healing by killing: medicine in the third reich. part ii. eugenics: healing by killing in america...

Healing by Killing: Medicine in the Third Reich

Part II. Eugenics: Healing by Killing in America and GermanyEugenics: definitionA conflict of visionsJewish valuesGreek valuesHistory of Eugenics in the Western

World, primarily America and Germany

Eugenics Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

defines eugenics as “the science [sic] dealing with factors that influence the hereditary qualities of a race and with ways of improving these qualities, especially by modifying the fertility of different categories of people.”German eugenics = racial hygienePositive eugenics: encourages the

transmission of more desirable genetic traits.

Negative eugenics: discourages the transmission of less desirable genetic traits.

Eugenics (contd)Practical positive eugenics or positive

racial hygiene:Encourages medical care and

procreation for the superior races. Practical negative eugenics or

negative racial hygiene:Discourages even inexpensive medical

care and procreation for the inferior races.

Eugenics (contd)A selective historical review is useful

for the understanding of eugenics during the Third Reich and in America today:A conflict of visionsJewish valuesGreek valuesHistory of the Western World, primarily

America and Germany, as it relates to eugenics.

Eugenics (contd)Thomas Sowell: A Conflict of Visions:

Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.Walter Lippman: Public Opinion

Eugenics (contd)An overly simple but useful distinction

can be made between the unconstrained (or romantic) and the constrained (or classical) visions, which differ in major ways:The nature of manTrade-offs versus solutionsSocial morality and social causationLeadership

Eugenics (contd)The nature of man

Unconstrained vision (e.g. William Godwin’s 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice):The intention to benefit others is “of the

essence of virtue.”Man is capable of feeling other people’s needs

as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.

Socially contrived incentives are disdained as unworthy and unnecessary expedients and our efforts should be bent to have people do what is right because it is right, not because of psychic or economic payments.

Eugenics (contd)The nature of man

Constrained vision (e.g. Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments):Man’s moral limitations in general and his

egocentricity in particular are inherent facts of life, the basic constraint in this vision.

The fundamental moral and social challenge is to make the best of the possibilities which exist within that constraint, rather than dissipate energies in an attempt to change human nature.

The goal is to determine how the moral and social benefits desired can be produced in the most efficient way within that constraint.

Eugenics (contd)Sowell: “Clearly a society cannot

function humanely, if at all, when each person acts as if his little finger is more important than the lives of a hundred million other human beings.”

Over 100 million people met a violent death in the twentieth century, 5 times as many as in the 19th century, and more than 10 times as many as in the 18th century. More than 60 million of these 100 million men, women, and children who met a violent death were victims of mass killing or genocide, all of which were man-made events.

Eugenics (contd)Trade-offs versus solutions

Unconstrained vision:Since man is “perfectible” then “solutions,”

when it is no longer necessary to make a trade-off, even if the development of that solution entailed costs now past, are possible.

The goal of achieving a solution is what justifies the initial sacrifices or transitional conditions which might otherwise be considered unacceptable.

Condorcet anticipated the eventual “reconciliation, the identification, of the interests of each with the interests of all”—at which point, “the path of virtue is no longer arduous.”

Eugenics (contd)Trade-offs versus solutions

Constrained vision:Since man is not “perfectible,” the careful

weighing of trade-offs or prudence, is all that we can hope for.

Burke said that “prudence is “the first of all virtues” and “nothing is good but in proportion and with reference.”

Eugenics (contd)Social morality and social causation

Unconstrained vision: human actions are dichotomized by Godwin into the beneficial and the harmful, and each of these in turn was dichotomized into the intentional and the unintentional.

BENEFICIAL HARMFUL

INTENTIONAL Virtue Vice

UNINTENTIONAL

Negligence


Constrained vision: In Adam Smith’s work, especially in his Wealth of Nations, the missing category in Godwin’s table is central:The economic benefits to society produced by

the capitalist were “no part of his intention(s)”, which were “mean rapacity.”

Intentions are irrelevant.What matters are the systemic characteristics

of a competitive economy or of a society, which produce social benefits from unsavory individual intentions.


Unconstrained vision:If human options are not inherently

constrained, then the great evils of the world—war, poverty, and crime—cry out for explanations and for solutions.

Believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime.

There are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment.


Constrained vision: If the limitations and passions of man himself

are at the heart of these painful phenomena—war, poverty, and crime—then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized.

Believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society.

Whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.

Eugenics (contd)Leadership

Unconstrained visionThere exist intellectual and moral pioneers

who lead humans toward ever-higher levels of understanding and practice.

These pioneers become surrogate decision-makers, pending the eventual progress of mankind to the point where all can make social decisions.

A transitional period of draconian measures, during which the leader may be exempted from either systemic or organized social constraints, may be necessary to achieve the desired social goals, usually an equality of outcome.

Eugenics (contd)Leadership

Constrained visionThere is no human capability to deliberately

plan and execute social decisions for the common good (although there exist vast differences within areas of specialization e.g. medicine, there is no general superiority of one group over another).

Evolved systemic processes—tradition, values, families, markets, for example—lead to the preservation and advancement of human life.

Freedom is more important than equality of outcome so that inequality of outcome does not justify imposition of draconian measures by leaders (who will promote their own interests).

Sheldon Rubenfeld, M.D.Clinical Professor of Medicine

Baylor College of Medicine


Course OutlineMedicine in Germany during the Third

Reich (1933-1945) Eugenics: Healing by Killing in America

and GermanyMedicine after the Holocaust: From

the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond.

Part I. Medicine in Germany during the Third Reich (1933-1945) Sterilization LawNuremberg LawsChild EuthanasiaT4 ProgramWild EuthanasiaOperation 14f13The Final SolutionMedical ExperimentsCover-up

Summary of medicine during the Third Reich (1933-1945)More than 38,000 physicians, almost

half of all doctors in Germany, had joined the Nazi party by war’s end.

More than 7% of all physicians were members of the SS, compared with less than 0.5% of the general population.

German physicians, nurses, other medical personnel, public health officials, and biomedical scientists accomplished the following:

Summary (contd)More than 6,000,000 Jews selected

and killed.400,000 German patients selected and

sterilized.5,000 German children selected and

euthanized.200,000 German adults selected and

euthanized.Only 15% of patients in German

mental hospitals at the start of World War II survive.

Cruel, and murderous medical experiments on thousands of concentration camp inmates.

Only 23 physicians, bioscientists, administrators, and public health officials tried at Nuremberg.

Gen. Telford Taylor’s Indictment

Sentencing of Dr. Karl Brandt

Eugenics Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

defines eugenics as “the science [sic] dealing with factors that influence the hereditary qualities of a race and with ways of improving these qualities, especially by modifying the fertility of different categories of people.”German eugenics = racial hygienePositive eugenics: encourages the

transmission of more desirable genetic traits.

Negative eugenics: discourages the transmission of less desirable genetic traits.

Eugenics (contd)Practical positive eugenics or positive

racial hygiene:Encourages medical care and

procreation for the superior races. Practical negative eugenics or

negative racial hygiene:Discourages even inexpensive medical

care and procreation for the inferior races.

Eugenics (contd)An overly simple but useful distinction

can be made between the unconstrained (or romantic) and the constrained (or classical) visions, which differ in major ways:The nature of manTrade-offs versus solutionsSocial morality and social causationLeadership

Jewish Values“The Jews started it all—and by “it” I mean so

many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings. And not only would our sensorium, the screen through which we receive the world, be different: we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experiences differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.”

Thomas Cahill: The Gift of the Jews

Jewish Values (contd)“God said, ‘Let us make a human in our

image, as our likeness.”…And thus God created the human being in His image. In the image of God, he created the human being; male and female, He created them.’” (Exodus 1:26-27)

In Jewish thought, the human body and soul are both sacred, both created by God and must function in harmony to fulfill God’s purposes in the world.

“He who saves one life…it is as if he saves an entire universe. He who destroys life…it is as if he destroys an entire universe.” (Mishna, Sanhedrin 37a)

Jewish Values (contd)“See I have put before you today life

and death, blessing and curse and you shall choose life so that you and your seed shall live.” (Deut 30:19)

Practically speaking, this means:No child sacrifice.Strict limitations on abortion.No euthanasia.No culture of death.

This is a constrained or classical view of humanity, which quickly came into conflict with the unconstrained view as exemplified by Pharaoh.

Jewish Values (contd)Biblical eugenics:

A new king arose over Egypt, who did not know of Joseph.

“Behold! The people, the Children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we.”

The king of Egypt said to the midwives of the Hebrews, “When you deliver the Hebrew women, and you see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you are to kill him, and if it is a daughter, she shall live.”

Greek ValuesThomas Cahill in Sailing the Wine Dark

Seas: Why the Greeks Matter notes that the Greeks taught us:How to fight: the warrior in Homer’s

IliadHow to feel: the wanderer in Homer’s

the OdysseyHow to party: the poet in Hesiod’s

TheogonyHow to rule: the politician and the

playwright in Aeschylus’ trilogy of plays, the Oresteia

How to think: the philosopher (lover of wisdom) in Plato’s the Republic

How to see: the “Kritian boy” and other erotic nudes

Greek Values (contd)Aristotle argued in his Politics that

killing children was essential to the functioning of society. He wrote, “There must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up. And to avoid an excess in population, some children must be exposed. For a limit must be fixed to the population of the state.”Infanticide (Oedipus Rex by Sophocles)Perfection sought in athletic contests,

such as the Olympic games (re: Rome, see Gladiators)

Greek Values (contd)Plato, referring to Asclepius, the

Greek god of medicine and healing, says in The Republic, “But he makes no attempt to cure those whose constitution is basically diseased by treating them with a series of evacuations and doses which can only lead to an unhappy prolongation of life, and the production of children as unhealthy as themselves. No, he thought no treatment should be given to the man who cannot survive the routine of his ordinary job, and who is therefore of no use either to himself or society.”

Greek Values (contd)Hippocratic Oath:

Invocation of ancient Greek deities.Relationship to teachers and other

physicians.The end is benefit to the sick; do no

harm.No euthanasia or abortions, even if

asked.Consult those with greater expertise.No voluntary injustice, mischief, or

sexual deeds.Patient privacy.Covenant and (almost a) prayer.

Greco-Roman values meet

Jewish valuesTo the Greek, the beautiful is holy.To the Jew, the holy is beautiful.

Revolt of the Macabees against the Hellenization of Israel in 167 B.C.E. (Channukah).

The Great Revolt of the Jews against Roman rule, which began in 63 B.C.E. The revolt of 66 C.E. ended with the destruction of the Second Temple and the mass suicide atMassada.

The Bar-Kokhba Revolt of 132-135 C.E. ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of much of the Jewish population of Judea.

Greco-Roman values meet

Judeo-Christian valuesTo the Greek, the beautiful is holy.To the Jew, the holy is beautiful.Christianity and Judaism were

antagonistic until Judeo-Christian became a meaningful term with the founding of America.

Eugenics (contd)Enlightenment and Emancipation in

Europe Europeans declared that liberty was

contingent upon “reason,” a faculty shared unequally by different races and genders.

Jews were emancipated from European ghettos and given many rights.

Nationalistic movements arose e.g. the German Volk or (superior) nation, people, or race.

The Founding of America on two wingsThe secular enlightenment.The God of Israel championed by the

nation’s first Protestants.

Eugenics (contd)No Christian community in history identified more with the

People of the Book than

did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to

be a literal reenactment of the Biblical drama of the Hebrew nation. They themselves

were the children of Israel; America was their Promised Land; the Atlantic Ocean their

Red Sea; the Kings of England were the Egyptian pharaohs; the American Indians the

Canaanites (or the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel); the pact of the Plymouth Rock was God’s

holy Covenant; and the ordinances by which they lived were the Divine Law. Like the

Huguenots and other Protestant victims of Old World oppression, these émigré Puritans

dramatized their own situation as the righteous remnant of the Church corrupted

by the “Babylonian woe,” and saw themselves as instruments of Divine Providence,

a people chosen to build their new commonwealth on the Covenant entered into at

Mount Sinai.

Gavriel Sivan, The Bible and Civilization

Eugenics (contd)Hebrew and Bible studies were required

courses at Yale, Harvard, William and Mary, Rutgers, Princeton, Brown, Kings College (later Columbia), Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, etc.

The seals of Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth contain Hebrew words or phrases.

The first design of the official seal of the United States, recommended by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1776, depicts the Jews crossing the Red Sea. The motto around the seal read, “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

Eugenics (contd)

Eugenics (contd)The inscription on the Liberty Bell is a

direct quote from Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land.”

Dr. Benjamin Rush, in his editorials denouncing the Tea Act, drew inspiration from the Hebrew Bible:

“What did Moses forsake and suffer for his countrymen! What shining examples of patriotism do we behold in Joshua, Samuel, Maccabees and all the illustrious princes, captains and prophets among the Jews.”

Eugenics (contd)The basic framework of America, the

Declaration of Independence, reflects the influence of the Bible and the power of Jewish ideas in shaping the political development of America:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

By many measures, America is the most religious democratic country in the world today.

Eugenics (contd)“The Republic of the Israelites an Example to

the American States.” A sermon preached by Samuel Langdon, D. D., at Concord in the State of New Hampshire before the Honorable General Court at the Annual Election. June 5, 1788.

Republic: a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.

Federalism: the distribution of power in an organization (as a government) between a central authority and the constituent units.

Eugenics (contd)Slavery was woven into the fabric of American

society and the U.S. Constitution.Article I, Section 2, the Enumeration Clause: slaves

or “other persons” are counted as three-fifths of a whole person.

Article 1, Section 9: Congress is limited from prohibiting the "Importation" of slaves before 1808

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3: the laws of one state cannot excuse a person from "Service or Labour" in another state, meaning that an escaped slave has to be returned.

Dred Scott Supreme Court Decision of 1857 declared no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen.

Eugenics (contd)The Civil War 1861-1865.The Civil War Amendments:

Thirteenth ended slavery.Fourteenth gave blacks the same rights

as whites.Fifteenth allowed blacks to vote.

Jim Crow laws and the “one-drop” rule followed.

Plessy vs. Ferguson, 1896: Supreme Court ruled that while blacks had equal right under the law, separation of the races was legal as long as facilities were equal.

Eugenics (contd)Scientific accomplishment, prestige,

and salvation begins in the 1500’s, accelerates in the 1700’s.

Luigi Galvani 1780’s: animal electricity, the life force within the muscles of the frog.

Eugenics (contd)In Frankenstein or the Modern

Prometheus published anonymously by Mary Shelley (Godwin’s daughter) in 1818, Victor Frankenstein uses an electrical storm to creates a “creature.”

Eugenics (contd)

Eugenics (contd)Lambroso, explained criminality:

“Criminals are apes in our midst, marked by the anatomical stigmata of atavism” ( resemblance to more remote ancestors rather than parents) thru process of recapitulation or reversion to an ancestral type.

Phrenology, facial angle, and cephalic index were developed to distinguish between the races.

Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races 1853-1855:Race is the primary moving force of

world history.Racial history is a science.

Eugenics (contd)Charles Darwin publishes Origin of Species in

1859. Natural selection: process by which heritable

traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations.

Watershed event in biological determinism in general and in racial science in particular.

Argued against the unity of man based on the Adam and Eve story (creationism or intelligent design vs. evolution)

Opposed the more optimistic theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck that acquired characteristics could be inherited and the environment could therefore influence group standing i.e. provided for the improvement of status for groups and individuals through social change.

Eugenics (contd)Social Darwinism should really be called Social

Spencerism, since Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his 1864 Principles of Biology. Spencer did not portend any evolutionary implications, just a perfecting or stabilizing of the best features of the human species. He was an opponent of racism. Perfection occurred because “…people with any

constitutional flaw preventing the due fulfillment of the conditions of life are continually dying out and leaving behind those fit for the climate, food, and habits to which they are born…And thus is the race kept free from vitiation.”

Eugenics (contd)1870’s: Health care introduced into

the Western world by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck under Kaiser Wilhelm II to:increase allegiance to the state.undermine socialists threatening the

monarchy by reducing or blurring the tension and conflicts between social classes.

to provide for the “social good.”

Eugenics (contd)In 1883 Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s

cousin, coined the term eugenics (good birth or well-born): “the science [sic] dealing with factors that influence the hereditary qualities of a race and with ways of improving these qualities, especially by modifying the fertility of different categories of people.”Negative eugenics (negative racial hygiene)

Discouraged transmission of less desirable genetic traits.Discouraged medical care and procreation for inferior

races. Positive eugenics (positive racial hygiene)

Encouraged transmission of more desirable genetic traits.Encouraged medical care and procreation for superior

races.

Eugenics in America (contd)The end of the 19th and the turn of the

20th centuries saw turbulent economic and social problems resulting from:The Civil WarIndustrializationMechanization of farmingRapid expansion of citiesLabor unionsWaves of immigration, especially from

southern and eastern EuropeDepressions

Eugenics in America (contd)Social Darwinism initially explained

social and economic inequalities as the “survival of the fittest” but by the turn of the century:The fittest were having fewer children.The working class and the poor were

having many children and organizing against the wealthy and the powerful.

The traditional approach to solving the problems of the poor—charity, social work, and religious institutions—was not working.

The new approach was called “Progressivism.”

Eugenics in America (contd)Progressivism included the following

elements:A shift from laissez-faire to managed

capitalism.The government would play an

increasing role in the management of economic and social problems.

Scientific management would be done by university-trained experts who would do long-range planning for society.

A strong faith in science as a cure-all that would herald a new era of rational control of both nature and human society—the progressive science of social engineering was eugenics.

Eugenics in America1867: Richard Dugdale publishes The

Jukes, a study of six generations of criminal families. Criminality attributed to bad environment that could be reversed by good environments i.e. “Men do not become moral by intuition, but by patient organization and training.” (Misinterpreted by others and overwhelmed by hereditary pessimism.)

1867: Michigan Marriage Act makes it a crime for idiots, the insane, uncured syphilitics, and people with uncured cases of gonorrhea to marry or live together.

Eugenics in America (contd)1888: Oscar McCulloch publishes the Tribe

of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation, publicizing it as a socially degenerate collection of families in Indianapolis.

McCulloch’s study, unlike Dugdale’s, is bleak and pessimistic, stressing the wretchedness of the families and the burdens they impose on society.

His views are popularized by the essays of David Starr Jordan, a professor of natural history at Indiana University, who become the first president of the newly created Stanford University in 1891.

Eugenics in America (contd)In the last quarter of the 19th century,

authors wrote two polemics whose shared thesis was that the history of the relationship between science and religion had been a centuries-long story of acrimonious attacks, retreats, and counterattacks.1874: John William Draper’s History of

the Conflict between Science and Religion

1896: Andrew Dickson White’s (president of Cornell University) A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

Eugenics in America (contd)1892: Henry D. Chapin argues that

vagabonds, tramps, and criminals should be isolated from society.

1893: Dr. F. E. Daniel of Austin, TX recommends sterilization of the unfit, including habitual masturbators, as being humane at the Medico-Legal Congress held in Chicago.

1896: Czarist forgery called Protocols of the Elders of Zion is released and becomes a best seller. (Adopted by Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent in 1920 and published by Gerald K Smith as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.)

Eugenics in America (contd)1897: Michigan sterilization law fails

after passing one house.1899: .J. Ochsner, the founder of the

American College of Surgeons, urges vasectomies for prisoners and other degenerates.

1899: Harry Clay Sharp performs the first vasectomy to treat masturbation in a prisoner in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

Eugenics in America (contd)

Eugenics in America (contd)From a review in “American Journal of

Psychology” of Human Heredity and Progress by W. Duncan McKim, M.D., published by Putnams’s Sons in New York in 1900:“The dark side of human existence; the

cause of human wretchedness; the defective classes; a remedy; and a consideration of objections against it, are the chief features of this book. The most striking and central idea is that artificial selection should help the elevation of the human race, partly by restricting reproduction by those organically very weak or vicious, and doing this, to use his language,


‘by the surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most human means of preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of this high privilege’ by ‘a gentle and painless death.’ ‘This should be administered, not as a punishment, but as an expression of enlightened pity for the victims too defective by nature to find true happiness in life and as a duty toward the community and toward our own offspring.’”

Eugenics (contd)1900: Three European botanists

discover Gregor Mendel (Augustinian monk and high school science teacher) 1866 Experiments on Plant Hybridization describing how traits were inherited in peas: Hereditary factors do not combine, but

are passed intact.Each member of the parental

generation transmits only half of its hereditary factors to each offspring (with certain factors "dominant" over others).

Different offspring of the same parents receive different sets of hereditary factors.

Eugenics in America (contd)1900: Rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s

genetic research provided a scientific patina and intellectual respectability to eugenics, an idea that became orthodox thinking in the highest circles of American academe (David Starr Jordan and Charles Eliot, presidents of Stanford and Harvard), science (Alexander Graham Bell, Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel), government (Presidents T. Roosevelt and Wilson), law (Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), social activism (Margaret Sanger) and philanthropy (Carnegie, Rockefeller).

Eugenics in America (contd)1902: David Starr Jordan, president of

Stanford University, published The Blood of a Nation, extolling eugenics.

1903: The American Breeders Association is founded to focus on animal and plant breeding.

1904: Governor Samuel Pennypacker of Pennsylvania vetoes a compulsory sterilization law for the feebleminded.

Eugenics in America (contd)1904: the Carnegie Institute's Station

for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, NY was formally opened by Hugo de Vries, one of the three re-discoverers of Mendel’s work. Charles Davenport, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, is the director.

1905-1909: Wilhelm Johannsen proposes terms "genes," "genotype," and "phenotype.”

1906: William Bateson introduces term “genetics.”

1907: Indiana passes the first state compulsory sterilization law .

Eugenics in America (contd)1909: The American Breeders

Association established a Committee on Eugenics, which was chaired by David Starr Jordan. Charles Davenport was the first secretary of the Committee.

1910: The Committee on Eugenics supervised the funding by Mrs. E.H. Harriman, mother of the future governor of New York, of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at CSHL. Under Harry Laughlin, the ERO becomes the leading promoter of American eugenics, receiving funds from the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Kellogg foundations.

Eugenics in America (contd)ERO developed questionnaires that

were taken from door-to-door by trained workers who recorded the characteristics of individuals in the families interviewed. These were stored on index cards that by 1924 numbered 750,000. They were analyzed according to the principles of Mendelian genetics but with little or no regard for the quality of the data or whether Mendelian genetic analysis was appropriate for such traits. Nevertheless, the ERO became the center for scientific studies of eugenics.

Eugenics in America (contd)1910: Abraham Flexner, who had

trained at Harvard and the University of Berlin, publishes a report entitled “Medical Education in the United States and Canada.” It is now known as “The Flexner Report.”

Over the next 15 years, the report transformed American medical schools from proprietary schools operated more for profit than education to the German model of strong biomedical sciences together with hands-on clinical training—he “Germanized” American medical education.

Eugenics in America (contd)On two wings: Hebraic religion and

enlightenmentSlavery, Civil War, Jim Crow laws, one-

drop ruleScience and Mary Shelley’s

FrankensteinDarwin and Origin of SpeciesBismarck and national health

insuranceGalton coins the word “eugenics”Mendelian genetics rediscovered

Eugenics in America (contd)The end of the 19th and the turn of the

20th centuries saw turbulent economic and social problems resulting from:The Civil WarIndustrializationMechanization of farmingRapid expansion of citiesLabor unionsWaves of immigration, especially from

southern and eastern EuropeDepressions

Eugenics in America (contd)Social Darwinism initially explained

social and economic inequalities as the “survival of the fittest” but by the turn of the century:The fittest were having fewer children.The working class and the poor were

having many children and organizing against the wealthy and the powerful.

The traditional approach to solving the problems of the poor—charity, social work, and religious institutions—was not working.

The new approach was called “Progressivism.”

Eugenics in America (contd)Progressivism included the following

elements:A shift from laissez-faire to managed

capitalism.The government would play an

increasing role in the management of economic and social problems.

Scientific management would be done by university-trained experts who would do long-range planning for society.

A strong faith in science as a cure-all that would herald a new era of rational control of both nature and human society—the progressive science of social engineering was eugenics.

Eugenics in America (contd)1900: Rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s

genetic research provided a scientific patina and intellectual respectability to eugenics, an idea that became orthodox thinking in the highest circles of American academe (David Starr Jordan and Charles Eliot, presidents of Stanford and Harvard), science (Alexander Graham Bell, Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel), government (Presidents T. Roosevelt and Wilson), law (Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), social activism (Margaret Sanger) and philanthropy (Carnegie, Rockefeller).

Eugenics in America (contd)1902: David Starr Jordan, president of

Stanford University, published The Blood of a Nation, extolling eugenics.

1903: The American Breeders Association is founded to focus on animal and plant breeding.

1904: Governor Samuel Pennypacker of Pennsylvania vetoes a compulsory sterilization law for the feebleminded.

Eugenics in America (contd)1904: the Carnegie Institute's Station

for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, NY. Charles Davenport, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, is the director.

1907: Indiana passes the first state compulsory sterilization law.

1909: The American Breeders Association established a Committee on Eugenics, which was chaired by David Starr Jordan. Charles Davenport was the first secretary of the Committee.

Eugenics in America (contd)1910: The Committee on Eugenics

supervised the funding by Mrs. E.H. Harriman of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at CSHL. Under Harry Laughlin, the ERO becomes the leading promoter of American eugenics, receiving funds from the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Kellogg foundations.

ERO developed questionnaires that were taken door-to-door by trained workers who recorded the characteristics of individuals in the interviewed families. These were stored on index cards that by 1924 numbered 750,000.

Eugenics in America (contd)1910: Abraham Flexner publishes a

report for the Carnegie Foundation entitled “Medical Education in the United States and Canada.”

The schools, he wrote, were essentially private ventures, money making in spirit and object. Income was simply divided among the lecturers. No applicant for instruction who could pay his fees or sign his note was turned down. Chicago’s 14 medical schools were described as “a disgrace to the State whose laws permit its existence…indescribably foul…the plague spot of the nation.”

Eugenics in America (contd)Over the next 15 years, the Flexner

Report transformed American medical schools from proprietary schools operated more for profit than education to the German model of strong biomedical sciences together with hands-on clinical training.

Between 1909-1910 Flexner visited155 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada. After his report, the number of American medical school dropped to 31 and graduates dropped from 4400 to 2000. By 1935, there were 66 American medical schools.

Eugenics in America (contd)1911: New Jersey law created the

“Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics and Other Defectives” to identify when “procreation is inadvisable” for prisoners and children residing in poor houses and other charitable institutions. The court-designated counsel for the patient was given only five days before the sterilization decision was sealed. Governor Woodrow Wilson signed the law on April 21, 1911. He was elected President of the United States in 1912.

Eugenics in America (contd)1912: at the First International

Congress for Eugenics, Alfred Ploetz, the father of German racial hygiene, praised the United States as a bold leader in the realm of eugenics. Attendees included:Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, and

head of the sponsor of the congress, the British Eugenics Education Society

Alexander Graham BellCharles DavenportCharles Eliot, president of Harvard

UniversityDavid Starr Jordan, president of

Stanford University

Eugenics in America (contd)"We must protect the crushable

elements at the base of our present industrial structure...it is abnormal for any industry to throw back upon the community the human wreckage due to its wear and tear, and the hazards of sickness, accident, invalidism, involuntary unemployment, and old age should be provided for through insurance." TR would succeed in having a plank adopted in the Progressive Party Platform that stated:

Eugenics in America (contd)“ We pledge ourselves to work

unceasingly in state and nation for…The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment, and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use.”

Theodore Roosevelt addressing the convention of

the Progressive Party in 1912.

Eugenics in America (contd)1913: former President Theodore

Roosevelt wrote Davenport: “I agree with you…that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…Some day, we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizens of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

Eugenics in America (contd)1913: One of President Wilson’s very

first acts in office was to institute comprehensive racial segregation throughout the federal government. When Wilson’s appointees were unable to put blacks and whites into separate offices and buildings, room dividers were installed to prevent whites from even having to gaze upon their darker-skinned co-workers.

1913: The 16th amendment was ratified, allowing the Federal government to tax the income of individuals.

Eugenics in America (contd)Eugenic journals

Eugenical News 1916-1953, Eugenics Quarterly 1954-1968, Social Biology 1969-present

The Eugenics Review 1909-1968, Journal of Biosocial Science 1969-present

Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment 1928-1931

American Breeders Magazine 1910-1914, Journal of Heredity 1914-present

Eugenics in America (contd)Eugenic organizations

Eugenics Research AssociationEugenics Society (British)American Eugenics SocietyAmerican Breeders Association 1902-

1913, American Genetics Association, 1914-present

Eugenics in America (contd)1915: Anna Bolinger gave birth at

German-American Hospital to a baby with extreme intestinal and rectal malformations. The delivering physician awakened Dr. Harry Haiselden, the hospital’s chief of staff, who decided the baby too afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. Surgical treatment was denied.

Eugenics in America (contd)1916: Dr. Haiselden became an

overnight eugenic celebrity and he played himself in a movie produced by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, The Black Stork (Are You Fit to Marry? after 1927), a fictionalized account of eugenically mismatched couple who are counseled by him against having children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually the woman does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die.

The dead child then levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ.


Show clip from War Against the weak

Eugenics in America (contd)Madison Grant was a lawyer in New

York and a conservationist as well as a eugenicist. He was also friends with and influenced the thinking of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.

Madison Grant wrote in The Passing of the Great Race in 1916: "The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” i.e. the one-drop rule.

Eugenics in America (contd)Madison Grant also wrote in The

Passing of the Great Race: ”Mistaken regard for what is believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

Eugenics in America (contd)Many German scientists were avid

fans of Madison Grant and accepted all of the major tenets of his scientific racism.

Grant argued for the superiority of the Nordic race, which he suggested was a master race.

A disgruntled corporal in the German Army who was also an extreme nationalist, race biologist and advocate of a master race wrote a fan letter to Grant thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and telling him that “the book is my Bible.” The corporal was Adolf Hitler.

Eugenics in America (contd)1916: Margaret Sanger opened her

birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

1921: Sanger formed the American Birth Control League (ABCL), an educational and lobbying group; it had links to radical ideas about women’s equality and sexual freedom that were scandalous at the time.

Eugenics in America (contd)Eugenicists initially opposed the ABCL

for fear that birth control would be most available to the “fit.”

However, Sanger aggressively promoted the eugenic features of birth control.

At the 1921 International Eugenics Congress at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Sanger argued, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective.” Legalization and distribution of contraceptives would aid in this pursuit, she said.

Eugenics in America (contd)1922: Margaret Sanger publishes The

Pivot of Civilization, in which she says:“ The most penetrating thinkers…are

coming to see that a qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity…”

“(t)hat there is truly…a feeble-minded peril to future generations—unless the feeble-minded are prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities.”

Eugenics in America (contd)“Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its

negative aspects. It is “negative Eugenics” that has studied the history of such families as the Jukeses and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of imbecility and feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread through all strata of society…On its negative side it shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all…”

The ABCL was the forerunner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America that was founded in 1942.

Eugenics in America (contd)1922: Lothrop Stoppard publishes The

Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man, which was the first use of the term “Untermenschen” that was taken up by Nazi apologists to mean subhumans.

The book was a tirade against the degenerative Slavs who had taken power in the Soviet Union as the Bolshevists.

The book argued that if the white race was going to win the struggle against inferior races, it must eschew liberal policies and adopt an expansive eugenics program.

Eugenics in America (contd)1924: Virginia passes “The Racial

Integrity Act,” which required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and made a marriage between white persons and non-white persons a felony.

Walter Plecker, M.D., developed the racial criteria behind The Racial Integrity Act.

Dr. Plecker was also the Registrar of Vital Statistics in Virginia from 1912 to 1946 and zealously enforced the one-drop rule. He simplified the original six racial categories to “white” and “colored.”

Eugenics in America (contd)1911: Immigration Restriction League

President Prescott Hall asked his former Harvard classmate Charles Davenport of the ERO for assistance in influencing Congressional debate on immigration.

Davenport appointed Harry Laughlin to perform a survey to determine the national origins of “hereditary defectives” in American prisons, mental hospitals and other charitable institutions.

The U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) was responsible for performing medical inspections of disembarking passengers at Ellis Island.

Eugenics in America (contd)The U. S. Public Health Service

(USPHS) adopted eugenic arguments to stem the flood of “inferior stock” represented by the new immigrants.

1914: the Surgeon General and a number of USPHS senior officers became publicly aligned with the eugenics movement and published articles to support the eugenicists’ position in the immigration restriction debate.

1920: Laughlin appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization.

Eugenics in America (contd)Using data from his survey of the

number of foreign-born persons in jails, prisons and reformatories, Laughlin argued that the “American” gene pool was being polluted by a rising tide of intellectually and morally defective immigrants, primarily from eastern and southern Europe.

Committee Chairman Albert Johnson appointed Laughlin as “expert eugenics agent,” empowering him to conduct large-scale surveys of charitable institutions and mental hospitals and have his results published by the GPO.

Eugenics in America (contd)1924: Laughlin testifies in Congress in

support of a eugenically-oriented immigration restriction bill.

The Eugenics Research Association displayed a chart beneath the Rotunda of the Capitol building showing the cost to taxpayers of supporting “social inadequates” during the hearings.

The resulting Immigration Restriction Act halted the immigration of “dysgenic” Italians and eastern European Jews, whose numbers had mushroomed between 1900 and 1920 by allowing immigration from each country in proportion to the 1890 census.

Eugenics in America (contd)Son David Popenoe : “He could be

marked as a California man, a free thinker. He gave up religion when he was still young (after teaching Sunday school for many years in the Congregational church) and became a secular humanist, often jokingly replying when you asked his religion that he was a member of "the First Evangelical Church of the Living Truth.” He was one of the early California vegetarians, refraining from eating meat around 1905…he kept to a meatless diet for the rest of his life.”

Eugenics in America (contd)“Amidst a group of young intellectuals

centered around, and financially supported by, Alexander Graham Bell, who had become interested in heredity and eugenics through the hereditary deafness of his wife and sheep breeding experiments at his summer home in Nova Scotia, Paul Popenoe developed rapidly as a self-taught scientist and something of a now-urban raconteur.”

Eugenics in America (contd)“My father's major interests in the

years around World War I were heredity, and its chief social application of the time, eugenics. It has never been clear to me just how and where he picked up his vast knowledge of heredity, but his interest in both heredity and eugenics was surely in keeping with one of the major intellectual fashions of that era.”

Eugenics in America (contd)“Intellectually, the young Paul

Popenoe was a true child of the Progressive era, a combination of Darwinian scientist, William James pragmatist, and Teddy Roosevelt progressive. Charles Darwin was his idol, and he was also greatly influenced by the eminent biologist David Starr Jordan, president and then chancellor of Stanford from 1891 to 1916, under whom he had studied. More than anything else, he was a devout advocate of science and the scientific approach, and believed that the path to human betterment lay in the application of science to society.”

Eugenics in America (contd)“Although eugenics is thoroughly

repudiated today as deeply reactionary and misguided, mainly due to the racism with which it often was associated, it was then considered liberal and progressive. Living in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, most of the intellectual Progressives of that day--in America as well as in Europe--were eugenists. This included Teddy Roosevelt, Harvard's president Charles W. Eliot, many of the leading sociologists, the socialists Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and many, many others.”

Eugenics in America (contd)“They fully accepted the hereditarian

precepts that many personal traits are passed along genetically and therefore heredity is the key to understanding human behavior, and they further believed in the social regulation of heredity, or eugenics--controlling human reproduction in various ways for the good of society.”

Eugenics in America (contd)1922: Harry Laughlin publishes his

“Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, which is passed in 1924 in Virginia as “The Sterilization Act.” Laughlin’s act was drafted to withstand a challenge to compulsory sterilization in the United States Supreme Court.

1927: In its Buck vs. Bell decision of May 2, 1927, the United States Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s law providing for eugenic sterilization for people considered genetically unfit.

Eugenics in America (contd)Dr. Albert Priddy, superintendent of

the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, filed a petition to his Board of Directors to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old patient whose adoptive family had committed her to his institution as “feeble-minded.” Dr. Priddy claimed that Carrie had a mental age of 9, that her 52-year-old birthmother possessed a mental age of 8. After Carrie gave birth to an illegitimate child, petitioned to have her sterilized since she was a genetic threat to society. (Priddy died and was replaced by Dr. James Bell.)


MENDEL'S LAW. A Plea For a Better Race of Men.

Oh, why are you men so foolish – You breeders who breed our men

Let the fools, the weaklings and crazy Keep breeding and breeding again?

The criminal, deformed, and the misfit, Dependent, diseased, and the rest –

As we breed the human family The worst is as good as the best.

Eugenics in America (contd)Go to the house of some farmer,

Look through his barns and sheds, Look at his horses and cattle,

Even his hogs are thorough breds; Then look at his stamp on his children,

Low browed with the monkey jaw, Ape handed, and silly, and foolish –

Bred true to Mendel's law.

Eugenics in America (contd)Go to some homes in the village,

Look at the garden beds, The cabbage, the lettuce and turnips,

Even the beets are thoroughbreds; Then look at the many children

With hands like the monkey's paw, Bowlegged, flat headed, and foolish –

Bred true to Mendel's law.

Eugenics in America (contd)This is the law of Mendel,

And often he makes it plain, Defectives will breed defectives

And the insane breed insane. Oh, why do we allow these people

To breed back to the monkey's nest, To increase our country's burdens

When we should only breed the best?

Eugenics in America (contd)Oh, you wise men take up the burden,

And make this you[sic] loudest creed, Sterilize the misfits promptly –

All not fit to breed; Then our race will be strengthened and

bettered, And our men and our women be blest,

Not apish, repulsive and foolish, For the best will breed the best.

by Joseph DeJarnette, MD, director of Western State Hospital in Virginia, witness in Buck vs. Bell.


“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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.


The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the 8-1 majority.

The governors of California, Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina and South Carolina have acknowledgedand apologized for their sterilization laws.

Eugenics in America (contd)Beginning in1932, the U.S. Public

Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis at the hospital affiliated with Tuskegee Institute, the black university founded by Booker T. Washington. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.

Eugenics in America (contd)The study was meant to discover how

syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites —the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis, whereas blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage.

Tuskegee Institute lent the PHS its medical facilities for the study, and other predominantly black institutions as well as local black doctors also participated. A black nurse, Eunice Rivers, was a central figure in the experiment and the men in the experiment trusted her.

Eugenics in America (contd)1934: President Franklin Roosevelt

created by executive order the Committee on Economic Security (CES).

1935: The Social Security Act was passed by Congress and:Created a social insurance program

designed to pay retired workers age 65 or older a continuing income after retirement.

Taxes to pay for these benefits were first to be collected in 1937 and monthly benefits would begin in 1942; amendments in 1939 advanced payments to 1940.

Eugenics in America (contd)The Social Security Act did not quite

achieve all the aspirations its supporters had hoped by way of providing a "comprehensive package of protection" against the "hazards and vicissitudes of life." Certain features of that package, notably disability coverage and medical benefits, would have to await future developments. But it did it include unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, aid to dependent children and grants to the states to provide various forms of medical care.

Eugenics in America (contd)Alexis Carrel, French surgeon,

biologist and eugenicist.1906-1912: experiments at the

Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912.

Working with Charles Lindbergh, who was interested in developing an artificial heart to save his sister from death from valvular heart disease, he produced the first device to keep a THYROID alive in the lab for a week; this was the beginning of regenerative medicine.

Eugenics in America (contd)In 1935, Carrel published a best-

selling book titled L'Homme, cet inconnu (Man, The Unknown), which advocated, in part, that mankind could better itself by following the guidance of an elite group of intellectuals, and by implementing a regime of enforced eugenics. Carrel claimed the existence of a “hereditary biological aristocracy” and argued that “deviant” human types should be suppressed.

Eugenics in America (contd)Carrel wrote in Man, The Unknown:

“(t)he conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.”

Eugenics in America (contd)In the 1936 preface to the German

edition of Man, the Unknown, Carrel added praise for the eugenic policies of the Third Reich, writing that:

“(t)he German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.”

Eugenics in America (contd)1936: Harry Laughlin accepted an

honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his contributions to eugenics, notably his “model sterilization law,” which served as a basis for Nazi eugenics programs

Laughlin writes that the U.S. and the Third Reich share "a common understanding of...the practical application" of eugenic principles to "racial endowments and...racial health."

Eugenics in America (contd)1847: the AMA is founded.1872: the AMA’s national convention

allowed state societies, not the national convention, to determine

which local societies would be officially recognized by the AMA. But because many societies—especially in the South, where most African Americans resided—openly practiced racial exclusion, this structure effectively excluded most African

Americans from the AMA.

Eugenics in America (contd)1938: the AMA had a few (0.3%) northern

black members and racial exclusion within AMA-affiliated societies, particularly in the South, precluded most African American physicians from joining the AMA.

"American propaganda stressed above all else the abhorrence of . . . Hitler's brand of racism and its utter incompatibility with the democratic faith.” Many Americans, however, came to see similarities between "Hitler's brand of racism" and white supremacist ideologies

in the United States.Woodward CV. The Strange Career of

Jim Crow.

Eugenics in America (contd)2008: “The American Medical

Association (AMA) today apologizes for its past history of racial inequality toward African-American physicians, and shares its current efforts to increase the ranks of minority physicians and their participation in the AMA. In 2005, the AMA convened and supported an independent panel of experts to study the history of the racial divide in organized medicine, and the culmination of this work prompted the apology.”

Eugenics in GermanySterilization LawNuremberg LawsChild EuthanasiaT4 ProgramWild EuthanasiaOperation 14f13The Final SolutionMedical ExperimentsCover-up

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1891: Dr. Wilhelm Schallmayer

publishes Concerning the Imminent Physical Degeneration of Civilized Humanity and the Nationalization of the Medical Profession, the first eugenic tract published in Germany. He articulates a clear strategy for saving Western civilization as a whole, and Germany in particular, from the peril of “degeneration.”

1900: Friedrich Alfred Krupp of Europe’s leading cast-steel and armaments firm sponsors a contest for the advancement of science and in the interest of the Fatherland.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Krupp offers a first prize of 10,000

marks for the best answer to the question: “What can we learn from the theory of evolution about internal political development and state legislation?”

Sixty contestants formally entered the competition: forty-four from Germany, eight from Austria, four from Switzerland, and two each from the United States and Russia.

The winner is Wilhelm Schallmayer’s 381-page Heredity and Selection in the Life History of Nations.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)A revised edition of Schallmayer’s

book became the standard German eugenics textbook, providing a discussion of critical theoretical issues underlying eugenics and a practical eugenics program, large portions of which were adopted by the German Society for Race Hygiene.“The statesman whose vision is not

merely directed at momentary success and whose horizon has been broadened by the light of the theory of descent would recognize that the future of his nation is dependent on the good management of its reproductive (human) resources.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Sheila Faith Weiss in Race, Hygiene

and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer:“He was the first person to clearly

articulate the technocratic/managerial logic behind German eugenic thought, indeed behind eugenic thought in general: the idea that power or ‘national efficiency’ is essentially a problem in the rational management of population…German racial hygiene was…a strategy to boost national efficiency through a kind of rational management or managerial control over the the reproductive capacities of various groups and classes.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1895: physician Alfred Ploetz publishes

The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak: A Discussion Concerning Race Hygiene (Rassenhygiene) and Its Relationship to Humanitarian Ideals, Especially Socialism.

He addresses Darwin’s personal dilemma as outlined in Descent of Man: how can human beings reconcile the inevitable conflict between the humanitarian ideals and practices of the noblest part of our nature, with the interest of the race, whose biological efficiency is impaired by those very ideals and practices.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1895: Adolf Jost calls for unwanted

people to be medically put down in his 1895 book The Right to Die. Jost claimed that “the state needs to assume the responsibility for killing individuals for the health of the social organism.”

1904: Ploetz founds the Journal of Racial and Social Biology to investigate “the principles of the optimal conditions for the maintenance and development of the race.”

1905: Ploetz and psychiatrist Ernst Rudin and others found the Society for Racial Hygiene, the forerunner of the International Society of Racial Hygiene, to further the cause of human racial improvement.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1913: Eugen Fischer, an anatomist at

Freiburg University, publishes The Bastards of Rehoboth and the Problem of Miscegenation in Man, a book about mixed-blood people in Southwest Africa, recommending that they be offered minimal protection “as a race inferior to ourselves.”This book influenced all subsequent German

racial legislation, including the infamous Nuremberg racial laws.

“We still do not know a great deal about the mingling of the races. But we certainly know this: Without exception, every European nation (Volk) that has accepted the blood of inferior races—and only romantics can deny that Negroes, Hottentots and many others are inferior—has paid for its acceptance of inferior elements with spiritual and cultural degeneration.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Fischer proposed, “Consequently, one

should grant them the amount of protection that an inferior race confronting us requires to survive, no more and no less and only for so long as they are of use to us…”

Fischer rejected not only marriages between whites and blacks but also objected to “colored, Jewish, and gypsy hybrids, the so-called “Mischlinge.”

This book established his reputation.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Fritz Haber: Jewish Nobel Laureate for

the process of fixing atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen, which solved the world’s long-standing dependence on this fast disappearing natural source of ammonia and nitrogenous compounds, especially fertilizers. About one-third of the world’s food supply results from nitrogen-fixed fertilizers, which led to the catchphrase “bread out of air.”

Haber also directed the first chlorine gas attacks against enemy troops during World War I, which may have led to his wife’s suicide.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Haber developed Zyklon A, from

hydrogen cyanide as an insecticide for flour mills and granaries,.

Despite Haber's outspoken loyalty to his country, his Jewish ancestry and wartime role made him undesirable in the eyes of Nazi Germany. Haber left Germany in 1933 and died in Switzerland in 1934.

Once the odorous marker used as a warning system to prevent poisoning was removed, Zyklon A evolved to Zyklon B, the notorious poison used in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. Among its victims reportedly were some of Haber's relatives.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1917: Hermann Siemens, M.D.,

publishes a book, which is translated into English in 1924 by Lewellys F. Barker, M.D., as Race Hygiene and Heredity and it is reviewed in the December 26, 1925 issue of the British Medical Journal. The reviewer says the following:“Dr. Siemens is alarmed at the lower

birth rate of the cultivated classes, a phenomenon observed in German as in many other countries, and fears that they will gradually be exterminated by the increasing numbers of the proletariat. He wants something done to

Eugenics in Germany (contd)

encourage larger families amongst the upper middleor professional classes, and to provide this encouragement he proposes a readjustment of taxation so that a much larger burden shall fall on the unmarried or childless and a much greater relief be assured the good citizen who is generously restocking the Fatherland.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1920: Professor of psychiatry Alfred

Hoche and professor of law Karl Binding publish The Release of The Destruction of Life Devoid of Value:The right to life must be earned and

justified, not assumed.Those incapable of human feeling

—“empty human husks” in the mental hospitals—should be destroyed as a humane act.

One of the most influential contributions to the debates on euthanasia and eugenics.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Euthanasia was no longer an academic

contemplation:Millions of people had died in World War

I and hard choices had been madeMass starvation of German mental

patients had occurred.Building upon a series of unimpeachably

liberal premises, Hoche and Binding’s tract systematically rehearsed a series of illiberal and crudely materialistic arguments in favor of involuntary euthanasia.

They accorded the state paramount rights, overriding the claims of individuals or morality.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)“It is impossible to doubt that there are

living people to whom death would be a release, and whose death would simultaneously free society and the state from carrying a burden which serves no conceivable purpose, except that of providing an example of the greatest unselfishness. And because there actually are human lives, in whose preservation no rational being could ever again take any interest, the legal order is now confronted by the fateful question:


Is it our duty actively to advocate for this life's asocial continuance (particularly by the fullest application of criminal law), or to permit its destruction under specific conditions? One could also state the question legislatively, like this: Does the energetic preservation of such life deserve preference, as an example of the general unassailability of life? Or does permitting its termination, which frees everyone involved, seem the lesser evil?”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)“Reflect simultaneously on a battlefield

strewn with thousands of dead youths, or a mine in which methane gas has trapped hundreds of energetic workers; compare this with our mental hospitals, with their caring for their living inmates. One will be deeply shaken by the strident clash between the sacrifice of the finest flower of humanity in its full measure on the one side, and by the meticulous care shown to existences which are not just absolutely worthless but even of negative value, on the other.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Binding was the senior partner in the

collaboration with Hoche but he did not live to see the fruits of his cogitations beyond proof stage, dying in 1920.

His only son had been killed at Langemark in World War I and Hoche wrote bad poetry about the experience of grief.

He married a Jew and had to take early retirement from his post at Freiburg when the Nazis came to power.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Ironically, Hoche was privately critical

of the Nazi eugenic laws, pointing out that they would have precluded the birth of, among others, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Beethoven.

Hoche opposed the Nazis’ euthanasia program, after it claimed one of his relatives, even though much of its rational derived from his own writings.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1921: Fritz Lenz, a physician who

edited the Journal of Racial and Social Biology from 1913-1933, along with medically trained anthropologist Eugen Fischer and geneticist Ernst Baur, write the influential Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, which was published by anti-Semite Julius Friedrich Lehman (whose publishing house continues to function today although the name “Lehmann” was eliminated in 1997.)

1923: Lenz is named Germany’s first Professor of Racial Hygiene at the University of Munich.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1923: Lehmann was a friend and a

supporter of Adolf Hitler and brought a copy of the second edition of Baur, Fischer and Lenz’s Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene to Landsberg prison where Hitler was imprisoned after the failed Munich beer hall putsch.

Hitler incorporates racial ideas from the genetic textbook into his Mein Kampf (My Struggle):“Whoever is not bodily and spiritually

healthy and worthy, shall not have the right to pass on his sufferings in the body of his children.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Otto Wagener, head of the Nazi Party’s

Economic Policy Office from 1931 to 1933, quotes Hitler: “Now that we know the laws of heredity, 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. I’m sure that occasionally mistakes occur as a result. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1923: While imprisoned, Hitler

reportedly also read Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, an antiSemitic tract in four volumes whose main source was The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a booklet claiming to be the confidential minutes of a Jewish conclave convened in the last years of the 19th century to plot the take over the world.

The booklet was actually a contrivance of the Russian Okhrana or czarist secret police.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1926: The Kaiser Wilhelm-Gesellschaft

(KWG) founded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin and nominates Eugen Fischer as its director.

Funding was provided for the KWI by the Rockefeller Foundation, which, according to historian Paul Weindling, “intervened from 1922 to save German medical sciences. American scientists, many of whom had trained in Germany, regarded German medicine as being of world significance…training researchers from all over the world.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Among the scientists who worked at

the KWI was Otmar von Verschuer, who collaborated with his former assistant, Josef Mengele, on his research at Auschwitz.

Science as Salvation (Kass article in MATH): “Is there something wrong—even deadly wrong—in seeing science as our salvation?”

There were two contrasting images at the Deadly Medicine exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Glass Man display in the German Hygiene Museum of Dresden, 1930.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)While transparent models of the

human body are today widely marketed as science toys for school children, it is difficult to exaggerate the excitement these original models created.

For the first time, the common man could glimpse a life-like model of his insides, organ by organ, artery by artery, nerve by nerve, seeing with illuminated brilliance all the parts that made him run.

The Glass Man stands toweringly over us, fitly and proudly, a model of human perfection not to say apotheosis.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)This perfect man came clearly not

from the hand of God but from an even more perfect human, the scientific and medical visionary who would someday soon help humankind collectively achieve the healthiest perfection here modeled in glass.

The Glass Man was the emblem of a new religion: in place of the God who became man, we have here the man become as god, the scientific savior, in loco crucifixis, who would take away the sin of suffering altogether.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Contrast the perfect Glass Man with

these images of the human deformity, from loss of limb to loss of mind, that came home from World War I to Germany by the tens of thousands. The maimed and enfeebled had rarely if ever been seen in such numbers—thanks, please note, to the great technological improvements for waging war—and the response of the German mind, humiliated in the War, did not take the most compassionate turn.

Recall the book by Hoche, who had lost his only son in World War I and Binding.

Maimed soldiers in Plötzensee near Berlin, summer 1916.Source: Courtesy of USHMM.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Fear and loathing of the deformed and

defective found abundant expression, as hatred of imperfection grew up with and encouraged the desire to imitate the perfection of the Glass Man.

The contrast between the reality of human deformity created by technology and the possibility of human perfection created by science in part explains the great excitement and social appeal of the Glass Man.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)The idealistic German scientists could

not have known that the Glass Man was the harbinger of anything like the Final Solution. But they should have known that the biologizing and soulless account of human life that they were trumpeting is in fact always deadly to humanity—even if not one crematorium is built. A dehumanizing account of human life can all by itself produce a holocaust of the human spirit.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)The early German racial hygiene

movement was split between the:Nationalistic and meritocratic faction,

which worried about the indiscriminate use of birth control by the “fit” and the provision of inexpensive medical care to the “unfit” and the

Nordic supremacist and antiSemitic faction, which worried about the breeding of inferior with inferior races or many of the other themes associated with the Nazis

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Those opposed to the ideas of Nordic

supremacy broke away from the Society of Racial Hygiene (SRA), which was formed by Ploetz and Rudin in 1905 to further the cause of racial improvement, and formed the German Association for Volkish Improvement and Genetics.

The new group reunited with the SRA in 1931 with a renewed promise to unload the “ballast of racial ideology” but, by that time, both organizations were out of tune with the large movements sweeping the country, especially Nazism, that took over eugenics.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1929: The International Congress of

Eugenics takesplace in Rome. Charles Davenport, now President of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, send Mussolini a memorandum written by Fischer (whom he appoints as chairman of the Committee on Racial Crosses), which says:“Maximum speed is necessary; the danger is enormous.”

1931: Fischer, Baur and Lenze write in the third edition of their textbook:

Eugenics in Germany (contd)“We must of course deplore the one-

sided ‘anti-Semitism’ of National Socialism. Unfortunately, it seems that the masses need such ‘anti’ feelings...we cannot doubt that National Socialism is honestly striving for a healthier race. The question of the quality of our hereditary endowment is a hundred times more important than the dispute over capitalism or socialism, and a thousand times more important than that over the black-white-red (Imperial Germany) or black-red-gold banners (Weimar Republic.)”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1931: Himmler orders that members of

the SS, bodyguards of the Nazi party, must obtain permission to marry from the newly constituted Race Bureau of the SS, saying:“Permission tomarry will be granted or

refused solely and exclusively on the basis of the criteria of race and hereditary health.”

Professor Lenz calls this a “worthwhile exercise,” demonstrating the coming together of academics and political movements on the issue of eugenics.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1932: A committee of the Prussian

State Health Council recommends that a law on sterilization be brought in under the title of “Eugenics in the Service of Public Welfare.” The law would permit the “voluntary’ sterilization of the same groups of persons, with the exception of alcoholics, as were later specified the The Sterilization Law of July 14, 1933.

At that time, there were more than 20 institutes for racial science at German universities and at least 10 journals on the subject of racial hygiene.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1932: At the Third International

Congress of Eugenics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Davenport suggests Eugen Fischer as his successor as president of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations but Fischer declines and Ernst Rudin is elected.

By that time, a year before Hitler is elected Chancellor, 2800 doctors, or 6% of the whole medical profession, have joined the Nazi Physicians’ League. This is three times the rate for the general population and 15 times higher than the number of judges who have joined.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)“The Nationalist Socialist (Nazi)

Physicians’ League proved its political reliability to the Nazi cause long before the Nazi seizure of power, with an enthusiasm (Begeisterung), and an energy, unlike that of any other professional group”

—Dr. Hermann Berger, 1934

Eugenics in Germany (contd)January 30, 1933: Hitler is

democratically elected Chancellor of the Reich. Fritz Lenz declares, “It is the will of the Fuhrer, that the demands of racial hygiene should be put into practice, without delay.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)As the picture of “Hitler, the Doctor of

the German People” shows, the transformation of the Hippocratic Oath’s doctor-patient relationship has now been radically transformed into the state-patient relationship, with deadly consequences.

Hitler has displaced both Hippocrates’ gods and the Judeo-Christian God and will replace Darwin’s process of natural selection with his own “selections” on the ramps of Auschwitz and elsewhere.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)The Gleichschaltung of German

Medicine: shortly after the Nazi rise to power the medical profession was gleichgeschaltet—literally coordinated or unified—into a single, hierarchical structure responsible to a vertical chain of command culminating in the Nationalist Socialist Physicians’ League, which was in turn subordinated to the National Socialist Party.

On March 21, 1933, Dr. Alfons Stauder, had of Germany’s two major medical associations, pledges the support of the profession to the new regime.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Three days later, on March 24, 1933,

Stauder and other medical organization leaders are replaced by the new Führer of the Nazis Physicians’ League, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, “to counter divisions and new movements within the profession.”

On August 2, 1933, medical organizations were united into a single Association of German Health Insurance Physicians (KVD) under the Führer of the Nazis Physicians’ League, who now also became the Führer of the KVD.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)The Nazis credited themselves with

having established, for the first time, a unified and state-regulated structure for the German medical profession.

In this fashion, by the end of 1933, the German medical community had been unified into a single political entity, subordinated to the Nationalist Socialist Physicians’ League and hierarchically organized in accordance with the Fürher principle (Führer-prinzip) and the principle of Gleichschaltung.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Dr. Gerhard Wagner made it clear that

the Führer principle also had philosophical dimensions:Health care was to be replaced by

health leadership. The shift from health care to health leadership implied a recognition of the importance of distinguishing between valuable forms of life and life “not worth living.”

Curative medicine was to be replaced by preventive medicine.

Individual hygiene was to be replaced by racial hygiene.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Nazi doctors hailed a move “from the

doctor of the individual to the doctor of the nation.”

The consolidation of the medical profession under Nazi rule implied dramatic and far-reaching changes in the structure of German medical practice including:The medical press.The nature of medical education.The structure and priorities of medical

research.Who could and could not participate in

German medical science and practice.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)July 14, 1933: The Sterilization Law is

passed.1933: a Berlin correspondent for the

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) wrote, “Since sterilization is the only sure means of preventing the further hereditary transmission of mental disease and serious defects, this law must be regarded as an evidence of brotherly love and of watchfulness over the welfare of coming generations.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Theresa Duello from MATH: a German

course in medicine in the 1930s from beginning through licensure took up to seven years: eleven semesters of study, one semester for examinations, and one year of internship. She discusses six theses, written between 1937 and 1940, detailing the eugenic sterilization of hundreds of women deemed to be suffering from one of the “hereditary” disorders specified by the Sterilization Law.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1933: JAMA correspondent wrote, “ The

negative measures for the prevention of offspring with serious hereditary defects will be followed by positive legislative measures for the protection of families with sound hereditary attributes, and particularly the families with many children.. . .The personal desire to be sterilized, in itself, cannot and must not be considered important. The danger that person with such desires, born of the endeavor to secure unrestrained sexual gratification without fear of consequences, might find all too easily a willing surgeon, as well as other possible abuses, has been studiously avoided.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1934: A new journal, entitled The

Genetic Doctor, appears on June 16 with Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Mengele’s mentor, as the editor. The journal includes a column titled “Genetic Advice and Expertise,” which was a kind of “Dear Abby” for physicians on how to determine genetic fitness, when to sterilize, how to counsel for a healthy marriage, and so forth.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1935: Nuremberg Laws are passed.

The Reich Citizenship Law distinguished between citizens and residents, including Jews and single women, who were excluded from many privileges now accorded only to citizens.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which forbid marriage and sexual relations between non-Jews and Jews, and later extended to all non-Aryans.

The Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People, requiring medical examinations before marriage to see “if racial damage” might occur.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)Robert Proctor in Racial Hygiene:

Medicine Under the Nazis:“Racial hygienists drew upon the examples of American immigration, sterilization, and miscegenation laws to formulate their own policies in these areas…Germany’s foremost racial hygiene journal reported on the refusal of the American Medical Association to admit black physicians. German scholars also took note when British and American journals openly considered the question of euthanasia.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1939 was designated by the German

government as the year of “the duty to be healthy.” Hitler authored the secret memo to “allow certain specific doctors to grant a mercy death. These events built on expressions of support for euthanasia by:E. Kircner in 1925 who linked Hoche and

Binding’s proposal with Nietzsche’s view that “the sick person is the parasite of society.”

The Liegnitz town council in the early 1920s recommended the formation of a commission to determine whether money might be saved by eliminating the insane.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1927: American philosopher Bertrand

Russell writes in Marriage and Morals: “It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensible, so their extermination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable.”

1932: Kilock Millard, president of Britain’s Society of Medical Officers, proposes legislation regulating voluntary euthanasia.

1937: A Gallup poll showed that 45% of the American population favored euthanasia for defective infants.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1936: German ophthalmologist Helmut

Unger publishes his widely read novel Mission and Conscience, which tells the story of a young woman who, suffering from multiple sclerosis, decides that her life is no longer worth living and asks to be relieved of her misery. Her husband, a doctor, recognizes her plight and agrees to give her poison.

He gives his wife a fatal injection of morphine, while a physician friend accompanies the act with soothing and romantic music at the piano.

The doctor is accused of murder and brought to trial.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)The doctor refuses to let his colleagues

invent an alibi for him, because he is convinced he has done no wrong. He asks, “Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?”

The doctor is acquitted on the grounds that his act constituted an act of mercy.

Dr. Gerhard Wagner, the medical Führer, ordered the book made into a movie designed to dramatize the plight of the incurably ill: I Accuse!

Dr. Gabbard compares this propaganda film with Hollywood’s films about euthanasia in MATH.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1938: W.G. Lennox, in a speech to

Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, claimed that saving lives “adds a load to the back of society.”

You Are Sharing the Load! A Genetically Ill Individual Costs Approximately 50,000 Reichsmarks by the Age of Sixty.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)The argument for the destruction of

live not worth living was at root an economic one.

1934: the journal Deutsche Freiheit publishes a small pamphlet by Dr. Heilig, a representative of the Nazi Physicians’ League, in which he argues:“It must be made clear to anyone

suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified. Parents who have seen the difficult life of a crippled or feeble-minded child must be convinced that, though they may have a moral obligation to care


for the creature, the broader public should not be obligated…to assume the enormous costs that long-term institutionalization might entail.”

Heilig also stated that “it made no sense for persons ‘on the threshold of old age’ to receive services such as orthopedic therapy or dental bridgework; such services were to be reserved for healthier elements of the population.”

Popular medical and racial hygiene journals carried charts depicting the costs of maintaining the sick at the expense of the healthy.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)1942: AS Hitler’s psychiatrists were

sending the last of their patients into the gas chambers, Dr. Foster Kennedy, professor of neurology at Cornell Medical College, published an article in the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association calling for the the killing of retarded children aged five and older—children whom the author called “those hopeless ones who should never have been born—Nature’s mistakes.”

Kennedy cited Justice Holmes’s remarks that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Eugenics in Germany (contd)January 20, 1942: The Final Solution.

Of the fourteen Nazi officials at the infamous meeting at Wannsee, called to discuss the logistics of mass murdering the entire Jewish population of Europe, eight were holders of doctoral degrees.

Indeed, one can imagine an “on-call schedule” with different physicians assigned to ramp selections, gas chambers, crematoria, work selections, medical experiments, and so on at each of the many Nazi concentration camps.

Eugenics in Germany (contd)The Nazis emphasized the importance

of protecting animal life.On August 17, 1933, Hermann Göring

issued orders that henceforth “vivisection of animals of whatever species is prohibited in all parts of Prussian territory,” and that “persons who engage in vivisection of animals of any kind will be deported to a concentration camp.”

“Heil Göring!”

healing by killing: medicine in the third reich. part ii. eugenics: healing by killing in america...

Documents