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Racial Hygiene Addition:
During the end of the nineteenth century, German racial hygienists Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmayer regarded certain people as inferior, and opposed their ability to procreate. These theorists believed that all human behaviors, including crime, alcoholism, and divorce, were caused by genetics. Scientific institutes in Nazi Germany during the 1930's and 1940's studied genetics, created genetic registries, and researched twins. Nazi scientists also studied blood, and developed theories on the supposed racial specificity of blood types, with the goal of distinguishing an "Aryan" from a Jewish person by examining their blood. In the 1930's, Josef Mengele, a doctor in the Nazi ranks, provided human remains taken from Auschwitz - blood, limbs and other body parts - to be studied at the institutes. Harnessing racial hygiene as justification, the scientists used prisoners from Auschwitz and other concentration camps as test subjects for their human experiments.

Theories on racial hygiene led to an elaborate sterilization program, with the goal of eliminating what the Nazis regarded as diseases harmful to the human race. Sterilized individuals, reasoned the Nazis, would not pass on their diseases to their children. The Sterilization Law, passed on July 14,1933, also known as the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, called for the sterilization of any person who had a genetically determined illness. The Sterilization Law was created by some of Germany's top racial hygienists, including: Fritz Lenz, Alfred Ploetz, Ernst Rudin, Heinrich Himmler, Gerhard Wagner and Fritz Thyssen. Robert N. Proctor has shown that the list of illnesses targeted included "feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, genetic blindness, and "severe alcoholism."" The estimated number of citizens who were sterilized in Nazi Germany ranges from 350,00 to 400,000. As a result of the Sterilization Law, sterilization medicine and research soon became one of the largest medical industries.