Nuremberg Laws - Nazi Eugenics and Racial Belief

Nazi Eugenics and Racial Belief

The Nuremberg laws were based on a belief in Scientific racism and derived from a primitive understanding of genetics. Although the Nazis took these ideas to violent extremes, they were based on thinking that already existed across Europe and America. Nazi laws banning "inter-marriage" assumed that nations were "races" and that Aryans were a Master race and in accordance with ideas expressed in Eugenics and Social Darwinism; they therefore sought to preserve their supposed racial superiority by banning inter-marriage with people they regarded as inferior or as a threat, in particular Jews and Gypsies.

Read more about this topic:  Nuremberg Laws

Famous quotes containing the words nazi, racial and/or belief:

    He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!
    Billy Wilder (b. 1906)

    Please stop using the word “Negro.”... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.
    Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)

    It seems, Euphranor..., that there is nothing so singularly absurd as we are apt to think, in the belief of mysteries; and that a man need not renounce his reason to maintain his religion. But if this were true, how comes it to pass, that, in proportion as men abound in knowledge, they dwindle in faith?
    George Berkeley (1685–1753)