Achim Gercke
Politician
1902 – 1997
Who was Achim Gercke?
Achim Gercke was a German politician.
Born in Greifswald, Gercke became a department head of the NSDAP in Munich on January 1, 1932. In April 1933, he was appointed to the Ministry of the Interior, where he served as an expert on racial matters. In that year in a speech to a general audience, he stated that beside the task of maintaining one's own blood as pure, there was the task of "extinction", which would obey the great law of Nature to eliminate the bad and so be truly humane.
Gercke devised the system of "racial prophylaxis", forbidding the intermarriage between Jews and Aryans. As a student, he had attempted to develop a card index listing all Jews in Germany. His articles outlined Nazi public thinking on what to do about the Jews at the beginning of the Third Reich, which includes expelling them all from Germany. It notes that the just-issued Nuremberg Laws restricting Jews were provisional measures that indicated the direction future measures would take. He argued for a Jew being any person with one-sixteenth Jewish blood.
When Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan claimed that Reinhard Heydrich had Jewish ancestry and therefore could not have been Aryan, it was Gercke who investigated the issue and concluded that Heydrich was a pure Aryan with no Jewish ancestry.
We need you!
Help us build the largest biographies collection on the web!
Citation
Use the citation below to add to a bibliography:
Style:MLAChicagoAPA
"Achim Gercke." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/achim_gercke>.
Discuss this Achim Gercke biography with the community:
Report Comment
We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.
If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly.
Attachment
You need to be logged in to favorite.
Log In