War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (76 page)

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared: “There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause…. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival. … To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these [Virginia] statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law…. These convictions must be reversed. It is so ordered.”
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After the Lovings’ victory in 1967, other states’ racial integrity laws became unenforceable. In 2000, Alabama became the last state in the union to repeal its antimiscegenation statute
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With the science stripped away, all that remained to justify eugenic legislation was bigotry. Late in the twentieth century, in an enlightened post-war era, the eugenic notions that gripped a nation and then a world were finally understood. It had all just been colossal academic hubris masquerading as erudition.

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By the late 1920s, the Carnegie Institution had confirmed by its own investigations what many in the scientific world and society at large had long been saying: that the eugenic science it helped create was a fraud.
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Nevertheless, Carnegie allowed its Cold Spring Harbor enterprise to supply the specious information needed to validate Virginia’s legal crusade to sterilize Carrie Buck. Relying on Laughlin’s pseudoscience and his own prejudices, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had established the law of the land. In 1927, Holmes’ famous opinion decreed:

With Holmes’ decision in hand, Carnegie’s Cold Spring Harbor enterprise had unleashed a national campaign to reinforce long dormant state laws, enact new ones and dramatically increase the number of sterilizations across America. Sterilizations multiplied, marriage restrictions were broadened. Hundreds of thousands were never born. Untold numbers never married. The intent had been to stop the reproduction of targeted non-Nordic groups and others considered unfit. It continued into the 1970s, probably even later. It was all said to be legal, based on science, sanctioned by the highest courts. But what was it really?

As early as December of 1942, the Nazi plan was obvious. In a highly-publicized warning simultaneously broadcast in more than twenty-three languages the world over, the Allies announced that the Nazis were exterminating five million Jews and murdering millions of other national peoples in a plan to perpetrate a master race. The Allies vowed to hold war crimes trials to punish the Nazis and all those who abetted them.
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Ultimately, the trials would bring to justice more than just the executioners, but those who ordered them, financed them, inspired them, facilitated their crimes and gave them scientific and medical support. These war crimes trials would ultimately include bankers, industrialists, philosophers, a newspaper editor, a radio propagandist, and many doctors and scientists.

By 1943, humanity needed a new word for the Third Reich’s collective atrocities. The enormity of Nazi butchery of whole peoples by physical extermination, cultural obliteration, biological deracination and negative eugenics defied all previous human language. Nothing like it on so sweeping a scale had ever occurred in history.

Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee at Duke University, formerly a prosecutor from Warsaw and an expert on international law, was commissioned by human rights organizations to study the crime. After a few months fighting as a
partisan,
Lemkin had fled Poland for Sweden and ultimately settled in the United States. His new word describing the overall Nazi campaign in Europe sprang from the same Greek root Galton had used.
Eugenics
was the study of “well-born life.” Lemkin’s new word, contemplated by him since 1940, encompassed the systematic destruction of an entire group’s life. His new word was
genocide.
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On October 30, 1943, as Lemkin was finalizing his study, the Allies met in Moscow and issued a joint declaration reconfirming that there would be war crimes trials for Nazi perpetrators, to be conducted in both the victimized countries and in Germany. The Allies demanded that all such crimes cease during the final turbulent days of Europe’s liberation. “Let those who have hitherto not imbrued their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done.” The declaration was signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin.
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Days later, on November 15, 1943, Lemkin completed his study,
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,
which was published a year later. In a chapter entitled “Genocide,” Lemkin listed the several physical and administrative “techniques of genocide.” Among the techniques was a section labeled “Biological.” Lemkin later explained the principle: “The genocidal policy [of the Nazis] was far-sighted as well as immediate in its objectives. On the one hand an increase in the birth rate, legitimate or illegitimate, was encouraged within Germany and among
Volksdeutsche
in the occupied countries…. On the other hand, every means to decrease the birth rate among ‘racial inferiors’ was used. Millions of war prisoners and forced laborers from all the conquered countries of Europe were kept from contact with their wives. Poles in incorporated Poland met obstacles in trying to marry among themselves. Chronic undernourishment, deliberately created by the occupant, tended not only to discourage the birth rate but also to an increase in infant mortality. Coming generations in Europe were thus planned to be predominantly of German blood, capable of overwhelming all other races by sheer numbers.”
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Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
even quoted a relevant Hitler speech: “We are obliged to depopulate as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out…. Nature is cruel, therefore we, too, may be cruel. … I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin! And by ‘remove,’ I don’t necessarily mean destroy; I shall simply take the systematic measures to dam their great natural fertility…. There are many ways, systematical and comparatively painless, or at any rate bloodless, of causing undesirable races to die out.”
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Some five months later, Lemkin’s chapter on genocide was popularized in an article entitled “Genocide-A Modem Crime,” appearing in
Free
World,
a new United Nations multilingual magazine.
In
Free World,
Lemkin again cited “Biological” techniques as a means of genocide. By this time Lemkin had become an advisor to the Judge Advocate General of the u.s. Army, and military tribunal planners were working with him and his concepts as they prepared to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.
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Within a month of the publication of “Genocide-A Modern Crime,” the Third Reich fell. Lemkin’s codified principles of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity became pivotal. In August of 1945, the victorious Allies met in London and chartered an international military tribunal to bring the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals to justice. The so-called Nuremberg Trials began just three months later. The dock was hardly limited to those Nazis who pulled triggers and ordered murders-such as Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Governor-General of Poland Hans Frank-but also included key propagandists and facilitators, such as newspaper editor Julius Streicher and radio director Hans Fritzche. At the same time, international justice groups continued to further define the prior acts of genocide in anticipation of more war crimes tribunals, these for individuals oflesser stature who were nonetheless instrumental in Nazi genocide. These additional trials would prosecute doctors, scientists and industrialists. Many of these tribunals would be conducted exclusively by the United States.
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On December
11,
1946, as the United States was readying its own prosecutions, the United Nations approved Resolution 96 (I), which embedded the concept of “genocide” into international law.
It
proclaimed: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups, and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations.”
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Shortly thereafter, the articles of a forthcoming Treaty Against Genocide were formulated and later adopted through a succession of resolutions, conventions and treaties to become settled international law. The international convention enumerated crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide in five categories; the last two categories-in subsections (d) and (e)-squarely confronted eugenic policies: sterilization and the kidnapping of eugenically qualified children to be raised as Aryans. Article II stated: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Article
III
assigned equal guilt to those who were responsible for “direct and public incitement” to commit the crimes described as genocide, and those who in other ways become complicit. Article IV declared that the law could punish anyone in any country, “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.” American prosecutors at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials took their cue from the treaty.
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In early July of 1947, the Allies indicted the leaders of the Reich’s militarized eugenics umbrella organization, the SS Race and Settlement Office, which forcibly sterilized thousands, kidnapped Polish children with Nordic racial features, organized the Nordic breeding program known as
Lebens-
born,
developed extensive genealogy files on millions and conducted eugenic examinations of prisoners before deciding if they should be saved or exterminated. For these activities, SS Race and Settlement Office leader General Otto Hofmann stood among those in the dock.
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The indictment clearly enumerated the various aspects of Nazi eugenics as genocide: “Kidnapping the children of foreign nationals in order to select for Germanization those who were considered of ‘racial value.’ … Encouraging and compelling abortions on Eastern workers…. Preventing marriages and hampering reproduction of enemy nationals.”
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A week after the indictment was served on the accused, the military occupation’s semiofficial newspaper,
Die Neue Zeitung,
drove home the point to the German people, publishing extracts of the U.N. Treaty on Genocide. The newspaper announced: “On 10 June the Secretary’s Office of the United Nations completed the first draft of an international convention for the punishment of government officials who attempted to exterminate racial, religious, national, or political groups…. Three distinct types of ‘genocide’ are listed.” The paper then itemized actions that qualified as genocide, including “open mass murder” and housing people in conditions calculated to kill.
Die Neue Zeitung
explained that the other of the three most significant forms of genocide was “sterilization of large groups and forcible separation of families as ‘biological genocide.’” The article itself was entered into the Nuremberg Trial record.
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During the long trial, which lasted almost a year, prosecutors outlined a lengthy bill of eugenic particulars, including the murder of those who did not pass eugenic tests. “The SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) was responsible,” prosecutors declared, “among other things, for racial examinations. These racial examinations were carried out by RuSHA leaders or their staff members, called racial examiners.” Prosecutors charged that as part of the Reich’s genocidal campaign, RuSHA was continually engaged in “classification of people of German descent.” It added, “RuSHA, in carrying out racial investigations and examinations, took a leading part in the accomplishment of the [ extermination] program. Since negative results of racial investigations and examinations led to the extermination or imprisonment in concentration camps of the individuals concerned, the Staff Main Office … acted in close cooperation with the SS Reich Security Main Office [the chief SS agency overseeing physical extermination]. The Reich Security Main Office imposed capital punishment and imprisonment in concentration camps upon individuals designated by RuSHA.”
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An entire portion of the prosecutors’ case, “Section 4: Sterilization,” presented documents and evidence concerning the mass sterilization of unfit individuals by Nazis throughout Europe during the Reich’s twelve-year reign of terror. Leaving no doubt, prosecutors declared, “The fundamental purpose … was to proclaim and safeguard the supposed superiority of ‘Nordic’ blood, and to exterminate and suppress all sources which might ‘dilute’ or ‘taint’ it. The underlying objective was to assure Nazi dominance over Germany and German domination over Europe in perpetuity.”
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