It is a common misconception that the Nazis wanted their eugenics program to create a new breed of supermen. In fact, they wanted to breed back to the archetypal Nordic man. They located their ideals in the past, which is a counterintuitive idea for many of us.
The first time I read the sequences, this struck me as unobjectionable and yet another reason to look down on the Nazis. But in reading Sapiens, I realized that I didn’t actually have any first or second-hand evidence on which to base that impression, and that bothered me when reading R:AZ.
Does anyone know of any good works on what the Nazis actually believed when it comes to genetics and the modification of populations? I’d prefer second-hand sources, because I’d rather trust a Nazi historian on what Nazis believed than any individual Nazi, but I’m willing to read primary sources if there are some that are deeply relevant.
I think a good question is “Should we expect the beliefs of all self-identifying Nazis to converge?” Sure, the government was a dictatorship and there was a lot of propaganda produced by a central authority, so we might expect Nazi beliefs to be more homogeneous than those of other cultures. But I remember reading a LW comment once about surveys conducted by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages/Renaissance on Catholics in semi-remote locations, and they found that each community had idiosyncratic variations of Catholicism, incorporating everything from polytheism to animism.
A good proxy might be the beliefs of Adolf Hitler, which are more well-known, although not entirely known. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia article on Nazi eugenics indicates that he idealized the Greek city-state Sparta and heralded it as a historical example of a state with pro-eugenics policies. I suppose that how good of a proxy Hitler’s beliefs are would depend on how much and how well he expressed them in public.
On the other hand, the German term ‘Tausendjähriges’ (‘Thousand-year Reich’) was also popular at the time, which might indicate an idealization of the future rather than the past.
Another thing is that those are the only things I’ve seen that seem to indicate that Nazi beliefs were even particularly timeful. Discussion of the past often seems to be related to relating modern people of various ethnicities to the geographical locations of their ancestors. I see talk about which ethnicities supposedly have the best hereditary characteristics, but nothing about breeding modern people into some approximation of individuals in their genetic past, or harking back to some past Golden Age.
I recall that my father read a book on this issue. I’ll ask him about it next time we talk and relay the information to you. Remind me if I do not do so.
My father said he read a review of a book on this subject posted on r/history on reddit. He did not read the book. He said it might have been written by a British author. Not much help, but this is what I learned.
The first time I read the sequences, this struck me as unobjectionable and yet another reason to look down on the Nazis. But in reading Sapiens, I realized that I didn’t actually have any first or second-hand evidence on which to base that impression, and that bothered me when reading R:AZ.
Does anyone know of any good works on what the Nazis actually believed when it comes to genetics and the modification of populations? I’d prefer second-hand sources, because I’d rather trust a Nazi historian on what Nazis believed than any individual Nazi, but I’m willing to read primary sources if there are some that are deeply relevant.
I think a good question is “Should we expect the beliefs of all self-identifying Nazis to converge?” Sure, the government was a dictatorship and there was a lot of propaganda produced by a central authority, so we might expect Nazi beliefs to be more homogeneous than those of other cultures. But I remember reading a LW comment once about surveys conducted by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages/Renaissance on Catholics in semi-remote locations, and they found that each community had idiosyncratic variations of Catholicism, incorporating everything from polytheism to animism.
A good proxy might be the beliefs of Adolf Hitler, which are more well-known, although not entirely known. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia article on Nazi eugenics indicates that he idealized the Greek city-state Sparta and heralded it as a historical example of a state with pro-eugenics policies. I suppose that how good of a proxy Hitler’s beliefs are would depend on how much and how well he expressed them in public.
On the other hand, the German term ‘Tausendjähriges’ (‘Thousand-year Reich’) was also popular at the time, which might indicate an idealization of the future rather than the past.
Another thing is that those are the only things I’ve seen that seem to indicate that Nazi beliefs were even particularly timeful. Discussion of the past often seems to be related to relating modern people of various ethnicities to the geographical locations of their ancestors. I see talk about which ethnicities supposedly have the best hereditary characteristics, but nothing about breeding modern people into some approximation of individuals in their genetic past, or harking back to some past Golden Age.
I recall that my father read a book on this issue. I’ll ask him about it next time we talk and relay the information to you. Remind me if I do not do so.
My father said he read a review of a book on this subject posted on r/history on reddit. He did not read the book. He said it might have been written by a British author. Not much help, but this is what I learned.