War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (67 page)

Given Fischer’s high profile in Nazi Party extermination policies, his successor would have to be selected carefully. Lenz was considered for the job, but Fischer worked behind the scenes with the Nazi Party to have Lenz passed over. Fischer thought Lenz was too tutorial, and not bold enough for the challenges ahead. Instead, Fischer’s hand-picked successor would be Verschuer-something Fischer had actually planned on for years.
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In 1942, Verschuer wrote in
Der Erbarzt
that Germany’s war would yield a “total solution to the Jewish problem.” He wrote a friend, “Many important events have occurred in my life. I received an invitation, which I accepted, to succeed Eugen Fischer as director of the Dahlem Institute [Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics at Berlin-Dahlem]. Great trust was shown toward me, and all my requests were granted with respect to the importance and authority of the institute…. I will take almost all my coworkers with me, first Schade and Grebe, and later Mengele and Fromme.” Even though Mengele was still technically attached to the Race and Settlement Office, he was still Verschuer’s assistant. Mengele’s name was even added to the special birthday list for the institute’s leading staff scientists.
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In January 25, 1943, with Hitler’s extermination campaign in full swing, Verschuer wrote to Fischer, “My assistant Mengele … has been transferred to work in an office in Berlin [at the SS Race and Settlement Office] so that he can do some work at the Institute on the side.”
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On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz.

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Eugenics craved one type of human being above all others to answer its biological questions and to achieve its ultimate biological goal. The quest to locate this type of human being arose at the dawn of eugenics, and continued ceaselessly for four decades, throughout the voluminous discourse, research and publishing of the worldwide eugenic mainstream. To the eugenic scientist, no subject was of greater value. Young or old, healthy or diseased, living or dead, they all wanted one form of human-twins.

Twins were the perfect control group for experimentation. How people developed, how they resisted or succumbed to disease, how they reacted to physical or environmental change-all these questions could be best answered by twins precisely because they were simultaneous siblings. While fraternal twins sprang from two separate eggs fertilized at the same time, identical twins were, in fact, one egg split in two. Identical twins were essentially Nature’s clones.
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Twins were valued for a second eugenic reason: Nature itself could be outmaneuvered if desirable individuals could be biologically enabled to spawn twins-or even better, triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets. In other words, a world of never-ending multiple births was the best assurance that the planned super race would remain super.

About a decade before Galton coined the term
eugenics,
he was convinced he could divine the secret of human breeding by studying twins. In 1874 and 1875, he published various versions of a scientific essay entitled “The History of Twins as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture.” In analyzing whether environment or heredity was responsible for an individual’s success, Galton complained that his investigations were always hampered by the unending variables-that is, until he located biological comparables. “The life history of twins supplies what I wanted,” he wrote. Galton had closely studied some eighty sets of twin children by the time he wrote that essay. These included twins of the same and different gender as well as identical and non-identical twins.
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Cold Spring Harbor’s handwritten outlines for key Mendelian traits listed twinning as one of the ten salient physical characteristics to explore. Davenport’s 1911 textbook,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,
included a section on twins with the introduction, “It is well known that twin production may be an hereditary quality.” Three years later, Heinrich Poll, Rockefeller’s first fund administrator in Germany, published a major volume on twin research; Poll’s interest in the topic dovetailed with the Rockefeller Foundation’s years-long support of the subject.
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American eugenic publications constantly dotted their pages with the latest twin theory and research. Identifying the mechanism governing the creation and development of twins quickly became a major pursuit for eugenics. In 1916,
Eugenical News
published three articles on the subject, including one that examined a recent article in
Biological Bulletin
on armadillo quadruplets, hoping to apply the principle to multiple births in humans. One of the 1917 articles on twins in
Eugenical News
indicated that in about a quarter of same sex twins, “there is some factor that definitely forces the two children to be of the same sex.” A second article in 1917 announced that a doctor in a Michigan institution for the feebleminded was searching the nation for mongolism in twins, especially cases in which only one of the siblings manifested the condition.
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The problem with studying twins was that in adulthood most twins lived separate lives, often in separate cities and even in different countries. It was hard to locate them, let alone bring them together for examination. In 1918, the American Genetic Association, the renamed American Breeders Association, announced that it desired to “communicate with twins living in any part of the world.” The AGA explained, “It has been discovered that twins are in a peculiar position to help in the elucidation of certain problems of heredity…. ‘Duplicate’ twins have a nearly (though never an absolutely) identical germ plasm…. It is fortunate for our knowledge … on account of the chance it gives [us] to study the relative importance of heredity and of environment.” Within a year of its announcement, the AGA had identified some six hundred twins, and by soliciting photos it had assembled a photo archive of several hundred.
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The ERO initiated its own twin study with a detailed four-page questionnaire. Among its numerous questions: “What is your favorite fruit?” and “Do you prefer eggs boiled soft or hard?” It also provided a place for each twin’s fingerprints and the names and addresses of family members. ERO investigators located one especially fertile family in Cleveland that had repeatedly produced multiple births. When Davenport wrote up the case for
Journal of Heredity
in 1919, he explained that it had taken more than six visits by field workers to determine the full scope of the original couple’s fecundity. Later,
Eugenical News
announced that Columbia, Missouri, was home to more twins than any other city in the nation-one pair for every 477 people.
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Hereditarians sought twins of all ages-not just children-for proper study. The family tree of a New England family of twins, including one pair ninety-one years of age, fascinated eugenicists. Geneticists excavated old journals to discover even earlier examples, such as a seventeenth-century Russian woman who gave birth twenty-seven times, each time producing twins, triplets or quadruplets, yielding a total of sixty-nine children
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Race and twins quickly became an issue for American eugenicists. In a 1920 lecture series, Davenport raised the issue of “racial difference in twin frequency” in the same geographic area. He pointed out that from 1896 to 1917, in Washington, D.C., the “negro rate [of twins] is 20 percent higher than the white rate.” For whites in the nation’s capital, it was 1.82 pairs of twins per hundred births, while blacks had 2.27 per hundred. At about the same time,
Eugenical News,
analyzing recent census data, claimed that twin births overall still occurred at a frequency of approximately 1 percent nationwide; but the percentage of multiple births among Blacks was almost one-fifth greater than among whites. Davenport followed up such observations in his Jamaica race-crossing study, which featured in-depth studies of three sets of twins.
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Diagnostic and physiological developments in twin studies from any sector of the medical sciences were of constant interest to eugenic readers. So
Eugenical News
regularly summarized articles from the general medical literature to feed eugenicists’ unending fascination with the topic. In 1922, when a state medical journal reported using stethoscopes to monitor a twin pregnancy, it was reported in
Eugenical News.
When a German clinical journal published a study of tumors in twins, this too was reported in
Eugenical News.
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With each passing issue,
Eugenical News
dedicated more and more space to the topic. The list of such reports became long. By the early 1920s, articles on twins became increasingly instructive. One typical article explained how to more precisely verify the presence of identical twins using a capillary microscope.
Journal of Heredity
also made twins a frequent subject in its pages. For example, it published Popenoe’s article entitled “Twins Reared Apart,” and Hermann Muller’s article “The Determination of Twin Heredity,” and regularly reviewed books about twins.
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Every leading eugenic textbook included a section on twins. Popenoe’s
Applied Eugenics
explained that identical twins “start lives as halves of the same whole” but “become more unlike if they were brought up apart.” Baur-Fischer-Lenz’s
Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene
cited several studies including those written by Popenoe in
Journal of Heredity.
The German eugenicists wrote, “Of late years, the study of twins has been a favorite branch of genetic research” and thanked Galton for his “flash of genius” in “[recognizing] this a long while ago.”
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In a similar vein, most international eugenic and genetic conferences included presentations or exhibits on twins-their disparity or similarity, their susceptibility to tuberculosis, their likes and dislikes. R. A. Fisher opened one of his lectures to the Second International Congress of Eugenics with the phrase: “The subject of the genesis of human twins … has a special importance for eugenicists.” The third congress offered an exhibit on mental disorders in twins, an exhibit illustrating fingerprint comparisons, a third juxtaposing identical and fraternal twins, and a fourth offering an array of fifty-nine anthropometric photoS.
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The quest for a superior race continued to intersect with the availability of twins. In the July-August 1935 edition of
Eugenical News,
Dr. Alfred Gordon published a lengthy article entitled “The Problems of Heredity and Eugenics.” His first sentence read: “Regulation of reproduction of a superior race (eugenics) is fundamentally based on the principles of heredity.” Gordon went on to explain, “The role of heredity finds its strongest corroboration in cases of psychoses in twins.” He then gave an example of just two case studies of twins. Such enthusiastic coverage in the biological and eugenic media was prompted a few months before by the extensive examination of just a single pair of twins undertaken at New York University’s College of Dentistry, this to identify pathological dentition.
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There were so few twins to study that surgeons in the eugenics community passed along their latest discoveries, one by one, to advance the field’s common knowledge. In one case, Dr. John Draper of Manhattan wrote to Davenport, “Last Thursday, I opened the abdomen of twin girls, fourteen years old. They presented very similar physical characteristics and the psychoses so far as could be determined were identical.” Davenport replied, “Your observations upon the internal anatomy of the twin girls is exceedingly important, as very few observations of this type have been made upon twins.” He offered to dispatch a field worker to make facial measurements. Such random reports were precious to eugenicists because physical experimentation on large groups was essentially impossible.
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All that changed when Hitler came to power in 1933. Germany surged ahead in its study of twins. The German word for twins is
Zwillinge.
There were tens of thousands of twins in the Reich. In 1921 alone, 19,573 pairs were born, plus 231 sets of triplets. In 1925, 15,741 pairs of twins were born, as well as 161 sets of triplets. Twins were now increasingly sought to help combat hereditary diseases and conditions, real and imagined. Verschuer’s book,
Twins and Tuberculosis,
was published in 1933 and received a favorable review in
Journal of Heredity.
In 1934, a Norwegian physician working with Verschuer and Fischer published in a German anthropology journal his analysis of 116 pairs of identical twins and 127 pairs of fraternal twins for their inheritance of an ear characteristic known as Darwin’s tubercle.
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But many more twins would be needed to accomplish the sweeping research envisioned by the architects of Hitler’s master race. In early December of 1935, Verschuer told a correspondent for the
Journal of the American Medical Association
that eugenics had moved into a new phase. Once Mendelian principles of human heredity were established, the correspondent wrote, “Further progress was achieved with the beginning of research on twins, by means of which it is possible to measure hereditary influence even though the hereditary processes are complicated…. Many of these researches, however, as Freiherr von Verschuer recently pointed out, are of questionable value…. What is absolutely needed is research on series of families and twins selected at random … examined under the same conditions, a fixed minimum of examinations being made in all cases.” The article went on to cite Verschuer’s view that meaningful research would require entire families-from children to grandparents.
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In plain words, this meant gathering larger numbers of twins in one place for simultaneous investigation.