For most of these, often well-meaning, people any admiration with theories horribly close to nazism were conveniently forgotten. Once most people could see where it ultimately led – to the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps – eugenics went into steep decline after 1945. In 1883, a year after Darwin’s death he gave his discredited science a name: Eugenics.
The term ‘eugenics’ to describe the concept of improving the quality of the human race through selective breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. The idea of Eugenics to produce better human beings has existed at least since Plato in ancient Greece. The Nazis targeted people identified as “life unworthy of life” (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), such as those with congenital cognitive and physical disabilities which included the ‘feebleminded’, epileptic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, deaf, blind and the homosexual, and then tried to eliminate them from the chain of heredity. People including architects of Britain’s welfare state and writers famous for their socialist and Fabian principles were very happy promoting eugenicist ideals even while Hitler was, horrendously, putting many of these theories to the test with policies designed to biologically improve the Aryan “Ubermenschen” master race. The belief of many luminaries of pre-war Britain and America was that the human race needed urgent protection from “degenerates”, the “unfit ” and the “feebleminded”. Before the Second World War, eugenics or as the Oxford Dictionary puts it: ‘the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics’ was surprisingly popular with many people still very famous today.
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