Ep. 30- Nazi Eugenics with Marius Turda

The first victims were not Jews per se, but Germans.  That is to say, that the Nazis first murdered mentally and physically handicapped Germans that they considered to be unworthy of living.  In so doing, they drew on the long history of the eugenics movement. 

In this episode, I talked with Marius Turda about the role eugenics played in the Nazi state, its connections to the larger global eugenics movement, and the echoes of this history today.

Marius Turda is a professor and historian of eugenics and the Holocaust as well as the director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University.

Turda, Marius. Modernism and Eugenics (2010)

Turda, Marius. Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary (2014)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.102)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Bourne. And today we're talking about a really important topic that really has a connection to a lot of different elements of the Holocaust. And that is the idea of eugenics and the so-called Nazi euthanasia program that springs from it. This is a really important topic that I think

predates a nazis and i think it follows after the nazis as well and i have a really fantastic guest here to help us with this is my strata from oxford brooks university my thanks so much for coming on

Marius Turda (00:44.303)
Thank you for having me, it's a real pleasure.

Waitman Beorn (00:46.872)
So can you tell us little bit about yourself and how you got interested in this particular topic?

Marius Turda (00:54.287)
Well, you know, for a long time, people have studied the history of eugenics almost exclusively through the prism of Nazi regime, Nazi Holocaust. So if you're interested in eugenics, in whatever aspects of eugenics, you would have by default in many ways.

studied the Nazi period. And so there was a lot of emphasis on Nazi eugenics, Nazi Holocaust, for the obvious reasons. And this is in many ways the right thing to do. You cannot talk about the history of eugenics and not mention the Nazi period and not mention the Holocaust or not mention the T4 program.

So I, as an intellectual historian, I was interested in how ideas circulate and how they morph into different contexts. So whilst I did study the Nazi period, I did study quite in depth the Nazi racial hygiene movement,

I was, however, interested in something else, both in terms of what I call the horizontal implication or the horizontal dimension of eugenics. In other words, I looked at other countries than Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s, but also temporarily I was interested in how can we read the history of eugenics through a much longer historical perspective that not only predates Nazism, as you pointed out, but also continues after 1945.

to some extent, it continues to this day. if you look at these kind of interests, then one cannot but observe the centrality of the Nazi experiment. And it is there, no matter what we do, no matter what kind of topics I research, or how kind of approach I take, whether it's more philosophical or more historical or more hemeneutical,

Marius Turda (02:54.213)
There's something always that drives me back or draws me into the Nazi kind of understanding of eugenics, because it's literally as much as we can say the same thing about the Holocaust. It completely and ultimately fundamentally and without any possibility of going back, it transformed entirely the way you look at history and the way we look at ourselves as individuals.

Waitman Beorn (03:23.884)
Yeah, I think that's certainly the case. We'll probably talk about this, you know, with the idea even of euthanasia and the way it spills over into right to die kinds of conversations. And, the difference between sort of voluntarily choosing to end your own life, which, you know, in the modern context, people who are opposed to that will often throw the Nazis up as, you know, this is what this means, this kind of thing.

Marius Turda (03:36.495)
Yeah, and.

Marius Turda (03:49.699)
Yeah, I mean the whole thing with that, now with the 60 suicide debates that are going on in our countries and in some places of course it is legal.

if you think of places like the Netherlands or Canada. Now it is being debated in the British Parliament. So there is a push towards voluntary euthanasia, assisted suicide. And there is a way to rethink the legal framework within which this could happen. And as you rightly pointed out, we can't have this conversation today without understanding there was a moment in time.

in direct connection to one of the most horrific totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, where people are actually killed.

based on this idea that it is a merciful way of ending someone's life because it's literally of no use or cannot be lived. So it was forced, of course, it was implemented without the consent of the individuals and families, but that connection is always there. the critics of euthanasia today are keen to point out that historical element.

But obviously there are major differences as well as much as there are certain subterranean continuities, as historians would likely point out, between the 1930s and 40s.

Marius Turda (05:16.025)
and the eugenic debates about who deserves to live and who deserves to die, and our current understanding of how can we articulate a medical and social policy towards people who are terminally ill or indeed people who wish to die for a number of reasons, personal or otherwise.

Waitman Beorn (05:38.722)
Yeah, so maybe the next place to go is just to start at the very beginning, which is, can you give us sort of a general history of the idea of eugenics? You know, where is this coming from? Who is pushing it? And then we can move into looking at sort of how the Nazis adopt this, modify this for their own purposes.

Marius Turda (06:02.747)
There are many ways to explain the history of eugenics and there are many good books on the topic. And some people take a more historical approach. They will say, well, you know, let's start looking at industrialized Western Europe after and United States after 8050s, 8060s. And the kind of...

crisis of modernity that impacted these countries. And within that context, we look at currents of thought, which are quite different, but they kind of come together after the publication of Charles Darwin's History of Evolution. And there is this understanding that you need to really interfere and controlled to some extent, both population growth and the quality of population.

So you have this, and of course within that you have discussions about the empire and European colonialism and racism. so eugenics is the way it's placed, the interstices between all of these different aspects of understanding Western or European modernity since, let's say, early 19th century.

And people then point out that Francis Galton, the British or English statistician and demographer and anthropologist, he coined the term in 1883. He's been interested in questions of heredity since the 1850s, 1860s. He's half a cousin.

Charles Darwin, of course, played a crucial role on his thinking. And there is a relationship between Charles Darwin and Francis Goulton, which is not simply familial, but it's also familiar. In other words, they read each other and they were quite influenced by each other's thinking. But of course, Francis Goulton's ideas of heredity are very different than what you'll have after 1900 with a rediscovery of mentalism and basically the emergence of genetics.

Marius Turda (08:07.667)
and then they are pointing out to similar authors or similar thinkers who kind of thought of proposing the same way of managing population or proposing ways.

to deal with the social problems facing Western societies. So you have people in Germany like Alfred Plotz, you have people in France like Adolf Pinar. So you have, and then of course you have in America, a massive discussion about how can we withstand the profound transformation America, North America was experiencing in the end of 19th century, not only in terms of expansion.

economic growth, but also the number of people coming into the country. So immigration and racism are always part of this conversation. So that's one direction to explain how it all starts, say around 80s, 70s, 80s, 80s, with a number of scientists interested in issues of heredity and evolution and secularization and trying to combine that, some of them with medicine, particularly in the French context, some of them with population control.

and social problems in the British context or in connection to race or the national community, as it was called in the German context or Central European context. So you have basically three major traditions that work and sometimes they interspersed, they relate to each other and these people communicated and shared ideas.

So that's one way of looking at it. The other way, of course, is to say, well, there is a philosophical undercurrent in European culture that is basically eugenics that goes back to Plato and Aristotle. It goes back to ancient Greece and go back to Sparta. So you have this form of, you know, dealing with problems that, philosophically speaking, eugenics, which is basically eugenics comes from the Greek word, which it means good breeding of a good birth.

Marius Turda (10:16.831)
And the idea basically is that in order to have a functional society, need to have well-functioning citizens and they should be healthy not only in terms of their bodies but also in terms of their morality and the way they think responsibly towards future generations. And Plato would play with these ideas as you know. So you have that discussion that goes back to...

And it's interesting when it comes to euthanasia and the T4 program, the Nazi radicalization of a rhetoric about forced killing, there is a lot of reference to ancient Greece and it's a lot of reference to the Asian sparta. Now, of course, as you know, Nazi ideologues would reference ancient Greece anyway on a number of issues, but there's also this connection they don't say, we need to kind of...

to revive that kind of attitude towards mercy killing, because it's for the greater good, the way the ancient Spartans had done it. And then you have another tradition, is continuous also to this day, which is more or less connected to Christianity and morality and care. So ideas on how mercy and helping others.

can be formulated within the idea of what the Catholics would call the true eugenics, which is basically where can we intervene to regulate something which is basically untouchable, namely human life, because this is not something that you should do.

you should not transgress that ultimate boundary to take human life and also to stop someone from leaving. However, within that broad register, there is a possibility to improve the quality of future generation and to improve the quality of people through certain ways of dealing with human suffering and looking after each other. And there is a long tradition in Christianity and particularly in...

Marius Turda (12:24.731)
you could see this in the 19th 20th centuries, was a lot of Christian organisations are trying to articulate a way of dealing with people with disability, or people who otherwise would fall out of the normal rhythm of society and they would very easily become targeted by eugenics and eugenicists. And we have numerous examples how it happened in the 1920s and 30s, where

Well, obviously, there was a more difficult relationship the church, the Christian denomination had with eugenics because they thought they could articulate a form of cohabitation with certain eugenic ideas, not with abortion, for example, not with birth control, not with euthanasia, certainly, but with other things, you know, healthy families, numerous families, certain people should reproduce more than others. There is a lot

of eugenic thinking in that kind of proactive religious idea that we need to help society in certain way. So you see, you could write, and this is not to mention, of course, the new tendencies of understanding the history of eugenics that comes from the voice of those who are targeted by eugenics. In other words, a lot of the scholarship, as you know, is written by and for people who basically belong to the elites in certain way we're talking about.

scientific elites or political elites is written with a kind of perspective from top rather than from bottom up and that is fortunately has changed dramatically in the past two decades so now there is an understanding of eugenics from the point of view of someone with disability is the point of view someone who's

sexual orientation is different. Someone who's non-white, someone who's not a male, so you have a lot of gender perspectives infusing this conversation, a lot of...

Marius Turda (14:32.227)
queer perspective, lot of disability perspectives, so they rewrite the history of eugenics as we knew it or as you and I studied 30 years in school in a very novel and much needed ways. Certain things are still there in terms of chronology and in some of kind of major figures, however, there is a lot of new stuff being brought in which gives us a much better understanding of how history of eugenics should be understood in red by

younger generations.

Waitman Beorn (15:04.246)
And is it fair to look at, and again, is obviously, know, the eugenics movements of the 19th and early 20th century obviously are based heavily, as you note already, in sort of racism. And we'll say in the most charitable sense, a misreading of lots of different things that are considered to be genetic that really aren't. But can we also sort of divide eugenics and

as policy into kind of a positive and a negative kind of eugenics in the sense that the positive eugenics is kind of a public health thing. Like, let's make, let's do public health to make people more healthy. But the negative is in terms of like limiting people from procreating and or killing them, you know, removing them from society. that these, obviously that the latter piece is the one that sort of takes over.

our consciousness in terms of, you know, our memory of it and the historical piece. Whereas of course there is part of creating these healthy societies is just creating healthy people, which is on its face, not necessarily a bad thing, right?

Marius Turda (16:19.929)
Yeah, no, obviously, this is this we are having at the moment, you know, how much of that kind of eugenic argument can be accepted and how much historically can be attributed to what people called, as you pointed out, positive and negative genetics, positive being more about, you know, encouraging people to to have children live a healthy life, creating conditions for them to thrive.

In other words, it plays both with heredity and with the environment and a more deterministic approach which turned out to be quite, how shall I put it, out to be quite annihilatory in its nature and genocidal and negative, leading to euphanasia, leading to sterilisation, leading to the Holocaust, leading to killing of various people.

And my argument is always eugenics is eugenics, there's no good and bad eugenics. I think conceptually you could always find an argument for and an argument against a particular philosophical point of view when it comes to human life. The consensus should be, I suppose, post-Holocaust at least, because before obviously they could not quite

understand much of it as he pointed out in terms of how heredity worked, how genetics can explain certain things. They were simply speculating a great deal about it and they simply took it for granted that it doesn't have to be 100 percent even if it's 60 percent explained by heredity that's already enough to to really shape the life of family and an individual and his descendants.

Although of course they knew at the time that this is not a solid foundation in terms of the science behind it, but they went on and sterilized you anyway.

Marius Turda (18:26.603)
and they went on and then killed you anyway if they simply assumed that there is an indication that that could be transmitted hereditarily. But after the Holocaust and after with the emergence of human genetics, I think the complication is that it's very hard to argue that we can base any solution to social problems, cultural problems, medical problems on biological arguments that are based on eugenics.

So even if I think a lot of people would agree, there is nothing wrong with having a healthy child, there's nothing wrong with having a healthy family or having a numerous family if you can afford it. This is ultimately not a conversation about giving legitimacy to eugenics because if you do it in this way,

The problem is that at some point you'll still have to draw a line somewhere and then even those who argue for positive eugenics and they argue for positive eugenics in the past and will historically if you look at contexts where you didn't have very strong racial hygiene programs like you know in countries like Italy or France or Eastern Europe or South America

But where of course eugenics are omnipresent in both the fascists and the democratic regimes and where a lot of positive eugenics ideas are pushed forward in the name of socializing public health, preventive medicine.

And a lot of good things happen from vaccination of people to creating better, you know, kindergarten facilities, maternity for mothers, teaching them how to become better, you know, better mothers in many ways. But also the ultimate goal was always who do you serve with this particular program? And you are basically in the same logic, an instrument.

Marius Turda (20:36.959)
the state. So the fascist rhetoric about the numerous families or about motherhood, you would say it's extremely different than the Nazi rhetoric, although I would disagree with that. think the Nazi way, well, how about we call the Nazi pro-natalist policies and population policies positive eugenics? There's a lot of positive eugenics in Nazi Germany.

Right? That's about encouraging people to live healthier, encouraging people to get better educated, encouraging people to have more children, helping those families financially, creating social corridors within which these families can climb, and so on and so forth, exactly as it happened in other countries, exactly as it happened after 1945. Now, of course, how can we put it together and say, well,

Can we accept that actually the Nazi regime did a lot of good things as well? Not only bad things. And of course, I'm not talking only about the economy. I'm not talking only about the construction of highways and the car industry. a lot of the panoply of the things the Nazi regime trying to implement in the names of rejuvenating the German nation and purifying the German folk.

Many of them would be considered today positive and potentially beneficial, if not outright beneficial to the German population. But this is exactly the point I highlight this word because you have to belong to the particular category of people. You had to be, you know, racially speaking a German in order to benefit from positive eugenics. You had to be racially speaking a French or Italian or Romanian or Hungarian person to benefit from positive eugenics.

That kind of selection and the word here is selection. And extremely important, a lot of the rhetoric, and you can see this in 1930s and 40s, they didn't have to use the word eugenics. They were talking about social selection, racial selection, Auslese in German. It's very important because that's the key word. You have two important concepts operating within this positive and negative eugenics. One is control and the other one is selection.

Marius Turda (22:52.899)
Ultimately, what you achieve is a form of control over a population. And how do you achieve that? It's through forms of selection. And of course, if you didn't, and you can see this in the post-war period, many categories of people, know, queer people, people of color.

people with disability, immigrants, refugees that did not belong to the fold, they did not belong to the national community or they were considered to be outside the national community. They could not benefit discriminatory practices against them. Still applied in the 1950s and 60s, they couldn't go to the right school or if they went to the right school, they were segregated in the classroom. You could see this in the most advanced societies in Britain or Sweden, or could see it in communist Eastern Europe with the Roma people. So...

And that was positive eugenics, right? So everyone had access to education. Everybody was invited to come in. They were members of society, but as Orwell put it very well, we were all equal, but some of us are more equal than the others. It's the same with positive eugenics. It works up to a point in terms of creating a facade of equality, but eugenics is not democratic. We'll never consider...

because if it's not about race, in other words, it's not biologically related, it's about social worth or class or social origin. And in this way, we still have a hierarchy of people. Some of us work more than others. Some of us are better than others at school.

So the moment I use these categories to separate, categorize, ultimately dehumanize certain categories of people, then any form of positive eugenics turns out to be as bad as negative eugenics, which at least is out front or better.

Waitman Beorn (24:33.794)
Well, it's funny because actually, you're mentioning that, I'm thinking this is obviously not eugenics per se, but in both the United States and England, have this, one of the most recent sort of political crises, I suppose, is this idea of degrees that are valid. What your degree at university, it a useful degree or not? Which is again, sort of based on this whole idea of like, are you contributing to society in a way that is valued?

by the decision makers, right? Which is not eugenics, but it is sort of a reflection or shadow of that idea of like your worth as a person is based on what it is that you're contributing to society almost in a directly economic way, which is kind of, you know, I hadn't really thought of that as kind of an echo of the eugenics idea, but it kind of is, I suppose.

Marius Turda (25:26.426)
Yeah.

Marius Turda (25:31.003)
That's one of the legacies. It goes back very clearly if you look at how ideas of productivity and worthiness were articulated and then applied. Look at the T4 programme in Nazi Germany. Some people were given a leeway if they were productive. They could fix a chair. They could have a form of disability. It's more of a serious form of disability. However, if you're able to give

back something to society, you were still spared maybe a few months or maybe entirely they would spare your life because you could say in other words your life was worth your living rather than a life unworthy of living. So at the moment the idea of productivity is central to eugenics then as it is now because ultimately if people say you're absolutely in no way able to give something back.

then what's the point of your life? Now, this completely takes away any form of human emotion and any form of sentimentality, as people in the 19th century would call a form of humanism or a form of charity and love. Because obviously, if I have someone, my daughter or my son has a profound disability, say, has Down syndrome. For me,

What I need from my offspring is that I just want my offspring to exist because the love and the mere existence of that individual gives me immense pleasure and makes me happy. For anyone else, that individual is a waste of space or waste of resources. Someone has to pay for them to go to school, to special school. Someone has to pay for them to be in hospitals and looked after.

So I have to pay for their care if I can't do it.

Marius Turda (27:29.967)
And that's exactly what eugenicists were arguing in 1920s and 30s. We need to devoid any form of social progress from sentimentality and false humanism because basically it works against natural selection. So what we are doing, we're not allowing natural selection to take its own course in other ways. Those who are fit should survive and procreate. Those who aren't fit shouldn't.

what we're actually creating is a completely different social fabric, which ultimately will lead to our demise. Now, you can read that in terms of complete sort of racial mindset. In other words, it's a war between superior and inferior races. And if your races are overwhelming us, we need to do something about it. As the Nazi would argue, we need to exterminate a few races. Or you could be in terms of somehow the...

Waitman Beorn (28:05.806)
And so if it.

Marius Turda (28:24.743)
American, British or Nordic Scandinavian eugenicists would argue, we have too many people, too many alcoholics, too many prostitutes, too many workers who are unable to basically provide complete services in return for what we're giving them through social assistance to care.

So the state needs to actually intervene. And then as we know, it happened in Sweden, happened in Switzerland, and I'm giving you all this to the democratic examples, sterilization of women with disability continued all the way into the 1970s. And the argument was simply based on the productivity and the kind of efficiency of these human bodies, which were deemed to be in many ways, not only

unworthy but also anti eugenics. In other words, it's not only the fact that you're actually not contributing, but actually you're contributing negatively. So to put it in the eugenic language of the time, it's not that your contribution is zero, it's actually it's in the negative that's even worse.

Waitman Beorn (29:33.856)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and to be fair, you know, the United States is guilty of this as well. You know, the state that I'm from, Virginia, you know, they were sterilizing women forcibly into like the 60s, I think. And and some of it was it wasn't even with the species genetic piece, it was, you know, single mothers, multiple times, single mothers, this idea that they were just sort of so immoral, you know, that as an unwed mother that they just are not worthy of sort of

Marius Turda (29:46.426)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (30:03.319)
procreating again. this idea of sort of the genetic transmission of morals and sort of asocial behavior. We should probably talk about the Nazis a little bit.

Marius Turda (30:15.643)
Yeah, it would have brought this to the Nazi, because of message of Virginia, it's I think, deported to our listeners that we're talking about, 1924, 2024. So we have a century almost, if you do want to take a kind of historical approach, it's interesting because we have a century since the major...

Racial Act of 1924 and it of course carried back any famous case of sterilization and yeah she was a white woman but basically it's important to highlight that kind of interesting relationship we have in terms of the temporality of it.

We need to go back to that as well. And morality is the key word here, and this will connect us to the Nazis and the Holocaust because as he pointed out, it was about not just people who were considered to have certain hereditary problems, and for that reason alone, they should not be allowed to procreate.

their behavior was considered to be against the norms of society. So there is a certain normativity there at work. So you are asocial, you are antisocial, and so on and so forth.

but you also in many ways, are someone to be dealt with in a quite radical way because eugenicists, they believe they are to some extent, know, defendants of morality. They were moral crusaders. So they were talking as much about, you know, the damage caused by venereal diseases and alcoholism and prostitution and immorality as he pointed out.

Marius Turda (31:55.597)
as much as they would talk about inferiority, sub-normality, people who, for number of reasons, could be of ethnic origin, as in case of Jews, the Blacks, or the Roma, the Sinti, or the Janish you have in Europe, or it could be because of ideological conviction or sexual orientation. They targeted homosexuals in Nazi Germany, they targeted communists.

they would believe communism to be a disease of the Jewish mind. In other words, ideology has this subtextual biological connotation in it. If you're a Jew, it was assumed, it's only natural that you become a communist. So.

Waitman Beorn (32:41.4)
Well, it's really quickly, it's worth also pointing out because I did an episode earlier with Laurie Marhoffer on trans people and LGBT people. And it's worth pointing out that even in that Nazi anti-gay policy, there is absolutely, as you're pointing out, this element of procreation, right? So that the Nazi state is in some ways less interested slash more lenient

Marius Turda (32:49.325)
huh.

Waitman Beorn (33:09.676)
with lesbians because they can still theoretically procreate. Whereas it views gay men even more sort of harshly because they are basically withholding the ability to procreate in some ways are sort of, know, so again, there's this, there's these connections with these overlaps in various kinds of Nazi discriminatory policy, but this has eugenics aspect to it as well.

Marius Turda (33:24.698)
Yeah.

Marius Turda (33:34.479)
Yeah, absolutely. So, if you think about the future of the race, reproduction is crucial. of course...

women reproduction has to be entirely controlled. Men could come and go, we can select those who are. you might remember, you might have mentioned this in other podcasts, the whole breeding programs the Nazis were trying to implement across Europe, particularly in the Scandinavian countries. In other words, we'll find the best individuals representing the Nordic or Aryan race and will basically like a breeding farm, will create the best offspring.

It's in a way, the man is not the agency of change here, as you pointed out. Homosexuals surely should be targeted for a number of reasons. Obviously, they don't reproduce. It's one thing. was a long conversation in Germany that members of the elite tend to be more prone to homosexuality and they tend not to have children. in other words, those who, according to eugenic logic, those who are the echelons

the top echelons of society, well-educated university professors, lawyers and so on so forth, they should have children, they don't because they are seduced at the time it was believed either they are, know, is an abnormality to be queer or it is a seduction by often in the propaganda depicted as Jewish.

a person who would lure you into it. It didn't help of course in major sexologies and figures in the psychoanalytical movement like Freud and Mangus Hirsfeld or Jewish origin, Jews. So it was in a way easy for a lot of the Nazi propaganda to build the connection between the degeneration of the race. Homosexuality as one of the toxic

Marius Turda (35:36.825)
factors contributing to the diminishing of racial vitality and Jewish attempt to ruin the Nordic and the Aryan and the German race. And so you could see that clearly with the 1930s and then by 1940s as you pointed out.

homosexuals are targeted very severely, although they would put lesbians as well in concentration camps. The attitude towards lesbian women was a bit more lenient, if we can say that. But when it comes to the euphanasia in the T-Fold program, as you can see, and this is important to highlight,

how the Nazi eugenic rhetoric worked and in general how eugenics worked at the time. have this intersection of two important vectors as it were. On the one hand you try to...

eliminate from the national body, as they said at the time, alien or foreign or undesired elements. And often they are categorized and dehumanized based on ethnic criteria. So we're talking about the Jews have to be excised, taken away, literally, you know, exculpated from the body, the Roma, because they're inferior. But then you have another vector, which is kind of an internal cleansing, a purification of your own

body which is basically on people. And you can see this when they start what it's called the first phase of euthanasia, right, so the child euthanasia. They actually, they're asking already in the summer of 1939, they're asking physicians across Germany to compile lists of all the children or toddlers up to the age of 17 who are severely disabled.

Marius Turda (37:30.083)
So they go after their own children, as it were. I always think of, know, so you may remember this kind of from Greek mythology, know, Cronos devouring its own children, kind of this, the way to achieve the perfect rejuvenation, the perfect renewal is not enough to simply eliminate those who are explicitly almost, but also implicitly the other.

You also have to do the ultimate sacrifice. And this is what the Nazis were very good at, convincing the population that the true transformation, the true ontological change would only come when you are able

to ultimately agree that your disabled child or disabled uncle later on in the second phase or father should be sacrificed on the altar of the new or the funeral pyre of the new civilization to be created or the new humanity. And this is the...

Waitman Beorn (38:28.462)
And of course there's also the economic rationalizations, which are very, very explicit. mean, I'm thinking about these propaganda posters where on the one hand you have the perfect German family, and on the other hand you have the worst possible photograph of someone who is mentally or physically handicapped. And it basically says the person on the right costs us X amount of Reichsmarks a year. Can you imagine how much we could spend that if we didn't have to spend it? And these are not like,

Marius Turda (38:37.124)
Yeah.

Marius Turda (38:54.234)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (38:58.09)
subtle sorts of things and they're not really an ideological that is kind of very hard basic fax that or or purported facts right the balance sheet kind of approach that they're putting out there

Marius Turda (39:08.955)
You're absolutely right and we shouldn't really...

forget about that because this is one of the arguments then in a way survived to this day when we have a conversation about people with disability. mean who pays for this is the taxpayers. How much do they cost us? The cynicism and the hypocrisy involved in these kind of arguments work very well then as they work now regrettably. So as you pointed out there were huge posters being circulated across Germany with a disabled family and how much it cost the German economy at the German

taxpayers, if you keep someone with disability for two years, five years, 10 years and so on. Not only in terms of the ruinous effect on the race, but also in terms of the mere economic feasibility of keeping people with disability alive.

And then of course you have major productions, film productions, very well crafted and very careful to play with the emotions of the people in terms of, know, ultimately it's not simply a form of sacrifice, but it's the ultimate form of pity and charity to terminate the life of someone like that. You're doing them a favour.

So you have this combination of what we could call crude materialism, mercantilism and ideas of efficiency. These people cost money, they don't produce anything. But at the same time, Nazis were so good at really playing with the emotional register as well in terms of saying, you you thought that keeping them alive, it makes you a good charitable person and a good Christian.

Marius Turda (40:49.643)
and a loving father and mother, but ultimately what you need to think or really think is that the ultimate form of love is to allow this person to die. And they played with that kind of arguments very well. And we could hear echoes across time to this day of these sorts of things, you know, how much and where is the ultimate form of love? Is it to actually let you go or then make you suffer interminably?

And so the Nazi realised very clearly that you can't really win this argument with just one type of evidence as it were in inverted commas. So yes, the economic argument was omnipotent and overly present and it was everywhere. You could see the newspapers, films, books and everything, but at the same time they play with the sort of sensibility.

which was interesting to play with. And it is here, in fact, that the entire euthanasia argument in Nazi Germany was successful. So when people like von Gallen and Archbishop of Münster come publicly forward and protest...

against what they call merciful killing against euthanasia. He does use this argument, he's not talking about the economic factors, interestingly, he could have said that, you look this is not really something that stays on its own feet, because he knew that ultimately what he has to fight, he has to fight fire with fire, he has to beat the Nazis on their arguments about love.

about charity, about caring for each other, about the future of the country. And his argument is like, there's no incompatibility between loving someone and caring and be able to really embrace that as a human being, as well as as a Christian.

Marius Turda (42:54.011)
Of course. So it's interesting when kind of by 1940, they decide to stop the program officially.

Waitman Beorn (43:02.33)
Maybe we should go back just really quickly and just kind of give a brief overview of how the program starts itself. How does what becomes to be known as Operation T4, how does this actually begin in Nazi Germany?

Marius Turda (43:18.746)
Well, it starts in October 1939, although it's predated to 1st of September 1939 in order to coincide in many ways with the invasion of Poland.

and to be explained in way in connection to the economic and war effort that Germany has to put in. So you're very likely pointing out that the economic argument is strong because now it's being said, well, we need hospitals to be available for the soldiers. We need physicians and nurses to be available to look after.

those who fight and so on and so forth. in other words, we need to empty those spaces occupied by people with disability. So it worked very well in this respect. So it started, although as I pointed out already by a couple of months earlier, by the summer of 1939, there are preparations being taken by...

the German government and by the German Chancellor in connection to Karl Brandt, was Adolf Hitler's personal physician and one of the main architects of this program.

to really eliminate people, initially children as I mentioned and toddlers with disability and then this is being extended to adults and older people with disability and it continues officially between October 1939 to 1941 once there is an end to it and it's being directed from Berlin, from this place in Berlin

Marius Turda (45:01.211)
Tiergartenstrasse, hence the name T4 associated with this program of genic killings in euthanasia. That it continues after 1941 is absolutely clear that it expands in other parts in Germany. So you have major killing centers in Austria, in occupied Poland.

And then it continues all the way until 1944. We see this in Eastern Europe, in occupied Ukraine, with German, kill people with disability. We see it, of course, in parts of Bohemia, and Moravia, in hospitals there. So it's not confined in many ways, of the, to some extent, some of the major centers where euthanasia.

had taken place during the 1940s and slightly afterwards are in countries today which are not in Germany. Well, it's not Germany, so talking about Austria, example. So Hadamard, a major killing sector is in Austria. Then it's very important to highlight that because when we talk about how do we go back and relate to euthanasia and to the places and to the memory and to the victims.

we need to understand the ramification of this program across Germany but also across the occupied territories in Central and Eastern Europe and obviously after 1938 Austria is part of the German Reich so that's one state.

So it's an interesting story that has to be told from so many different vantage points, not only in terms of understanding its internal logic, how it starts, when it starts, how many people were affected, but also how it worked across territories and with the contribution of physicians from those countries. Because obviously in Austria, there's a great deal of contribution from Austrian physicians.

Marius Turda (47:06.263)
And that support is not only the SS coming and killing patients in hospitals. They do that as well. We could see this happening in Occupy Poland. We could see this happening in Occupy Ukraine. We see this in Bohemia or Moravia. So the SS would come and kill, but there is a lot of internal discussion about, do we also want to do that?

And in some cases, as we know, is a lot of contribution from physicians and from hospitals in those locations. So those sites of memory need to be recognized properly and they have to be understood in the broader context of what the Germans... then... Go on.

Waitman Beorn (47:48.91)
I think there's just a sorry, just as an aside to that as well. think that's really interesting. And your work touched on this as well for me is I just recently finished a chapter, a book chapter on the the Wehrmacht and, you know, the Nazi state, et cetera, and its crimes. And one of the things that your work and others points out is. And I think it shows the depth to which eugenics.

in the Nazi concept are sort of considered to be just a general principle that is exported because the Wehrmacht brings brings that with it and is literally as you as you point out, you know, it's it's murdering populations of mentally, physically handicapped across Europe as part of its just general principles. know, like, I mean, and you have you have generals that are saying, you know, there's an insane asylum in my city. It's wasting space.

we're going to get rid of those people and use it for something. even that it's a, think it's, it's, it's instructive as an example of the, of how eugenics ideology seeps all the way down into sort of, you know, just general culture so that it's just another thing that is without a second thought. Obviously we're going to just, you know, we're going to empty this insane asylum because we can use it for a military hospital or anything else. Right. And so

One of the things that is exported, and I think this is one of the things that you're suggesting, and I think it's very true, you know, in terms of what we're not aware of, or it doesn't get the same level of attention, is that along with Nazi sort of anti-Semitic policy, and anti-Roma policy, these kinds of things, eugenics policy gets exported into occupied territories along with all those other things, you know, it's another part, another sort of...

tool in the nazi genocidal toolbox that goes right along with it and is is exported to a not the same extent because the nazis aren't as concerned about obviously the the societal health of the populations that they've occupied but the the economic piece of you know wasted resources absolutely gets exported you elsewhere in europe

Marius Turda (50:09.435)
Yeah, absolutely. it's important to highlight this argument because it's on the one hand, it's about, as you say, know, it is about economic efficiency, the German army needs to be protected and the economy needs to work. But at the same time, of course, ironically, or in a way, for a lot of people who have no look at this

sort of phenomena for a very long time. The Nazi racial ideas or the Nazi eugenics alongside anti-Semitism and racism latches on local traditions of anti-Roma racism, anti-Semitism and eugenics. So it latches on very nicely with what the Romanians wanted to do in terms of purification, what the Hungarians, the Ustasa Croats wanted to do, what the Slovaks and so on. So all of these, well, you look at the board

states, and there is an internal tradition there anyway already quite established by the 1930s in terms of okay the eugenic movements in these countries is quite strong. The state is engaging various programs of selection and purification and on top of that of course comes the Nazi kind of you know

domino effect that knocks down various inhibitory blocks if they had existed in the 1940s in these countries. And they say, well, you know, now basically everything goes.

Waitman Beorn (51:45.44)
Is this this really interesting is this an example of sort of another form of local collaboration in the sense of are there because you've worked specifically on this topic of eugenics in Eastern Europe. You know, are there local non-German, Eastern European doctors, medical professionals, et cetera, that are saying, well, great, the Nazis are here and they they are absolutely OK with with murdering people who are handicapped. We can now.

do things that we couldn't have done maybe beforehand and they are then are they then interacting and collaborating with the nazi state to kill their own people that are disabled or handicapped

Marius Turda (52:26.521)
Yes, there are cases like that, of course, where there is a certain impetus being given by, at least until 1942, by the German victories in the East and a lot of the German satellites, like Hungary, Romania, Croatia, are kind of fell in boldness by...

by the presence of German troops and German scientists traveling to the East. And there is a lot of collaboration on so many levels, including racial hygiene and eugenics, and what we do with people with disability. And the local physicians or the local experts feel that now finally they are basically on track. They are on the same page, as it were, with the German scientists.

Now, there is another logic, of course, which comes from the war pressure. This is to say that, you know, they feel that Germany is perhaps pushing too hard in certain ways. In other ways, it's not pushing hard enough. So if you look at what happened in Northern Transylvania when, you know, in 1944,

The entire Jewish population is being eliminated and taken to concentration camps. The Hungarian authorities and the German authorities are working together, but basically the Germans are doing very little. Hyman comes to Budapest and then it comes to Northern Transylvania. By then of course the Hungarian authorities...

have articulated a clear program of getting rid of the Jews. Within a couple of months, the Jews of Northern Transylvania disappear. The Romanians, on the other hand, if you think of deportation to Transnistria and their contribution to the Holocaust, needed very little push from the German. Of course, the German army and the Romanian army killed and worked together in terms of like...

Marius Turda (54:22.341)
producing mass graves and killing Jews. But there was already a desire on behalf of this. And we have this in Croatia, of course, with the concentration camp, the Ustashe are establishing, again, very radical ideologies at play, which needed very little from Nazi Germany in a way. Of course, it did help that the German army was there or that they were allies.

with Nazi Germany but we shouldn't really because this is why I want to underline this point is because afterwards

in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of discussion about what happened during the Holocaust was easily exoticized as something that was forced upon them by the Nazis. So there was an easy way to be able to claim no responsibility whatsoever and to blame the Nazi occupation or the Nazi army or the SS. So the Croatian involvement in the Holocaust, the Hungarian, the Romanian for decades was

simply assumed to be because of the pressure Germany exercised or put on these countries. And now we know it's not true. So there is a collaboration of all in terms of ideology, racism and anti-Semitism and kind of common goals that we need to get rid of the Jews, we need to get rid of the Roma, we need to get rid of people who we don't want. But there's also a very interesting

synergy between local traditions which are eugenic and biopolitical with ideas coming from Germany in terms of, okay, we need to think of a racial utopia, we need to think of a homogeneous ethnic state that can finally be achieved if it need be through war, an ultimate war at some point. So you could see this, now that Germany declares war on the Soviet Union, it becomes the war.

Marius Turda (56:22.879)
the total war. Romania is calling its war against Soviet Union a crusade against Bolshevism. So there is a lot of secular religious terminology at work here and that comes from all these sources put together and they create an amazing alliance whose effects are felt to this day.

Waitman Beorn (56:52.418)
Yes, let's keep going down this road because I think this is an area that is not understood particularly well by lots of people, which is this Eastern European context of eugenics and not T4 obviously, but that the similar kinds of T4 killings and procedures and programs. What are the continuities and breaks between the ways that Eastern European non-German medical

personnel sort of take advantage of, suppose, the German occupation to, you know, execute more severe eugenics programs and then into the post-war period. Is this something that continues or is there something particularly Eastern European about this approach to eugenics? Because I think it's fair to say that, maybe it's not fair to say, but I think, you know, a lot of eugenics is

in the West is clearly sort of repudiated because of the Nazis. know, just the word itself, you know, as we pointed out at very beginning of the podcast is tainted now. Whether there's anything positive about euthanasia or not, it's already sort of hopelessly poisoned by the fact that the Nazis committed murder in its name, et cetera, et cetera. Is that the same thing in Eastern Europe?

Marius Turda (58:14.811)
Yeah, I mean, the caveat is that even in the West eugenics doesn't disappear after 1945. I mean, they defeated Nazism, but they always argued that Nazism abused eugenics and the Nazi form of eugenics is not something that the British or the American or the French or the Swedish really entertained.

With Americas it will be more complicated because the connection between America and Nazi Germany in the field of racial hygiene were quite direct, particularly in 1920s and 30s there was lot of, as you know, financial support from American institutions to...

German racial science. But you know, was argued obviously that that form of eugenics that led to euthanasia and the Holocaust and human experimentation is something that is democratic eugenics entertained by countries in the West.

Which explains why American eugenics society disappears only in 1970s. There is a lot of eugenics going on in America in the 1560s. Actually, there is more eugenics in America in the 1560s than it is in the 1930s. More sterilizations happening in places like California in the 1970s than they happened in the 1930s. So there's absolutely no problem at all for these people to simply say, well, the Nazis misunderstood their racism or so blatantly blinded them.

what eugenics would achieve. The same in Britain, the eugenic society survives until 1989, not 1949, 1989. In Eastern Europe it's interesting, the first initial reaction after the end of the Second World War is to more or less rehabilitate eugenics in the form of a national tradition. So the Poles go back and they recreate the Polish eugenic society.

Marius Turda (01:00:12.795)
You have in Romania, for example, the main communist newspaper in 1944-1945, which is the Star, writes articles, publishes articles about Galtonian eugenics saying that we need to go back to Francis Goulton to keep eugenics and take it away from German racism. So there are attempts in between, say, 1945, 1946 and 1950s in Eastern Europe.

to really return to on the one hand, a national tradition of eugenics, on the other hand, a form of eugenics, which is universal in terms of betterment of human society, which is not tainted by Nazism. Now, of course, these attempts do not work, not only because of the change of regimes. So you have the Soviet army coming in and kind of, you know, communism.

it happens but also in terms of the new ideological framework according to which eugenics is imperialist bourgeois science. So it's an expression of American and British science that has to be repudiated by the new builders of socialism in Eastern Europe.

So they get rid of that. So he says, well, you know, it's racist. so they can't, they don't use the word anymore. After 1950s, very few places in Eastern Europe would dare to really argue openly for eugenics. However, eugenic ideas, and in particular in relation to what is the ideal socialist person,

productivity, contribution to society, disability. All of this is being embedded in the emerging socialist definition of society in the public health system, in the educational programs. And you can see this already in the 1950s and 60s to the point that by 1970s they start in the 80s, they start sterilizing Roma women, legitimately claiming that kind of assimilation.

Marius Turda (01:02:24.315)
doesn't work unless there is a clear eugenic program of selection. So there's absolutely no problem with sterilization in the communist east.

because there's no incompatibility between that kind of eugenic practice and the socialist mindset. It's not about race. So they will say it's not about race. Now, of course, in the 1990s, when we actually were able to speak to victims of civilisation from Eastern Europe and we actually engaged clearly with the archives, we could see that the ethnic argument was always relevant. There was also an assumption that there is a certain pathology about these people.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:42.082)
Yeah, it's.

Marius Turda (01:03:03.811)
makes them what they are. But he was phrased within the socialist rhetoric about efficiency and productivity. so he never went away. He never went away in the West, he never went away in the East. And in the 1990s, the whole thing got re-entered, not only the practical understanding of what is to be.

a citizen who is us, who is Hungarian, who is Czech, who is Romanian, who is Bulgarian, know, all this discussion about national specificity, national character, can a Roma be Hungarian? He is a citizen or she is a citizen, but ultimately, anthologically cannot, and so on. So all of these conversations which are so clearly connected to the 1930s return

Marius Turda (01:03:57.979)
Or, it'd be better to say, because they were always there, they never left the room, they just finally were expressed publicly without any inhibition, which is something that continues to this day.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:10.838)
And worth pointing out, you know, when we've talked on the podcast before about about the experience of Roma, you know, who again, you know, in a way that in a way that Jews don't experience the same kind of sort of massive government is institutional discrimination. Roma do, you know, it's almost a direct continuity, you know, after the war in terms of and this is a great example of another place in which that in which that takes place. You know, this idea of.

Marius Turda (01:04:13.776)
you

Waitman Beorn (01:04:40.268)
of eugenics and forced sterilization. you see now with things like the great replacement theory and, in the United States, there's a, I don't even want to say thinly veiled at this point, because it's not veiled at all, but this idea of, you know, birth rates and, you know, Elon Musk and other people are talking about birth rates and we need, and obviously the unspoken part of that is we want birth rates to increase, but only

birth rates of the right kind of people. What are the modern implications for things like that that seem very much to be drawing on these eugenic concepts about how to maintain the ideal population?

Marius Turda (01:05:30.955)
Yeah, that's a very interesting question. And obviously, those of us who are familiar with the history of eugenics in general, and in the United States in particular, can see those links with the past. Because obviously, by the end of the 19th century, in America, you have a major conversation about the decline of the Anglo-Saxon race.

decline of the white race. So when Madison Grant publishes his famous book, you know, The Decline of the White Race and the entire eugenic argument about we need to do something to stop the decline, but also to encourage white people to have more children, but also we need to stop those immigrants, people of inferior stock to come into the United States. So this argument is always there.

So there was always a fear amongst American eugenicists that the white population is being replaced by the newcomers. By the 1920s with the new immigration laws like, you know, we mentioned 1924, Virginia, but let's mention, you know, Johnson Act of 1924, where the East Europeans or Southern Europeans are considered to be our inferior stock and not allowed to come in. It's already the discussion reaches Congress.

The idea of replacement is being embedded in the conversation on Capitol Hill and it materializes in immigration laws. That's the vibe until the 1960s and 70s parts of them. And then they are revived again, particularly during the 1990s when the statistical records shows that people of Hispanic origin are becoming more numerous and then people of

of traditionally called of course, non-white background are in decline in the United States. So all of these connections are reconfigured to the point that by the time you get to the first, I was about to say the first, let's it's also the last, the first presidency of Donald Trump.

Marius Turda (01:07:48.347)
But the funny thing is that his discussions in 2015, 2016, it's everywhere. The theory is now taken on board not only by political pundits, it becomes part of the news bulletins, although obviously no one has read the literature going back to the beginning of the 20th century. They simply think it's something that just came up five years ago, but also becomes part of, as you pointed out, with people like Elon Musk and others, part of the news

social media campaign to articulate a sense of danger and a sense of we are under siege to the point that you have white families from California or Silicon Valley arguing for a new eugenic mentality that they're going to have now five to 10 children and you see them wonderfully.

posing for editorials and covers of magazines to anyone like you and I. This is so reminiscent of the Nazi poster from the 1920s when have the beautiful German family, mother, father and two or three children, exactly sitting in a kind of very austere classical position, almost epitomizing the white family that needs to be protected but at the same time

Waitman Beorn (01:08:54.88)
the mother's crossing gold kind of thing

Marius Turda (01:09:09.615)
that is in danger somehow from various influences, both internal and external. So we have to be very careful in terms of creating this conversation about this very serious and toxic to some extent, course, but taken seriously by a lot of people's

and established as one of the responsibilities we do have as people who study the history of eugenics or the history of racism or the history of immigration to put it all together and illustrate how well embedded they are in our societies and how this legacy of eugenics never went away because otherwise people will not understand that there is a long tradition in our countries of really dealing with people in this way. Whether you are

people of different origin or sexual orientation or someone with disability. There's a very long history here and we have to be alert to not repeating those moments which could lead, as it did in Nazi Germany, to euthanasia and forced sterilization and basically killing of people who are different than us.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:26.912)
i think that's a good i mean it's a really good thing to sort of wrap up on because you know that the thing that was the american context obviously in recording this you know a month out from from the election of twenty twenty four you know what's missing thank goodness the moment is the the apparatus to to sort of enact these public i think that policies that we see in nazi germany right and the the at the moment you know that the party that

is most espousing these concepts of the great replacement and birth and all that doesn't have a government apparatus behind it to allow it to sort of make good on some of these things. But, you know, if they manage to win and then then we are in that situation where you have a government that could, you know, begin at least to move down that road. And I think it's a good warning from history, you know, to to keep in mind that, you know, beneath

the maybe even maybe seemingly innocuous idea of, just have more kids and whatever is in fact the negative eugenics piece, right? That at some point these always lead to actions against people, you know, to limit their procreation or remove them from the society. I think the point that you made, Marius, at the very beginning is one that we should really...

end with, which is this idea that ultimately, or at least historically, eugenics is not about everybody. It's about a specific group of people. And every step after that is by definition discriminatory because it's not, at least historically, it hasn't been, or in practice, hasn't been. When we say we want to make American society better, we mean anybody that has an American passport.

or German society, whatever, within that there is a suggestion of some people are more valuable than others. And that once you've made that distinction, that no matter how good the policies are or how benign they are after that, they're still negative because they're still sort of discriminating against people. Yeah, so before we close, we always ask a question of our guests to sort of give us one book recommendation.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:51.436)
that's been particularly useful for you or that you recommend regarding the Holocaust or your piece of the Holocaust, I suppose. And so, Marius, what would you recommend in terms of a book?

Marius Turda (01:13:02.617)
Yeah, the book I would recommend deals with the Holocaust in the East, in Romania. So it's a book by an American historian, Grant Howard, and it's called Romania's Holy War. So it's basically about the Romanian army's contribution to the Holocaust and how profound, in a way, anti-Semitism and racism was amongst Romanian...

army soldiers and officers and it connects I think very nicely with the kind of the things you and I talked about today in terms of let's have a look at the East, bring forward the Eastern perspective, the Eastern front and understand a bit better the complexity of Nazi holocaust.

in all its ramifications geographically and territorially speaking.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:03.34)
Great. And I should mention, Grant was a guest on the show, episode number two. So if you want to hear Grant talking as well about Romanian Holocaust, you can look that one up as well. For everyone who's listening, thank you so much. As always, please, if you are enjoying the podcast, finding it useful, interesting, please give us a rating on the various sites. That's super helpful for us.

And again, Marius, thank you so much for coming and thank you for your time.

Marius Turda (01:14:33.519)
Thank you very much indeed.