Hitler believed Germany had become weak, and had been poisoned by "inferior" people. He believed these "inferior" people were ruining Germany's society, and were the cause of Germany's problems.
In his "Second Book", which was never published during the Nazi era, Hitler praised the ancient Greek city of Sparta. In Sparta, all newborn infants were examined carefully. Any infant that seemed weak, sick, or had any kind of disability was killed. Only the healthy, strong children were allowed to live. This meant that they were the only people alive to have children and continue the Spartan race. Hitler praised this early model of eugenics:
The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction [murder], was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day [in which the most disabled people are allowed to survive], and indeed at any price ... in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses."
Basically, Hitler was saying it was better (and cheaper) to kill people with disabilities than to allow them to live and have children. He thought that if people with disabilities were allowed to have children, their children would also have disabilities. So people with disabilities should be killed to prevent them from "breeding [creating] a race of" "inferior" people.
Hitler would later apply these same ideas to other people he thought were "inferior." The Holocaust was based on the idea that all of these "inferior" people should be killed so they would no longer exist in the Third Reich, Hitler's planned Nazi empire.
In organizing their eugenics program, the Nazis were inspired by the United States' programs of forced sterilization, and especially the eugenics laws that had been enacted in California.
On July 14, 1933, the Nazis passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. ("Hereditary diseases" are genetic disorders which are passed down from parents to children. "Offspring" means "children.") This law did a few things:
In 1934, nearly 4,000 people appealed against court decisions saying they would have to be sterilized. A total of 3,559 of the appeals (89%) failed. By the end of the Nazi regime, the Nazis had created over 200 Hereditary Health Courts (). Based on their rulings, over 400,000 people were forced to be sterilized.
The Nazis made six psychiatric hospitals into "Euthanasia Centres," where people with disabilities (including children) were taken to be killed. These six hospitals were Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centres.
At first, the Nazis killed patients in gas vans. The patients would be put into vansand exhaust gas from the vans' engines would be pumped into the vans. The carbon monoxide in the exhaust gas killed the patients. Later, gas chambers were built into the Euthanasia Centres and used pure carbon monoxide gas to kill the patients.
In July 1934, Nazi Germany passed the Law for Simplification of the Health System. This law set out rules for how the Nazis would decide whether a person was 'genetically sick.' The person would be sent to a Genetic Health Court, which would decide whether the person should be sterilized.
Doctor's offices and welfare departments had to give the Nazis information about people who might be 'genetically sick.'
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 made anyone who wanted to get married get tested for genetic disorders. The goal of this rule was to make sure the "Aryan race" would stay "pure," without people with disabilities in it. While dating, everyone was encouraged to question their dating partner carefully about whether anyone in their family ever had a genetic disorder. Members of the "Schutzstaffel" (SS) were ordered to carefully interview possible marriage partners to make sure they had no family history of hereditary disease or insanity, but to do this carefully to avoid hurting the woman's feelings. They were told that if they had to reject the woman for eugenic reasons, they should do it politely and not upset the woman.
Bern Herbolsheimer
Bern Herbolsheimer (September 2, 1948 – January 13, 2016) was an American composer and pianist. He was born in Great Falls, Montana. Herbolsheimer served on the music faculty at Cornish College in Seattle. He performed for the National Endowment for the Arts and for the Chamber Music America. He has composed over 500 pieces of work.
Herbolsheimer died of cancer in Seattle, Washington, aged 67.
Gottfried Honegger
Gottfried Honegger (12 June 1917 – 17 January 2016) was a Swiss artist and graphic designer. From 1955 through 1958, he was art director at Geigy. He worked at the University of Dallas until his death in 2016.
Honegger was born in Zürich, Switerland. He was married to the Swiss illustrator Warja Lavater. He studied shop-window display at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule and taught there from 1948. His early work was commercial graphic design. Honegger died at his home in Zürich, Switzerland from a short-illness, aged 98.
Paris School of Business
Paris School of Business (formerly the ESG Management School) is a European business school. The school has two locations, one in Paris and one in Rennes, France. It was created in 1974. PSB offers degrees in the fields of economics, social sciences, luxury markets, arts and management.
Monster Strike
Monster Strike (モンスターストライク: Monsutā Sutoraiku) is a mobile game with elements of RPGs, strategy games and cooperative multiplayer. It is developed by Mixi for the iOS and Android platforms. The game was co-created by Yoshiki Okamoto. In Japan, its name is often shortened to . As of June 30, 2015, the game has daily revenues of $4.2 million. A more traditional RPG of "Monster Strike" was released for the Nintendo 3DS in December 2015.
Tobacco mosaic virus
The tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) was the first virus to be discovered. That is to say, it was the first to be known as a virus.
It is a single stranded RNA virus which infects many plants, especially tobacco and other members of the family Solanaceae. The infection causes "mosaic"-like discolouration on the leaves. Although it was known from the late 19th century that an infectious disease was damaging tobacco crops, it was not until 1930 that the infectious agent was known to be a virus.
In 1886, Adolf Mayer first described the tobacco mosaic disease that could be transferred between plants, similar to bacterial infections.
In 1892, Dmitri Ivanovsky gave the first concrete evidence for the existence of a non-bacterial infectious agent. He claimed that infected sap remained infectious even after filtering through finest filters.
In 1898, Martinus Beijerinck independently replicated Ivanovsky's filtration experiments and then showed that the infectious agent was able to reproduce and multiply in the host cells of the tobacco plant. Beijerinck coined the term of "virus" to indicate that the causal agent of tobacco mosaic disease was of non-bacterial nature.
Tobacco mosaic virus was the first virus to be crystallized. It was achieved by Wendell Meredith Stanley in 1935 who also showed that TMV remains active even after crystallization. For his work, he was awarded 1/3 of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946, The first electron microscopical images of TMV were made in 1939.
In 1955, Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat and Robley Williams showed that purified TMV RNA and its capsid (coat) protein assemble by themselves to functional viruses, indicating that this is the most stable structure (the one with the lowest free energy).
The crystallographer Rosalind Franklin worked for Stanley for about a month at Berkeley, and later designed and built a model of TMV for the 1958 World's Fair at Brussels. In 1958, she speculated that the virus was hollow, not solid, and hypothesized that the RNA of TMV is single-stranded. This conjecture was proved correct after her death.