2. Eugenics, the Pseudoscience Behind the Lebensborn Program
In addition to stark racism, the Lebensborn program drew intellectually upon eugenics, a pseudoscience founded in the 19th century, that applied the principles of selective animal breeding to humans. It advocated for lower rates of reproduction or the sterilization of people with undesirable traits (negative eugenics), and higher rates of reproduction for those with desirable traits (positive eugenics).
By the early 20th century, a popular eugenics movement had emerged in Britain, and from there spread to much of Europe and across the Atlantic to Canada and the United States. For a time, the US became the world’s leading practitioner of eugenics, with most states adopting negative eugenics laws for the forced sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce.
Then the Nazis came along, and after taking power in 1933, they eclipsed everybody with the their own brand of eugenics, in which they were not content to merely sterilize those deemed unfit to reproduce. Instead, they went ahead and murdered such people by the hundreds of thousands in a program of involuntary euthanasia, known as Aktion T4.
Seen in hindsight, Aktion T4 was a practice run in which experience was gained, and some of the kinks were worked out, for greater horrors to come. The Third Reich simply took the pseudoscience of eugenics to its logical conclusion, and in so doing produced both the positive eugenics of the Lebensborn program, and the negative eugenics of the Holocaust.