseases to test vaccines or possible cures. Other experiments were used to further the Germans' war strategy by putting prisoners in vacuum chambers to see what could happen to pilots' bodies if they were ejected at a high altitude or immerse prisoners in ice water to see how long they would survive and what materials could be used to prolong life if worn by German pilots shot down over the English Channel. The precursors of this notion were earlier medical experiments which German doctors performed on African prisoners of war in concentration camps in Namibia during the Herero and Nama genocide.
A key aspect of National Socialism was the concept of racial hygiene and it was elevated to the primary philosophy of the German medical community, first by activist physicians within the medical profession, particularly amongst psychiatrists. That 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.
The blueprint for Nazism's attitude toward other races was written by Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz, and Eugen Fischer and published under the title Human Heredity Theory and Racial Hygiene (1936).

== After World War II ==
After World War II, the idea of "racial hygiene" was denounced as unscientific by many, but there continued to be supporters and enforcers of eugenics even after there was widespread awareness of the nature of Nazi eugenics. After 1945, eugenics proponents included Julian Huxley and Marie Stopes, but they typically removed or downplayed the racial aspects of their theories.

== See also ==

== References ==

=== Notes ===

=== Further reading ===
Glad, John (2008). Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century. Hermitage Publishers.
Joseph, J. (2004). The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope. New York: Algora. (2003 United Kingdom Edition by PCCS Books)
Joseph, J. (2006).  The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes. New York: Algora 
Paul, Diane B. (1995). Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present. New Jersey: Humanities Press 
Proctor, Robert (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674745780.