Walter Gross (politician)

Dr. Walter Gross (written Groß in German) (21 October 1904 in Kassel – 25 April 1945 in Berlin) was a German physician appointed to create the Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare (Aufklärungsamt für Bevölkerungspolitik und Rassenpflege) for the Nazi party (NSDAP). He headed this office, renamed the Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) in 1934, until his suicide at the closing of World War II.

Walter Gross was born in Kassel. In 1925, while training as a physician, he became a member of the NSDAP. He was appointed leader of the National Socialist German Doctors' Alliance in 1932. Gross was an anti-Semite and called for the extermination of the Jews and believed in the Final Solution that was so central to the Nazi Party. He wrote several books on the subject of the "Jewish Question". In many respects, he implemented the views of Alfred Rosenberg.

In 1933, Gross was appointed to create the National Socialist Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare, which was designed to educate the public and build support for the Nazi sterilization program and other "ethnic improvement" schemes through the 1930s. This was termed "enlightenment" rather than "propaganda" by Nazi authorities, because it was not a call for immediate action but a long-term change in attitude, aiming at undermining the view where people thought of themselves as individuals rather than single links in the great chain of life. In its first year, it published fourteen pamphlets for racial education. In 1933, he founded a mass-market glossy magazine, Neues Volk, which achieved wide popularity. At the beginning of the war, his pamphlet You and Your Volk urged the soldiers to think racially.

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