Nazi eugenics emerged from modern scientific planning, not medieval barbarism

Evidence

As Kallmann’s plan would require sterilizing no less than 18 percent of the total population, the author’s zeal had to be held back by his Gentile colleagues.) The quoted scientists were guided solely by the commonly accepted understanding of the role and mission of science and by feelings of duty towards the vision of a good, healthy, and orderly society. In particular, they were guided by the typically modern and not in the least idiosyncratic conviction that the road to such a society leads through the ultimate taming of the inherently chaotic natural forces and by systematic, and ruthless if need be, execution of a scientifically conceived, rational plan. As was to transpire later, the admittedly unruly and anarchistic Jewry was one of the many weeds which inhabited the plot marked for the carefully designed garden of the future. But there were other weeds as well ~ carriers of congenital diseases, the mentally inferior, the bodily deformed. And there were also plants which turned into weeds simply because a superior reason required that the land they occupy should be transformed into someone else’s garden. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 397

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bauman’s thesis in Modernity and the Holocaust — genocide as an achievement of rational modern bureaucracy rather than a relapse into irrationality. — connects to: American eugenics served as a model for Nazi Germany — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4293
• SEED: The garden-and-weeds framing of genocide could anchor an essay on how planning metaphors legitimize elimination — garden design as the ur-metaphor of social engineering.