Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
In my view that means that some of the things the Nazis were gravely wrong about go un/underdiscussed.
Despite eugenics and the Nazis being automatically denounced by all normal people, many of the underlying beliefs are quite common when divorced from the context of discredited labels and symbols.
In particular, mental illness, and schizophrenia especially, are assumed to be genetic and hereditary by many people.
The linked study apparently attempted to determine whether in fact, the Nazi extermination of the mentally ill reduced the incidence of such illnesses, and found that it did not, because schizophrenia is not "a simple Mendelian inherited disease" even if not fully understood.
"...it should have been known even in 1940 that removing cases of schizophrenia from society would have no impact on the incidence of the disease because the vast majority of individuals with schizophrenia do not have a family history of the disease and do not reproduce..."
While immediately after the genocide the incidence of course was reduced, after a few years in post-war Germany, the incidence was quite high, around twice that in "the U.S.A. and England and Wales".
In a similar vein, there is a growing number of supporters of the theory that some countries are poor because their population or certain ethnicities have lower IQ due to genetics and not because of environment and culture that suppress proper development of children.
To me it doesn't seem likely because intelligence similarly to schizophrenia is a complex trait or even more so. The deficiency of intelligence genes is refuted by the fact that children of immigrants in rich countries will be equally intelligent. And even if a certain country experiences brain drain, the effect on the population will be short lived. The culture and environment are the best explanations as even in rich countries some groups can be disadvantaged due to perpetuated inequalities that affect child development.