Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
History
Date of Award
5-2015
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
Stephen G. Fritz
Committee Members
William Douglas Burgess, Jr., Henry J. Antkiewicz
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to seek knowledge of how eugenics justified extreme racial policy, territorial expansion, committing unprecedented crimes against humanity; and to understand why and how eighty million human beings yielded to totalitarianism and racial murder. Further, by examining Nazi science and policies, through the lens of concentration/extermination camps at Dachau and Auschwitz, we sought to understand the linkage between scientific racism, Nazi ideology and genocide. Critiquing Germany’s failure to exercise sound science and morality in its occupation, subjugation, and depopulation during WW II, this paper will argue Nazi Germany’s evolution to systematized, industrial mass murder of Untermenschen (or “subhumans”) ‘justified’ their territorial expansion, and the elimination of whole populations based on the concept of an inferior class war.
Consequently, my research indicates apathy and greed, ignorance and intolerance will inevitably pull society into the abyss of perdition, thus services humanity as a grave warning to remember the fallacy of racial intolerance.
Document Type
Thesis - unrestricted
Recommended Citation
Letsinger, Michael A., "The Nazi Genocide: Eugenics, Ideology, and Implementation 1933-1945" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2472. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2472
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.