ABSTRACT
Herwig Czech demonstrates in the opening chapter of this section how notions of racial hygiene began to gain ground in interwar Austria, picking up on discourses on eugenics that date back to the late Habsburg Monarchy. Even though ideas varied widely across the fragmented political landscape, they helped to break ground for the key role which racial hygiene played after 1934. Czech traces continuities in ideas and personnel while emphasizing that no direct line can be drawn from the utopian thought experiments and ideas about eugenics if the interwar period to the quasi-industrial mass extermination programmes directed against people with intellectual disabilities or mental illness by the National Socialists. However, the chapter argues that the proponents of racial hygiene with pan-German nationalist and increasingly also National Socialist orientations have directly paved the way for these developments.
