The Nuremberg Laws

One of the Aryan race propaganda posters used by the Nazis.

The Sterilization Law was not sufficient for the Nazis to achieve their real objective. In order to establish a "purified Aryan race," the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935. Under these laws—savagery and primitiveness legalized—, enshrined the ideal of the so-called purification of the Aryan race.

Work on racial purification began with an enquiry into civil servants' family trees. Those thought not to belong to the Aryan race were forced into retirement. The Nuremberg Laws divided the German people into half: those who were subjects of the state and those who enjoyed full citizenship and political rights. Jews, Gypsies and members of other races were merely subjects of the state who did not enjoy citizenship rights. The second of the Nuremberg Laws, "For the Protection of German Blood and German Honor," (known as the Blood Protection Law for short) sought to guarantee the nation's so-called racial purity.

Under this new law, marriage between German citizens and German subjects became a crime. It also constituted a precedent for future practices implemented to isolate "undesirable individuals."

• Master Race Specification Programs

Skull measurements, hair color, lung capacity and fingerprints were used by eugenicists to identify those who were not "superior."

The first step in the eugenics program was to classify the features possessed by the race the Nazis regarded as superior. The characteristics of the so-called master race were enumerated as follows:

Blond, tall, long-skulled, with narrow faces, pronounced chins, narrow noses with a high bridge, soft hair, widely spaced pale-coloured eyes, pinky-white skin colour.94

These and similar criteria, manifestly the product of a diseased mentality, are both a violation of science and also morally unacceptable. As already emphasized, there are no logical or moral grounds for discriminating against people on the grounds of the color of their skin, eyes or hair.

Despite these irrational criteria, it wasn't that easy for the Nazis to distinguish the races from one another. To that end, they carried out various measurements, using exceedingly primitive methods, to measure people's skulls, and implemented a number of intelligence tests with no scientific validity. Women who met their necessary racial requirements were placed in special houses and kept pregnant by Nazi officers for as long as this primitive state of affairs continued. Children of unknown fathers were brought into the world in these immoral "human stud farms." These children represented the next generation of the so-called master race. However, the totally unexpected result was that the average IQs of children born on these farms were lower than the average IQs of their mothers and fathers.95