War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (54 page)

In
some cases, Hitler’s eugenic writings resembled passages from Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race.
Grant wrote, “Speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man. Nor was a Syrian or Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator in the amphitheater.”
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In a similar vein, Hitler wrote, “But it is a scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language in the future and perhaps even give his vote to a German political party.” He also noted, “Surely no one will call the purely external fact that most of this lice-ridden [Jewish] migration from the East speaks German a proof of their German origin and nationality.”
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Grant wrote, “What the Melting Pot actually does in practice can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture which we call Mexican and which is now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.”
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In a similar vein, Hitler wrote, “North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale.”
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Mein Kampf
also displayed a keen familiarity with the recently-passed U.S. National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. “There is today one state 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], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view which is peculiar to the Peoples’ State.”
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In
page after page of
Mein Kampfs
rantings, Hitler recited social Darwinian imperatives, condemned the concept of charity, and praised the policies of the United States and its quest for Nordic purity. Perhaps no passage better summarized Hitler’s views than this from chapter
11:
“The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood.”
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Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. “Now that we know the laws of heredity,” he told a fellow Nazi, “it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with great interest 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…. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws. It only exhorts us to the greatest possible conscientiousness …. It seems to me the ultimate in hypocrisy and inner untruth if these same people [social critics]-and it is them, in the main-call the sterilization of those who are severely handicapped physically and morally and of those who are genuinely criminal a sin against God. I despise this sanctimoniousness…. “
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Reflecting upon the race mixing caused by occupying French-African troops and his hope for Nordic supremacy, Hitler later told one reporter, “One eventually reaches the conclusions that masses of men are mere biological plasticine [clay]. We will not allow ourselves to be turned into niggers, as the French tried to do after 1918. The nordic blood available in England, northern France and North America will eventually go with us to reorganize the world.”
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Moreover, as Hitler’s knowledge of American pedigree techniques broadened, he came to realize that even he might have been eugenically excluded. In later years, he conceded at a dinner engagement, “I was shown a questionnaire drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, which it was proposed to put to people whom it was deemed desirable to sterilize. At least three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated my own good mother. If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty sure I should never have been born at all!”
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Nor did Hitler fail to grasp the eugenic potential of gas and the lethal chamber. Four years before
Mein Kampf
was written, a psychiatrist and a judge published their treatise,
Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life,
which insisted that the medical killing of the unfit, such as the feeble-minded, was society’s duty; but the extermination had to be overseen by doctors. Several subsequent publications endorsed the same view, making the topic
au courant
in German eugenic circles. Hitler, who had himself been hospitalized for battlefield gas injuries, wrote about gas in
Mein Kampf
“If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our best German workers in the field, the sacrifices of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.”
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On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler seized power following an inconclusive election. During the twelve-year Reich, he never varied from the eugenic doctrines of identification, segregation, sterilization, euthanasia, eugenic courts and eventually mass termination of germ plasm in lethal chambers. During the Reich’s first ten years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilizing hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, complained in the
Richmond Times-Dispatch,
“The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
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Most of all, American raceologists were intensely proud to have inspired the purely eugenic state the Nazis were constructing. In those early years of the Third Reich, Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modeled on laws already introduced across America, upheld by the Supreme Court and routinely enforced. Nazi doctors and even Hitler himself regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the United States.
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American eugenicists were eager to assist. As they followed the day-to-day progress of the Third Reich, American eugenicists clearly understood their continuing role. This was particularly true of California’s eugenicists, who led the nation in sterilization and provided the most scientific support for Hitler’s regime.
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In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond five thousand per month, the California eugenic leader and immigration activist C. M. Goethe was ebullient in congratulating E. S. Gosney of the San Diego-based Human Betterment Foundation for his impact on Hitler’s work. Upon his return in 1934 from a eugenic fact-finding mission in Germany, Goethe wrote Gosney a letter of praise. The Human Betterment Foundation was so proud of Goethe’s letter that they reprinted it in their 1935 Annual Report.
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“You will be interested to know,” Goethe’s letter proclaimed, “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, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. 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.”
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O
n the evening of Friday, September 27,1929, the upper echelon of eugenics met in majestic and Mussolini-ruled Rome, in the high-ceilinged library of the newly created Central Statistical Institute.
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They came from Sweden, Norway, Holland, Italy, England, Germany and the United States, gathering as the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations. Among this group, two men ruled supreme: Charles Davenport and Eugen Fischer. A large map dominated the room. This was no ordinary map, but an atlas of the defective populations on every inhabited continent.
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The men were flushed with excitement. Just two hours earlier, they had met personally with Mussolini at the Piazza Venezia, with a view of Trajan’s Column of antiquity. Indeed, their mission was a return to hereditary antiquity. All were intensely aware that they were assembled for a sacred duty in a city they revered as “the oldest capital of the world.” Davenport read the preliminary report of the Committee on Race Crossing. Entire populations of the unfit were designated. The eugenic atlas and other maps were scrutinized for the “regions in which the Committee had ascertained that tolerably pure races were intermarrying … [creating] first generation hybrids.” These would be the first people subjected to eugenical measures.
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Jon Alfred Mjoen of Norway displayed a map of his country, pinpointing regions with high concentrations of tuberculosis; he proclaimed that the tubercular zones constituted “a map of race crosses in Norway.” Mjoen wanted to target Lapp, Finn and Norwegian hybrids. Captain George Pitt-Rivers of England called for anthropologists to help catalog ethnographic statistics, asserting that the most dangerous effect of miscegenation was its disruption of “the ethnic equilibrium shown in the differential survival rate.” The Dutch representative focused on the mixed breeds of the Java islands. In describing America’s problem, Davenport spoke of U.S. Army intelligence testing that documented high levels of mental defectives. He also discussed tuberculosis rates in Virginia, comparing what he called “the Black Belt” against other areas in the state. Fischer insisted that the “whole weight of the Federation should be engaged in supporting this work.” He suggested that “Jew-Gentile crosses providing excellent material were obtainable in most European countries, and that bastard twins would give splendid data.”
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During the course of their deliberations, the eugenic leaders agreed that paupers, mental defectives, criminals, alcoholics and other inferior strains should be incarcerated
en masse.
They resolved that “all … members [should] bring to the notice of their governments the racial dangers involved in allowing defective persons, after training and rehabilitation in institutions, to return to free life in the community.” In other words, they were advocating permanent incarceration. Only later did someone think to amend the resolution to read, “whilst retaining their ability to procreate.”
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The worldwide cataloging of the unfit was to begin at once. It would start on “the American continent and certain small and large islands in the oceans.” At this point, America was still the only country with years of experience in state-sanctioned sterilization and other eugenic legislation. Fischer chimed in, however, that changes in the German criminal code were coming, and these would soon enable widespread sterilization and other eugenic measures there.
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Hitler’s arrival on the eugenic scene changed the entire partnership between German and American eugenicists.

America had shown Germany the way during the first two decades of the twentieth century, treating the struggling German movement with both parental fascination and Nordic admiration. But when Hitler emerged in 1924, the relationship quickly shifted to an equal partnership. National Socialism promised a sweeping hereditary revolution, establishing dictatorial racial procedures American activists could only dream of. During the period between wars, the American movement viewed National Socialism as a rising force that could, if empowered, impose a new biological world order. Nazi eugenicists promised to dispense with the niceties of democratic rule. So even if America’s tower of legislation, well-funded research and entrenched bureaucratic programs still monopolized the world of applied eugenics in the 1920s, National Socialism promised to own the next decade. American eugenicists welcomed the idea.

As early as 1923, Davenport and Laughlin decided that
Eugenical News
should add a subtitle to its name. It became
Eugenical News: Current Record of Race Hygiene.
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In doing so, the publication discarded any pretense that it might be anything other than a race science journal. Adding Germany’s unique term for eugenics,
race hygiene,
was also a bow by the American movement to the Germans.

By 1923, articles from
Archiv for Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of Race Science and Social Biology)
were highlighted and summarized almost quarterly in
Eugenical News.
In fact, no longer did such reviews bear specific headlines about interesting articles; rather, the summaries appeared as though they were regular columns, often just headlined “Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie,” and proceeded to explore the contents of the journal’s latest issue. Articles by Lenz, Fischer and Baur were among those most frequently featured.
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