Fathers of the Master Race Eugenics, the SS, and the Nazi Campaign to Breed a New Aristocracy of Blood

They could sterilize the 'unfit' by law. They could not order the 'fit' into the nursery.Adolf Hitler’s Germany promised a thousand-year Reich, but a thousand years demands heirs. To get them, the Nazis turned to a science that had been respectable in London, New York, and Berlin for half a century: eugenics.At the center of their plan stood Heinrich Himmler and his SS, the black-uniformed order he meant to make the seed of a new aristocracy of blood. He vetted his men’s ancestry, approved their marriages, set a quota of four children per couple, and urged them to father children outside wedlock. Schoolbooks taught children that having babies was a duty, and the SS newspaper filled its pages with birth notices and doting fathers. Then came the strange part. The Reich’s chosen breeding stock refused to comply.Drawing on Himmler’s private memos, Nazi textbooks, and the pages of Das Schwarze Korps, Fathers of the Master Race traces how a scientific movement became a state campaign, and why the men at its heart quietly defeated it. It is a chilling and often darkly ironic portrait of ideology colliding with ordinary life.