At the core of Nazi ideology was the belief that history was a struggle between races and that Germany’s future depended on preserving and expanding a supposedly superior “Aryan” or “Nordic” race. As Johannes Steizinger states, “a racist anthropology was at the core of Nazi ideology. National Socialism regarded itself as a political revolution which realized a new image of the human. This claim was accompanied by a massive ideological dehumanization of other groups of people” (Steizinger, J. “The Significance of Dehumanization: Nazi Ideology and its Psychological Consequences.” Politics, Religion & Ideology, Vol. 9, 2018). Nazi racial theory divided humanity into hierarchical categories, placing Germans of “pure blood” at the top while identifying Jews and other groups such as Roma, Slavs, and people with disabilities as biologically inferior or dangerous. The regime sought to engineer a new racial order in Europe through exclusion, segregation, forced sterilization, and mass murder.

Nazi antisemitism was codified in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage or sexual relationships between Jews and those classified as being of “German blood.” The laws transformed Jewish identity from a religious category into a racial one and established a complex system of ancestry-based classifications. Individuals with one or two Jewish grandparents were designated as “Mischlinge” (“mixed-bloods”), leaving them in an uncertain and dangerous position within Nazi society. This classification is central to The Sunflower House, as the protagonist, Allina Strauss, must conceal her origins after discovering that her mother was Jewish. The revelation from her uncle, “Irene was Jewish. That makes you Mischling” (34), transforms her from an ordinary German citizen into someone endangered by Nazi racial law.

The novel’s depiction of the Lebensborn (Spring of Life) program, an initiative founded by SS leader Heinrich Himmler in 1935, illustrates the Nazi regime’s use of eugenics, often referred to by the regime as “racial hygiene.” Designed to increase the population of “racially pure” children, the program ran a series of homes that functioned as maternity wards for women deemed genetically suitable. As The Sunflower House depicts, these homes also served as adoption services and meeting places for SS officers and “Aryan” women to procreate. The author’s note states that an estimated 25,000 children were born in these facilities across Europe.

In conjunction with initiatives to boost the birth rate of the “Aryan” population, the Nazi regime introduced measures to prevent the reproduction of those considered undesirable. The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring led to the forced sterilization of people with physical disabilities, learning disabilities, mental illnesses, epilepsy, alcohol addiction, and other conditions the state regarded as hereditary. According to F. Steger et al, “from 1934 to 1945, 350,000-400,000 human beings were sterilised by force in the German Reich” (Steger, F. et al. “Forced sterilisation based on the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.” Nervenartz, Vol. 3, 2012). The logic of eugenics soon escalated to murder as, in 1939, the secret Aktion T4 program authorized the systematic killing of disabled children and adults in hospitals and care institutions. This early initiative expanded into a continent-wide system of persecution and genocide as Jews were deported to ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps. Facilities such as Theresienstadt, where Karl is sent in the novel, served as transit and concentration camps, while extermination centers such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka were designed specifically for mass murder.

By the end of World War II, approximately 6 million Jews had been systematically murdered in the Holocaust, alongside millions of other victims targeted by Nazi racial ideology. By setting the narrative in Hochland Home, the very first Lebensborn facility, the novel illustrates the dual nature of the Nazi eugenics machine. While the institution exists to create the next generation of the “master race,” Allina herself belongs to a category the regime sought to exclude and eradicate.