This is somewhat true. (It gets even stranger when you find out that they were also trying to similar things with animals, trying to somehow breed dogs back to the first dog ancestor.) However, it's worth noting that Nazis directly tapped into the common "eugenics" mode of thought in our society, and eugenicists in general were trying to "breed better humans" (by doing things like encouraging the forced sterilization of the insane and the physically disabled, ect).
Of course, it's still a fundamental fail of an idea all the way around. Sure, you could do artificial selection on humans even without understanding genetics, the same way we did with dogs, but for that to work you'd have to have absolute and total control over the reproduction of entire large human sub-populations for dozens of generations, nothing short of that would work. And there's no way a tyrannical govenrment that absurd manages to stay in power for that long. On the scale of the kinds of stuff eugenicists were actually doing, it simply couldn't have a significant effect on the human gene pool in any plausible time-frame.
If you really wanted to try to breed better humans, and you weren't all powerful, probably your best best would be to try to ingrain a powerful and ubiquitous "sexy people are smart" meme into the culture and then keep it alive. If you were able to do that and maintain the meme for 1000 years or so, then sexual selection might start to have an effect to increase the average intelligence of the human race.
try to ingrain a powerful and ubiquitous "sexy people are smart" meme into the culture
I've been trying to do that for years. It doesn't seem to be working, as I can't even get laid myself, let alone smart people in general. ;-)
Like any educated denizen of the 21st century, you may have heard of World War II. You may remember that Hitler and the Nazis planned to carry forward a romanticized process of evolution, to breed a new master race, supermen, stronger and smarter than anything that had existed before.
Actually this is a common misconception. Hitler believed that the Aryan superman had previously existed—the Nordic stereotype, the blond blue-eyed beast of prey—but had been polluted by mingling with impure races. There had been a racial Fall from Grace.
It says something about the degree to which the concept of progress permeates Western civilization, that the one is told about Nazi eugenics and hears "They tried to breed a superhuman." You, dear reader—if you failed hard enough to endorse coercive eugenics, you would try to create a superhuman. Because you locate your ideals in your future, not in your past. Because you are creative. The thought of breeding back to some Nordic archetype from a thousand years earlier would not even occur to you as a possibility—what, just the Vikings? That's all? If you failed hard enough to kill, you would damn well try to reach heights never before reached, or what a waste it would all be, eh? Well, that's one reason you're not a Nazi, dear reader.
It says something about how difficult it is for the relatively healthy to envision themselves in the shoes of the relatively sick, that we are told of the Nazis, and distort the tale to make them defective transhumanists.
It's the Communists who were the defective transhumanists. "New Soviet Man" and all that. The Nazis were quite definitely the bioconservatives of the tale.