In Vienna, the Nazis did not exactly abolish all the socialist childand family-focused programs and policies—rather, they flipped them, turning them into their sinister doppelgangers. Programs that had universally supported mothers and children, including many Jewish refugees, were repurposed to provide support and care to Aryan mothers and children exclusively—part of the central Nazi mission of building a master race. Kamatovic explains that “‘family welfare’ under the Nazis was reformulated into a system of racialized welfare.” Red Vienna’s programs designed to better understand and support children with social and developmental challenges were instead turned into diagnosis machines, places where doctors sorted out those who were considered useful to the Nazi project from those who were, in the party’s parlance, “unworthy of life.”

XREF: Connects to the pattern of fascist regimes coopting the infrastructure and machinery of their predecessors rather than destroying them outright — echoes of Soviet repurposing of tsarist institutions and fascist Italy's reuse of prior systems.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 691