Nazi Health Policy in Linz and Oberdonau 1938 - 1945

Josef Goldberger

The roots of racial hygiene reach much further back than the National Socialism period. But it was the meeting of racial hygienists and National Socialists which cleared the road for the radical realisation of biogenetic selection. With the comprehensive construction of national health agencies in Germany in April 1935 and in the annexed Austria in April 1939, the way was clear for the nationalisation of the health service and the integration of demographic and racial policy in that nascent health service.

In the province of Oberdonau, too, 16 public health offices with their official doctors operated as centres of this system for medical and political assessment and selection in the following areas:

• Eugenic racism against members of one’s “own race” in the form of measures for positive selection for the “production of a genetically healthy population” (through child and education support, marriage loans, exhortations to produce children, the “Mutterkreuz” (medals awarded to prolific mothers), the fight against abortion, arranged marriages, prohibition of abortion, etc.) as well as negative selection measures to “weed out” those “genetically diseased” and of “inferior” genetic makeup from the process of procreation (through forced sterilisation, marriage prohibitions, registration of disabled new-borns, etc.)
• Anthropological racism against “foreign peoples” (Jews, gypsies, workers from the east, etc)
• Vital participation in “genetic health assessment” in Linz, Wels, Steyr, Ried and Krumau
• Complete biogenetic documentation of the population.
  The forced sterilisation, the most effective instrument of state policy implementation, claimed over 1,000 victims in Oberdonau. The net of sterilisation doctors and centres was drawn incredibly tightly over the whole of the present Upper Austria.