MischlingMischling (ˈmɪʃlɪŋ; "mix-ling"; plural: Mischlinge) was a pejorative legal term which was used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry as they were classified by the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denotation of hybrid, mongrel, or half-breed. Outside its use in official Nazi terminology, the term Mischlingskinder ("mixed children") was later used to refer to war babies born to non-white soldiers and German mothers in the aftermath of World War II.
Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler (ˈaːdɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ; 20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
Nazi eugenicsNazi eugenics refers to the social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany, composed of various ideas about genetics which are now considered pseudoscientific. The racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic" or "Aryan" traits at its center. These policies were used to justify the involuntary sterilization and mass-murder of those deemed "undesirable". Eugenics research in Germany before and during the Nazi period was similar to that in the United States (particularly California), by which it had been heavily inspired.
Racial hygieneThe term racial hygiene was used to describe an approach to eugenics in the early 20th century, which found its most extensive implementation in Nazi Germany (Nazi eugenics). It was marked by efforts to avoid miscegenation, analogous to an animal breeder seeking purebred animals. This was often motivated by the belief in the existence of a racial hierarchy and the related fear that "lower races" would "contaminate" a "higher" one.
Holocaust victimsHolocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and/or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society.
Nuremberg LawsThe Nuremberg Laws (Nürnberger Gesetze, ˈnʏʁnbɛʁɡɐ ɡəˈzɛtsə) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens.
MiscegenationMiscegenation (mɪˌsɛdʒəˈneɪʃən ) is sexual relations or marriage between people who are considered to be members of different races. The word, now usually considered pejorative, is derived from a combination of the Latin terms miscere ("to mix") and genus ("race"). The word first appeared in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, a hoax anti-abolitionist pamphlet David Goodman Croly and others published anonymously in advance of the 1864 presidential election in the United States.
