The Holocaust is a shining example of Anti-Semitism at its best and it was no secret that the Nazis tried to wipe out the Jews from Europe but the question is why did the Nazis persecute the Jews and how did they try to do it.This essay will show how the momentum, from a negative idea about a group of people to a genocide resulting in the murder of 6 million Jews, is carried from the beginning of the 19th Century, with pseudo-scientific racial theories, throught the 20th century in the forms of applied social darwinism and eugenics(the display of the T4 programme), Nazi ideas regarding the Jews and how discrimination increased in the form of the Nuremberg Laws , Kristallnacht, and last but not least, The Final Solution.
Spanning throughout the 19th century, racial theories were seen. Pseudo-Scientific theories such as Craniometry,where the size of one’s skull determines one’s characteristics or could justifies one’s race( this theory was used first by Peter Camper and then Samuel Morton), Karl Vogt’s theory of the Negro race being related to apes and of how Caucasian race is a separate species to the Negro race, Arthur de Gobineau’s theory of how miscegenation(mixing or interbreeding of different races) would lead to the fall of civilisation. But no theories where as popular with the Nazis as Hebert Spencer’s Social Darwinism theory and Sir Francis Galton’s Eugenics theory.
Social Darwinism is defined as “..study of human society, specifically a theory in sociology that