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Walter Groß or Walter Gross (October 21, 1904 - April 25, 1945) was the head of the Racial Policy Office of the NSDAP.
Groß was an anti-Semite and called for the extermination of the Jews and believed in the Final Solution that was so central to the Nazi Party. He wrote several books on the subject of the "Jewish Question". In 1933 Gross was appointed to create the National Socialist Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare, which was designed to educate the public and build support for the Nazi sterilization program and other "ethnic improvement" schemes through the 1930s.
Groß burned his files and committed suicide at the closing of the WW II, thereby erased significant evidence "that would have incriminated the more than 3,000 members of his national network of racial educators."1
In 1938 Groß, then head of the Reich Bureau for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare, contributed a chapter entitled “National Socialist Racial Thought” to an English language book, Germany Speaks (London: Butterworth 1938) , edited by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s newly appointed Foreign Minister. The book was an attempt to put an acceptable face on the more inhumane activities of Nazi Germany. Groß tried to justify the sterilization program by arguing that the birth rate among the “unhealthy” was nine times greater than that of the “fit”. Pretending that science knew things that it did not, he claimed that the Sterilization Law was passed “to prevent the transmission of hereditary disease”. [Id. @ 68] He described the chilling process by which an application lodged with the Court of Heredity would lead to an inquiry and judgment whether sterilization was required. [Id. @ 69]. Amazingly, given the hostility of Naziism to Communism, he justified this law in part by a claim that:
“Civilization is only possible through the individual becoming part of the whole and just as collective authority in the interests of all limits the egoism of the individual . . . , it similarly has the right to implement such measures for the benefit of the community as are scientifically proved expedient in the way of population policy or eugenics.” [Id. @ 70]
He next addressed the Nazi policy of achieving racial purity in Germany, arguing its need based on the loss of the racially purest Germans in the previous war, and pointed to immigration policies of the United States and European countries have racially discriminatory bases, and noted that Asian nations have a long tradition of avoiding “a mingling of the blood”. Id. @ 75. Turning then to the Jews, he argued that Jews could not be tolerated, first as an alien race, second, as having too much financial power in Germany, and third, by associating them with Communism. For these reasons, he says that the Nuremberg Laws were passed to exclude Jews from citizenship in the Reich. By these laws, Jews and Germans were forbidden to intermarry, and illicit intercourse was subject “to punishment . . . designed primarily with a view to preventing the birth of further individuals of mixed blood . . . .” Id. @ 77. In 1938, one would have thought of sterilization or abortion, but the death camps showed a more sinister meaning to that sentence.
References
- ^ Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2003), 107-106.
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