by Edwin Black
Sunday, November 9, 2003
from
SFGate Website
This article appeared on
page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Edwin Black is author of the award-winning "IBM
and the Holocaust" and the recently released "War
Against the Weak" (published by Four Walls Eight
Windows), from which this article is adapted.
|
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an
entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a
so-called Master Race.
But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic
race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in
the United States, and cultivated in California, decades
before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an
important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics
movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human
race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human
beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a
Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as
national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as
well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909,
California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately,
eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans,
barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in
"colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just
learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive
sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the
state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics
movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's
eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such
as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus
magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe,
as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and
Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it
not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies,
specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation
and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some
of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious
universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These
academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked
and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion
of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation,"
in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and
conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex
at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of
index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted
the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold
Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of
America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and
associations.
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New
York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish,
Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities
and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced
sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics
program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked
in before he went to Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the
American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous
eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation
and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society,
which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics
Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which
functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist
eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as
Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the
Nazis.
Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In
1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin,
theorized that if talented people married only other talented
people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn
of the last century, Galton's ideas were imported to the United
States just as Gregor Mendel's principles of heredity were
rediscovered. American eugenics advocates believed with religious
fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and
size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and
intellectual character of man.
In a United States demographically reeling from immigration upheaval
and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere
in the early 20th century. Elitists, utopians and so-called
progressives fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with
their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton's
eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent:
Populate the Earth with vastly more of their own socioeconomic and
biological kind -- and less or none of everyone else.
The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not
merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond,
blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to
inherit the Earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract
emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics,
East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm
and anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up
by American raceologists.
How? By identifying so-called defective family trees and
subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs
to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away
the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior -- the
so-called unfit. The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the
viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none
were left except themselves.
Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911
"Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the
American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best
Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the
Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the
United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas
chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease
specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied
Eugenics," which argued,
"From an historical point of view,
the first method which presents itself is execution... Its value
in keeping up the standard of the race should not be
underestimated."
"Applied Eugenics" also devoted a
chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the
destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the
environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily
deficiency."
Eugenic breeders believed American
society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But
many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical
lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in
Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows
believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to
40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors
practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others
doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.
Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalized, the main solution for
eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and
sterilization, as well as more marriage restrictions. California
led the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with
little or no due process. In its first 25 years of eugenics
legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women.
Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate,"
"oversexed" or "sexually wayward." At the Sonoma State Home,
some women were sterilized because of what was deemed an abnormally
large clitoris or labia.
In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were
performed, 700 on women. The state's two leading sterilization mills
in 1933 were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State
Hospital with 363 operations. Other sterilization centers included
Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state
hospitals.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its
infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes wrote,
"It is better for all the world, if
instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or
to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent
those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...
Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
This decision opened the floodgates for
thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as
subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted
Holmes' words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the
campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the
efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing
sterilization and circulated them to German officials and
scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize
his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more
palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to
recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that
science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own
mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted
in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists
cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with
Germany's fascist eugenicists. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1924,
Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a
thorough knowledge of American eugenics.
"There is today one state," wrote
Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better
conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not
our model German Republic, but the United States."
Hitler proudly told his comrades just
how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics
movement.
"I have studied with great
interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American
states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose
progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be
injurious to the racial stock."
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to
American eugenics leader Madison Grant, calling his
race-based eugenics book, "The Passing of the Great Race," his
"bible."
Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic"
or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became
the driving force behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi eugenics would
ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated
Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors
would become the unseen generals in Hitler's war against the Jews
and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the
science, devise the eugenic formulas, and hand-select the victims
for sterilization, euthanasia and mass
extermination.
During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed
Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of
research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi
propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi
scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A.
County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health
Association.
-
In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations
were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California
eugenics leader C.M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany,
ebulliently bragged to a colleague,
-
"You will be interested to know
that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the
opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler
in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their
opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American
thought... I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought
with you for the rest of your life, that you have really
jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."
That same year, 10 years after
Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette,
superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, observed in
the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us
at our own game."
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded
Germany's eugenic institutions.
-
By 1926, Rockefeller had
donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money --
to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller
awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German
Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became
director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic
medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics
institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since
1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed
when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000
allowed the institute to construct a major building and take
center stage in German race biology. The institute received
additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during
the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was
Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization
became a prime director and recipient of the murderous
experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and
others.
-
Beginning in 1940, thousands of
Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other
custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000
and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American
Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, "While we were
pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade a
spade."
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics
in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to
advance their research into heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an
unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller
Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris
office:
At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von
Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned
as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity
and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute
continued both directly and through other research conduits
during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the
institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that
was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on
twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees.
Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor's
journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total
solution to the Jewish problem."
Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef
Mengele.
-
On May 30, 1943, Mengele
arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German
Research Society,
-
"My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele
(M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is
presently employed as Hauptsturmführer (captain) and camp
physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in
this concentration camp is being carried out with permission
of the SS Reichsführer (Himmler)."
Mengele began searching the boxcar
arrivals for twins. When he found them, he performed beastly
experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the
paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often,
cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to
Berlin's eugenic institutes.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few
exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in
Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that
time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and
Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and
the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of
their own.
After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity
-- an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the
California statutes in their defense -- to no avail. They were
found guilty.
However, Mengele's boss Verschuer escaped prosecution.
Verschuer re-established his connections with California
eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade
"human genetics." Typical was an exchange July 25, 1946, when
Popenoe wrote Verschuer,
Popenoe offered tidbits about
various American eugenics luminaries and then sent various
eugenics publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some
cocoa, coffee and other goodies.
Verschuer wrote back,
Soon, Verschuer again became a
respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he
became a corresponding member of the newly formed
American Society of Human Genetics,
organized by American eugenicists and geneticists.
-
In the fall of 1950, the University
of Münster offered Verschuer a position at its new
Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In
the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of
numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society
of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna,
and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.
Human genetics' genocidal roots in
eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to
link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations
that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now
governors of five states, including California, have issued
public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for
sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.
Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the late 20th
century. Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human
code through
the Human Genome Project. Now,
every individual can be biologically identified and classified by
trait and ancestry. Yet even now, some leading voices in the genetic
world are calling for a cleansing of the unwanted among us, and even
a master human species.
There is understandable wariness about
more ordinary forms of abuse, for example, in denying insurance or
employment based on genetic tests. On Oct. 14, the United States'
first genetic anti-discrimination legislation passed the Senate by
unanimous vote. Yet because genetics research is global, no single
nation's law can stop the threats.
|