Race, blood and soil

Publisher: ClioPress. Editoria digitale per la didattica e la ricerca storica. Pages: 156. Language: Italian. NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/urn:nbn:it:unina-22047 Abstract: The "racial and biological regeneration" of the German people was one of the ideological foundations of the Third Reich. The ideas of ​​an organic improvement and of a racial selection of peoples originated in the utopias of eugenics and racism that were developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany and Europe. Eugenics laws were already in place since the early twentieth century in the United States, and later in Switzerland and Scandinavia. However, it was only in the Nazi Germany that racism and eugenics were able to intertwine and be fully realized into a wide and articulated legislative system aimed at the "defense" of the "racial and genetic integrity" of the German people. Statistics, genetics, demographics, anthropology, and medicine contributed, with their true or alleged scientific nature, to give the discriminatory and racist Nazi ideology an aura of objective certainty. The dangerous combination of these factors was systematically and organically implemented within the proposals of the anti-Semitic, "blood and soil" ruralism. These culminated in the "zootechnical" utopia, consisting of a selective breeding of a new Nordic peasant nobility, the future ruling class of the German racial society. The combination of eugenic and racist instances did not remain confined within utopian projects, but found its dramatic fulfillment in the policies of elimination, namely euthanasia and the Shoah. Table of Contents Il contadino tedesco tra demografia e antiurbanesimo Il socialdarwinismo di Hans F. K. Gunther e i fondamenti ideologici del razzismo ruralista Eugenetica e igiene razziale La politica eugenetica del Terzo Reich e la “difesa razziale” del popolo tedesco Coscienza selettiva e utopie dell’allevamento umano Conclusioni Fonti di archivio Bibliografia Indice dei nomi