Article: Genocide as a Scientific Project.

I found this article titled 'Genocide as a Scientific Project' (Andrew S Winston, 1997). Its based on the Nazi Holocaust, but it reviews some of the litriture written in the 1930's-1940's and gives a bit of an understanding as to what the german people would have been exposed to in order for the Nazi holocaust to, for lack of a better word, 'work'. There were two quotes in particular that struck me as horrifing and interesting, but also somewhat hard to understand. Being part of the 'modern educated western world' its hard to comprehend how people took these 'articles' as serious and actually believed them. (To some extent) On the other hand, i suppose that at the time these sources were seen as repudable, they were written by doctors and scientists, whom i am sure at that time were deemed a crediable source. Below i have posted the two quotes, feel free to add your opinoins/comments on them, as i found them to be quite controversial.

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  'Jews were commonly understood to be a mixed race - part Negro and part Oriental - and therefore were genetically defective... Jews produced elevated incidents of diabtes, hemophilia, deafness, muscular tumors, manic depression, schizophrenia, suicide, mental retartation, glaucoma, myopia, gallstones, brain malfunction, criminality and moral depravity' (referenced by the author of the article as comming from Proctor, 1988)
• 'When a people wants, somehow or other, to preserve its own nature, it must refect alien racial elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must supress and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self defence. In saying this, I do not characterise every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are...But i reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people. (The author states 'as quoted in Muller-Hill, 1988, p. 12)

I found these quotes to be incredibly offensive, wrong and just plain horrible, and yet almost laughable because they are so extreme and inconsiveable, i guess that comes with the old saying when you don't know know whether to laugh or cry. Anyway, thats all from me for now, i just thought they were interesting, from someone who hasnt studied anysort of history since grade 8!