The Invisible History of the Human Race (9 page)

The neatness of Mendelian explanations—the way true pitch seemed innate, the way color blindness was genetic—made people giddy with its possibilities. Alexander Graham Bell, best known for inventing the telephone, was passionately interested in the application of heredity and eugenics but worried that the public was put off by the eugenics movement’s emphasis on the negative and advised the pursuit of positive traits. He opened a genealogical records office in his laboratory and studied hereditary deafness in Martha’s Vineyard. He became chairman of the Eugenics Records Office in New York, which was devoted to studying human longevity. Bell and his workers carefully examined the lineages of families with members who lived to be over eighty.

Paul Popenoe, a close associate of Madison Grant, wrote extensively about America’s great eugenic future, in which genealogy would play a crucial role as nothing less than the “handmaid of evolution.” The traits recorded in a pedigree were not just “personal matters,” he argued; “upon such traits society is built; good or bad they
determine the fate of our society.”

In addition to birth and death dates, names, and relationships, Popenoe advised that genealogies should also include notations of traits, talents, and flaws. Americans should send their genealogies to a central office, where researchers could use the material to learn more about heredity and apply their findings to medicine, law, sociology, and statistics. “The alliance between eugenics and genealogy is so logical that it can not be put off much longer,” he wrote.

Genealogists understood themselves better, experienced broader outlooks, and led worthier lives, claimed Popenoe. Society could use genealogies to make decisions about the education of children, who could be directed based on their inborn abilities (which we now know meant not the child’s abilities at all but the abilities that had been previously measured in the parents).

Remarkably, Popenoe moved on from eugenics to invent the field of marriage counseling, in which he later worked exclusively, advising people to first choose marriage candidates based on genealogical information and only then fall in love. (
A 1925 book reviewer summed up the approach: “Keep a card index of all the candidates . . . draw up a list of wifely qualifications . . . Health, Motherhood, Intelligence, Appearance, Homemaking, Disposition, Age, Family, Vivacity, Comradeship . . . assign a value of ten points to each of these . . .” Eliminate anyone whose total is less than seventy-five points.)

From a distance Popenoe’s program is unfeeling, mechanical, and, for all its seeming pragmatism, completely impractical. But there was grandeur in his vision too, and the way that he thought about genealogy and relationships prefigured the social-network thinking of the early twenty-first century. Genealogists saw their families not just as an “exclusive entity, centered in a name dependent on some illustrious man or men of the past; but rather as an integral part of the great fabric of human life, its warp and woof continuous from the dawn of creation and criss-crossed at each generation.” Genealogy helped people gain perspective on “
the sacred thread of immortality, of which they were for a time custodian.”

Unfortunately, some threads were more sacred than others, and if the great warp and woof of the human fabric was tattered at its edges, Popenoe advised trimming those edges off. He examined the question of the extermination of dysgenic people (“
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.”) although in the end ruled it out: “To put to death defectives or delinquents is wholly out of accord with the spirit of the times, and is not seriously considered by the eugenics movement.”

Popenoe, like Grant, did advocate segregation and, as a useful next step for special cases, sterilization. That remedy was taken up by many states, beginning in Indiana in 1907. The first American to be forcibly surgically sterilized was seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck, who was described as belonging to the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites in the South.” Buck had one child, who had been conceived as a result of rape. Despite this, and the fact that her first-grade school report revealed a B average, she was described by the men who decided to sterilize her as promiscuous and feebleminded. Others who were subjected to this process included criminals, the blind and the deaf, orphans, the very poor, and people who were institutionalized. Between 1907 and the 1970s at least sixty thousand Americans were judged inadequate and forcibly sterilized by their states. The consequences are still playing out. In 2014, residents of North Carolina who had been sterilized by the state between 1929 and 1974 were able to file for reparation from a state fund.

 • • • 

Eugenics was taken up with great enthusiasm in Norway, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Russia, France, Mexico, Brazil, and Japan. Many nations sought to bureaucratize human breeding and control heredity by establishing federal offices to track genealogy, like the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in the United States and the Swedish State Institute for Race Biological Investigation.

Sterilization policies were implemented throughout the world, and everywhere the spread of eugenics was considered part of the grand project of bringing science to the masses. Much as they had been featured at American state fairs, science and eugenics were presented in other countries as a combination of education and entertainment. Women competed in eugenic beauty contests and attended hygiene exhibitions.

In Japan in the 1920s, eugenic marriage-counseling centers were opened in many cities, some in department stores so that shoppers could browse clothing, home goods,
and
the latest news about race hygiene. Eugenic marriage counselors served as matchmakers too, bringing couples together if they had the right genealogy and health certification. In the absence of a certifiable match, the Japanese used detectives to scout out the genealogy of a potential partner, ensuring that any non-Japanese contribution was discovered
before contracts were signed.

There was a Eugenic Exercise/Movement Association and in 1935 a Eugenic Marriage Popularization Society, a smaller part of the Japanese Association of Race Hygiene. Eugenic journals included
Jinsei-Der Mensch
(“Human Life”), and eugenic marriage questionnaires were distributed in magazines. As Popenoe encouraged Americans to collect and submit their genealogies for the greater good, so Japanese women were asked to assemble an account of all their relatives, so the information could, among other things, help prevent accidental inbreeding. In 1928 the twenty-first of December was declared “Blood purity” day, and free blood tests were offered to women.

In Germany the tangled threads of genealogy, heredity, and evolution developed along similar lines. Today people in the West tend to think of the impulses that led to World War II and the Holocaust as quite distinct from the character and preoccupations of people in the rest of the world. In fact there was much in common on both sides, especially as regards ancestry and its significance. Before World War II toxic beliefs about kinship, heredity, and race hygiene had led to mass sterilization of unwitting or unwilling people all over the world. In Germany the Nazi regime took the process to its horrifying extreme.

In due course, all
Volksgenosse
[racial comrades] will be placed in the position of having to show proof of their ancestry. For many racial comrades, it is of vital importance to be able to show this proof as quickly as possible.

—1939 German civil registrar’s instructions, from
Eric Ehrenreich,
The Nazi Ancestral Proof

W
hen I met seventy-three-year-old Joe Mauch, he took a slim brown book out of his black briefcase and placed it on the table. The faded image of a gold eagle sat in the middle of its cover. At the top were the words
Deutsches Einheitsfamilienstammbuch
. It was a German family tree book.

The book listed Mauch’s parents, Maria Lutz and Alfons Mauch and their parents and their forebears through to the late 1700s, Johann Michael Weider to Eleonora Weiss to Balthazar Luz. They were all
good Germans
, Mauch said, raising his eyebrows—they had good German names and they never traveled outside the country. The
Einheitsfamilienstammbuch
was a family tree, a document album, and a kind of passport for the entire family. It had slots for all the family births and marriages. Official stamps certified the marriage of Mauch’s parents and the details of their parents’ marriage. Mauch and his siblings—his brother, Jürgen, and their sister, Elisabeth, who died of diphtheria when she was three years old—had a page each, certifying when and where they were born. Mauch, born “Joachim” in 1940, had four official Stuttgart stamps on his page, one with a red horse rearing back, another depicting an eagle with wings spread wide above a swastika enclosed in a circle.

The book also contained a list of good German names for boys and girls: Joachim, Jobit, Julius, Jürgen. Essays at the front and back advised the citizens of 1930s Germany how to live productive lives. “Look,” Mauch said, pointing at an essay title, “
Die Familie im Dienst der Rassenhygiene
.” He said, “This word here,
family in the service of
Rassen
, it means ‘race,’ and so ‘race hygiene.’ Keep it clean.” We looked at another essay that explained why citizens should not marry people with genetic defects lest they pass them on to their children.

Mauch was open and thoughtful, and his conversation was punctuated by somber pauses and the occasional sweet grin that changed his whole face. His light blue eyes looked off in different directions; they both see, he explained, but his brain just won’t use what his right eye looks at. He was born in Stuttgart on a street full of apartment blocks, and four years into the Second World War, when he was three, the street was bombed. “There were two signals,” he said, “one a long, drawn-out siren, which means ‘find shelter,’ and one which went very quick,
dah, dah, dah, dah
. That meant that they were virtually arriving with their bombs.”

He asked me if I’d seen the film
Slaughterhouse-Five
, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about the bombing of Dresden. Whoever created that film, he said, must have lived through it. “The bombing raid in the film, I nearly had to walk out of the cinema. It was very realistic, and it wasn’t showing the fireworks. It showed a group of people going into this shelter underground, and then suddenly everything shakes, and then the mortar comes down, and there’s a light globe hanging there, and then it starts to swing, and then it goes out. It’s complete darkness. That was just how I remembered it.”

On the day of the bombing, the apartment block next door to Mauch’s was hit. A service tunnel in the basement of Mauch’s apartment building linked it to the basement of the building next door, so after the bomb fell, Mauch recalled, they were dragging half-dead people through the tunnel into his basement. He paused. “What really got me upset was all the adults. My mother went hysterical and screamed, and for a kid I think that is not a good thing, the parents going to pieces.” They were underground for probably half an hour, and when they came out, the apartment building on the right was completely gone, and Mauch’s once-straight eyes were pointing in different directions. No one knew how it happened.

At the time, Mauch’s brother had been sent to stay with a relative, and his father was on the Russian front. The only time Mauch met his father was when he returned home for his daughter’s funeral. Some months later Mauch’s mother, Maria, received a letter from the German government informing her that her husband was a hero, which meant that he was no longer alive. He died in a good cause, the letter explained. It did not say how.

Mauch grew to hate Germany. He and his friends grew up amid rubble and confusion, in a nation where eleven million people were murdered and many more incarcerated in death camps. But, Mauch said, “No one would tell us what happened.” He kept asking questions, but no one gave him a good answer. “Everybody we queried, adults we called and talked to, they would always say they were goody-goodies, they had nothing to do with it.” When his mother reluctantly told him something about the horrors visited on Jews by all the good Germans, Mauch would ask, “Why didn’t you do something about it?” “Which of course is totally unfair,” he said now, smiling sadly. His mother would say, “You wouldn’t understand it.”

“
No one
was a Nazi,” he said. “
Everyone
knew that Hitler had been a criminal from the start.” I asked him if his mother was a Nazi. “I don’t think so,” he said. “They had to be careful what they said in front of kids, because teachers would ask children to tell them if the parents said anything nasty about Hitler.” Mauch’s mother once told him about a day when the Führer made a televised speech. A neighbor came by afterward and asked accusingly if they had watched it. Mauch believed that his mother would not have told him that story if she was a Nazi herself, though she said her brother was. What about Mauch’s father? “I don’t think so,” said Mauch. “He was a very strict Catholic, from what I’ve heard. That wouldn’t probably go that well with being a Nazi.”

By the time Mauch went to school, many pages in his biology textbooks had a blank sheet pasted over them. He was told later that these passages made the case for biological supremacy of the Aryan race. There was only one teacher, Mauch said, who “made it his job to teach us about what happened.” Mauch remembers that the man was young and angry, although he cannot remember his name. One day the teacher brought in an architectural plan for one of the concentration camps. He showed the students the killing rooms and explained that in one room, where they shot people in the neck, a perfectly located channel on the floor was designed to drain away the blood after they fell. “Now just imagine the draftsman sitting there creating these things,” the teacher told the children.

“I still can’t comprehend how people could do that,” Mauch said.

In 1960 Mauch was called up for service but instead of joining the army he fled Germany. He went to Australia but because he couldn’t speak English he initially spent time only with other Germans. It was “the first time I actually met Nazis,” he said. “They all agreed that Hitler was bad news and the Nazis did terrible things, but then they would find excuses and defend that behavior.” So Mauch distanced himself from them and felt bad about being German for many years.

When he began to befriend the locals, Mauch was surprised to find that some Australians actively investigated their own genealogy. For him the pursuit had sinister undertones. Certainly his
Einheitsfamilienstammbuch
gave grist to the specific claims made by the critics of genealogy, as well as justifying their sense of panic. It wasn’t just the rich or the aspiring who cared about family history—the Nazis did as well.

 • • • 

The
Einheitsfamilienstammbuch
was created in the 1920s by the Reich Federation of German Civil Registrars, and it soon became standard legal proof of genealogy throughout the country. According to Eric Ehrenreich, whose book
The Nazi Ancestral Proof
is the most specific and detailed account of the Nazi bureaucratization of genealogy and race, the registrars were quite explicit in their hope that it would be “a good means of advertising the goals of eugenics.” Ehrenreich traced the origins of the
Einheitsfamilienstammbuch
and other documents like it to a period long before the Nazis came to power, when
genealogists had significant social influence.

As early as 1898 the German historian Ottokar Lorenz described genealogy as a bridge between history and science. He argued that historians should think more about heredity, and scientists should think more about genealogy. Before Lorenz the science of genealogy consisted of record collection and organization, but at around this time genealogical societies began engaging with doctors, researchers, and psychiatrists who were studying heredity.

One of their first case studies was royal families, not because genealogists were slavishly drawn to power but for the obvious reason that aristocratic genealogies had all been worked out to a significant degree and because portraits existed of the principals by which at least some traits could be observed. Lorenz was professionally interested in the protruding jaw and lip that recurred over generations of the Habsburg family. He pointed out that the family’s habit of marrying close relatives made the trait even more likely to appear across generations.

Family history was widely popular in Germany at the time, and in 1903 the
Zentralstelle für deutsche Personen- und Familiengeschichte
, the German Central Office for Family History, was formed. In 1908 the office made a formal commitment to collect genealogical information that would help psychiatrists and eugenicists understand “heredity, degeneration and regeneration.” The goal was to gather the current and ancestral genealogical records of the entire population, from the aristocracy through to the bourgeoisie, and even including the inhabitants of prisons and asylums.

Here, as elsewhere, genealogy, heredity, and evolution were prime material in the grand exercise of science as public entertainment. The German Society for Racial Hygiene was founded in 1910 and in 1911 sponsored an exhibition in Dresden, a biological extravaganza that showed how cells worked and how hybrids were created. Family trees illustrated heredity, showing that musicality, “moral insanity,” and, more straightforwardly, night blindness could be passed down. Reflecting the growing communication between genealogists and the medical community, genealogists gave talks at the exhibition. Such was the intense mingling of the disciplines that genealogical manuals began to include essays about the use of family history in psychiatry and anthropology. At the same time psychiatrists were engaged in a discussion about how to standardize records of the family histories of their patients.

As it did elsewhere, the combination of science and genealogy served as a way to unify the nation. Naturally, it wasn’t long before concerns about heredity and traits became entwined with concerns about disability and race. Indeed, genealogy came to stand at the crux of historical, scientific, and nationalist interests. As far as race was concerned, as genealogists became more preoccupied with racial groups and scientists became more interested in how evolution shaped people, they looked at the differences between not just families but entire populations. What happens when a population is isolated and doesn’t breed with others?

Scientists searched for island groups and groups who intermarried and reproduced only with one another. In many cases they ended up studying native peoples who were under the yoke of colonial rulers with whom there was already a great deal of tension. As one historian observed: “For Swiss anthropologists, the most obvious isolated group to study were the inhabitants of the Swiss Alps. For Americans, Native American populations were among the most promising isolates. For Indian and British scientists, isolation was to be studied in the caste system.” One geneticist who was eager to explore racial purity and racial mixture said, “We have in the American Negro Population almost laboratory conditions for the study of the
effects of racial crossing.”

Anti-Semitism, in particular, was tightly linked to German genealogical activities, and as Ehrenreich writes, “
The line between promoting the idea that distinct biological races existed and asserting that they were of differing value was extremely thin.” In Germany Jews, who were thought to be both racially pure and foreign, were seen as a useful target population for genetic and evolutionary studies, much like Darwin’s finches. Because so much conflict with and discrimination against Jews existed, scientists sought to explain social judgments with reference to heredity, not bigotry.

In the 1920s it became a common practice for genealogists and other interested parties to establish which families had Jewish blood and then to publish lists of their names. In 1925 there was a call to create a special eugenics division of the civil registrar’s office that would record four to six generations of family history and biological information. From 1928 to 1932 eight volumes of
The Jewish Influence and the German Universities
were published by Achim Gercke, who headed the Genealogical Authority but later joined the university system. The volumes listed the names of faculty who were Jewish and part Jewish and even faculty who were married to Jews. At the same time genealogical journals increasingly called for measures like sterilization or worse to contain the threat of hereditary illness.

In retrospect it is easy to assume that ideas about racial hygiene became popular with the rise of the Nazis, but as Ehrenreich explains, “
by the time the Nazis assumed power, virtually all of the basic components of their racist eugenic theory had already appeared in Weimar-era genealogical journals.” Indeed, the ancestral proof that Nazis began to require of German citizens would not have been possible without the formalization of genealogy that began in imperial Germany and continued through the Weimar era.

Even before the Nazis were in government, party members had to demonstrate the purity of their Aryan blood. A party newspaper article argued: “
Dogs and horses have family trees. Cattle are registered in herd books. This is the first condition to keeping the blood pure and will further yield a true Aryan foothold to the kinship group.” When they came to power in 1933, they created an enormous administrative apparatus to classify the racial purity or mixture of sixty million German citizens, defining the populace’s rights on that basis. “The interest in genealogy culminated under the Nazi regime when numerous eugenic databases were created,” writes historian Bernd Gausemeier, “and the right to live became
virtually dependent on one’s family chart.”