The National Socialist goal of perfecting the human body, and by extension the “Aryan” race, had a destructive counterpart: the persecution of people deemed hereditarily “less valuable” or “racially foreign.” Drawing on Social Darwinism and eugenic theories of the late 19th century, Nazi ideology maintained that the “Aryan” people were waged in a struggle for survival against Jews, Roma and Sinti (“Gypsies”), and people with physical and mental disabilities. State propaganda campaigns stigmatized these “unfit” bodies as ugly, unhealthy and threatening.

In Nazi Germany, physicians sterilized Roma and Sinti, people with physical and mental disabilities, and those with conditions considered to be hereditary. Between 1934 and 1945, the Nazis forcefully sterilized more than 300,000 people in Germany.

During the Second World War, the Nazis launched an “euthanasia” program to kill mentally and physically disabled Germans, and those deemed “undesirable” to the Reich. An estimated 200,000 Germans were murdered as part of this campaign.