Life unworthy of life : racial phobia and mass murder in Hitler's Germany

The Resource Life unworthy of life : racial phobia and mass murder in Hitler's Germany

Label

Life unworthy of life : racial phobia and mass murder in Hitler's Germany

Title remainder

racial phobia and mass murder in Hitler's Germany

Statement of responsibility

James M. Glass

Language

eng

Summary

In this pathbreaking work of intellectual and cultural history, James M. Glass provides a provocative new answer to the questions that bedevil us to this day: How and why did so many ordinary Germans participate in the Final Solution? And how did they come to regard Jews as less than human and "deserving" of extermination?
Glass, a leading scholar of political psychology and political theory, argues that the answers lie in the rise of a particular ethos of public health and sanitation that emerged from the German medical establishment and filtered down to the common people. Building his argument on a trove of documentary evidence, including the records of the German medical community and of other professional groups, he traces the development, in the years following World War I, of theories of "racial hygiene" that singled out the Jews as an infectious disease that had to be eradicated if the Aryan race were to survive - as "life unworthy of life," in the words of Nazi propagandists and German scientists
In their zeal to preserve the health of the German Volk, he observes, the people of the Third Reich became willing participants in the Final Solution, thinking of themselves not as executioners, but as highly motivated actors in a culture-wide sanitation project with the objective of purifying blood and genes

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

940.53/18

Index

index present

LC call number

D804.3

LC item number

.G587 1997

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

NLM call number

000092364

Context

Context of Life unworthy of life : racial phobia and mass murder in Hitler's Germany

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Context