Hitler’s newly appointed Foreign Minister. The book endeavored to put an acceptable face on the activities of Nazi Germany. Gross justified the sterilization program by arguing that "unrestrained propagation among the hereditarily unfit, the mentally deficient, imbeciles and hereditary criminals, etc.," had led to a birth rate nine times greater than that of the "fitter inhabitants". He claimed that the Sterilization Law was passed "to prevent the transmission of hereditary disease". He described how an application lodged with the Court of Heredity would lead to an inquiry and judgment as to whether sterilization was required. He justified this as follows: He addressed the Nazi policy of achieving racial purity in Germany, arguing its need based on the loss of the racially purest Germans in the previous war, and pointed to immigration policies of the United States and European countries have racially discriminatory bases, and noted that Asian nations have a long tradition of avoiding "a mingling of the blood". Turning then to the Jews, he argued that Jews could not be tolerated, first as an alien race, second, as having too much financial power in Germany, and third, by associating them with Communism. For these reasons, he says that the Nuremberg Laws were passed to exclude Jews from citizenship in the Reich. By these laws, Jews and Germans were forbidden to intermarry, and "making illicit intercourse liable to punishment was designed primarily with a view to preventing the birth of further individuals of mixed blood whose fate is a sorry one everywhere in the world, because they are neither one thing nor the other." References Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, ) External links Walter Gross at the Spartacus Educational website National Socialist Racial Policy: A Speech to German Women Race, A Radio Speech by Dr. Groß Blood is Holy, A Radio Speech by Dr. Groß 1904 births 1945 suicides Nazi Party officials Nazis who committed suicide in Germany Holocaust perpetrators Members of the Reichstag of Nazi Germany Physicians from Kassel