Hitler, imprisoned for leading the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt to seize power in Munich, read about Ploetz and race science while jailed in the 1920s and was immediately transfixed. Like Ploetz, he believed that defective genes were slow-poisoning the nation and obstructing the rebirth of a strong, healthy state. When the Nazis seized power in the thirties, Hitler saw an opportunity to put these ideas into action. He did so immediately: in 1933, less than five months after the passage of the Enabling Act, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring—commonly known as the Sterilization Law. The outlines of the law were explicitly borrowed from the American eugenics program—if amplified for effect. “Anyone suffering from a hereditary disease can be sterilized by a surgical operation,” the law mandated. An initial list of “hereditary diseases” was drawn up, including mental deficiency, schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, blindness, deafness, and serious deformities. To sterilize a man or woman, a state-sponsored application was to be made to the Eugenics Court. “Once the Court has decided on sterilization,” the law continued, “the operation must be carried out even against the will of the person to be sterilized. . . . Where other measures are insufficient, direct force may be used.”
To drum up public support for the law, legal injunctions were bolstered by insidious propaganda—a formula that the Nazis would eventually bring to monstrous perfection. Films such as Das Erbe (“The Inheritance,” 1935) and Erbkrank (“Hereditary Disease,” 1936), created by the Office of Racial Policy, played to full houses in theaters around the country to showcase the ills of “defectives” and “unfits.” In Erbkrank, a mentally ill woman in the throes of a breakdown fiddles repetitively with her hands and hair; a deformed child lies wasted in bed; a woman with shortened limbs walks on all fours like a pack animal. Counterposed against the grim footage of Erbkrank or Das Erbe were cinematic odes to the perfect Aryan body: in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, a film intended to celebrate German athletes, glistening young men with muscular bodies demonstrated calisthenics as showpieces of genetic perfection. The audience gawked at the “defectives” with repulsion—and at the superhuman athletes with envy and ambition.
While the state-run agitprop machine churned to generate passive consent for eugenic sterilizations, the Nazis ensured that the legal engines were also thrumming to extend the boundaries of racial cleansing. In November 1933, a new law allowed the state to sterilize “dangerous criminals” (including political dissidents, writers, and journalists) by force. In October 1935, the Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People sought to contain genetic mixing by barring Jews from marrying people of German blood or having sexual relations with anyone of Aryan descent. There was, perhaps, no more bizarre illustration of the conflation between cleansing and racial cleansing than a law that barred Jews from employing “German maids” in their houses.
The vast sterilization and containment programs required the creation of an equally vast administrative apparatus. By 1934, nearly five thousand adults were being sterilized every month, and two hundred Hereditary Health Courts (or Genetic Courts) had to work full-time to adjudicate appeals against sterilization. Across the Atlantic, American eugenicists applauded the effort, often lamenting their own inability to achieve such effective measures. Lothrop Stoddard, another protégé of Charles Davenport’s, visited one such court in the late thirties and wrote admiringly of its surgical efficacy. On trial during Stoddard’s visit was a manic-depressive woman, a girl with deaf-muteness, a mentally retarded girl, and an “ape-like man” who had married a Jewess and was apparently also a homosexual—a complete trifecta of crimes. From Stoddard’s notes, it remains unclear how the hereditary nature of any of these symptoms was established. Nonetheless, all the subjects were swiftly approved for sterilization.
The slip from sterilization to outright murder came virtually unannounced and unnoticed. As early as 1935, Hitler had privately mused about ramping up his gene-cleansing efforts from sterilization to euthanasia—what quicker way to purify the gene pool than to exterminate the defectives?—but had been concerned about the public reaction. By the late 1930s, though, the glacial equanimity of the German public response to the sterilization program made the Nazis bolder. Opportunity presented itself in 1939. In the summer of that year, Richard and Lina Kretschmar petitioned Hitler to allow them to euthanize their child, Gerhard. Eleven months old, Gerhard had been born blind and with deformed limbs. The parents—ardent Nazis—hoped to service their nation by eliminating their child from the nation’s genetic heritage.
Sensing his chance, Hitler approved the killing of Gerhard Kretschmar and then moved quickly to expand the program to other children. Working with Karl Brandt, his personal physician, Hitler launched the Scientific Registry of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses to administer a much larger, nationwide euthanasia program to eradicate genetic “defectives.” To justify the exterminations, the Nazis had already begun to describe the victims using the euphemism lebensunwertes Leben—lives unworthy of living. The eerie phrase conveyed an escalation of the logic of eugenics: it was not enough to sterilize genetic defectives to cleanse the future state; it was necessary to exterminate them to cleanse the current state. This would be a genetic final solution.
The killing began with “defective” children under three years of age, but by September 1939 had smoothly expanded to adolescents. Juvenile delinquents were slipped onto the list next. Jewish children were disproportionately targeted—forcibly examined by state doctors, labeled “genetically sick,” and exterminated, often on the most minor pretexts. By October 1939, the program was expanded to include adults. A richly appointed villa—No. 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin—was designated the official headquarters of the euthanasia program. The program would eventually be called Aktion T4, after that street address.
Extermination centers were established around the nation. Particularly active among them was Hadamar, a castlelike hospital on a hill, and the Brandenburg State Welfare Institute, a brick building resembling a garrison, with rows of windows along its side. In the basements of these buildings, rooms were refitted into airtight chambers where victims were gassed to death with carbon monoxide. The aura of science and medical research was meticulously maintained, often dramatized to achieve an even greater effect on public imagination. Victims of euthanasia were brought to the extermination centers in buses with screened windows, often accompanied by SS officers in white coats. In rooms adjoining the gas chambers, makeshift concrete beds, surrounded by deep channels to collect fluids, were created, where doctors could dissect the corpses after euthanasia so as to preserve their tissues and brains for future genetic studies. Lives “unworthy of living” were apparently of extreme worth for the advancement of science.
To reassure families that their parents or children had been appropriately treated and triaged, patients were often moved to makeshift holding facilities first, then secretly relocated to Hadamar or Brandenburg for the extermination. After euthanasia, thousands of fraudulent death certificates were issued, citing diverse causes of death—some of them markedly absurd. Mary Rau’s mother, who suffered from psychotic depression, was exterminated in 1939. Her family was told that she had died as a consequence of “warts on her lip.” By 1941, Aktion T4 had exterminated nearly a quarter of a million men, women, and children. The Sterilization Law had achieved about four hundred thousand compulsory sterilizations between 1933 and 1943.
Hannah Arendt, the influential cultural critic who documented the perverse excesses of Nazism, would later write about the “banality of evil” that permeated German culture during the Nazi era. But equally pervasive, it seemed, was the credulity of evil. That “Jewishness” or “Gypsyness” was carried on chromosomes, transmitted through heredity, and thereby subject to genetic cleansing required a rather extraordinary contortion of belief—but the suspension of skepticism was the defining credo of the culture. Indeed, an entire cadre of “scientists”�
��geneticists, medical researchers, psychologists, anthropologists, and linguists—gleefully regurgitated academic studies to reinforce the scientific logic of the eugenics program. In a rambling treatise entitled The Racial Biology of Jews, Otmar von Verschuer, a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, argued, for instance, that neurosis and hysteria were intrinsic genetic features of Jews. Noting that the suicide rate among Jews had increased by sevenfold between 1849 and 1907, Verschuer concluded, astonishingly, that the underlying cause was not the systematic persecution of Jews in Europe but their neurotic overreaction to it: “only persons with psychopathic and neurotic tendencies will react in such a manner to such a change in their external condition.” In 1936, the University of Munich, an institution richly endowed by Hitler, awarded a PhD to a young medical researcher for his thesis concerning the “racial morphology” of the human jaw—an attempt to prove that the anatomy of the jaw was racially determined and genetically inherited. The newly minted “human geneticist,” Josef Mengele, would soon rise to become the most epically perverse of Nazi researchers, whose experiments on prisoners would earn him the title Angel of Death.
In the end, the Nazi program to cleanse the “genetically sick” was just a prelude to a much larger devastation to come. Horrific as it was, the extermination of the deaf, blind, mute, lame, disabled, and feebleminded would be numerically eclipsed by the epic horrors ahead—the extermination of 6 million Jews in camps and gas chambers during the Holocaust; of two hundred thousand Gypsies; of several million Soviet and Polish citizens; and unknown numbers of homosexuals, intellectuals, writers, artists, and political dissidents. But it is impossible to separate this apprenticeship in savagery from its fully mature incarnation; it was in this kindergarten of eugenic barbarism that the Nazis learned the alphabets of their trade. The word genocide shares its root with gene—and for good reason: the Nazis used the vocabulary of genes and genetics to launch, justify, and sustain their agenda. The language of genetic discrimination was easily parlayed into the language of racial extermination. The dehumanization of the mentally ill and physically disabled (“they cannot think or act like us”) was a warm-up act to the dehumanization of Jews (“they do not think or act like us”). Never before in history, and never with such insidiousness, had genes been so effortlessly conflated with identity, identity with defectiveness, and defectiveness with extermination. Martin Neimöller, the German theologian, summarized the slippery march of evil in his often-quoted statement:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.
As the Nazis were learning to twist the language of heredity to prop up a state-sponsored program of sterilization and extermination in the 1930s, another powerful European state was also contorting the logic of heredity and genes to justify its political agenda—although in precisely the opposite manner. The Nazis had embraced genetics as a tool for racial cleansing. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, left-wing scientists and intellectuals proposed that nothing about heredity was inherent at all. In nature, everything—everyone—was changeable. Genes were a mirage invented by the bourgeoisie to emphasize the fixity of individual differences, whereas, in fact, nothing about features, identities, choices, or destinies was indelible. If the state needed cleansing, it would not be achieved through genetic selection, but through the reeducation of all individuals and the erasure of former selves. Brains—not genes—had to be washed clean.
As with the Nazis, the Soviet doctrine was also bolstered and reinforced by ersatz science. In 1928, an austere, stone-faced agricultural researcher named Trofim Lysenko—he “gives one the feeling of a toothache,” one journalist wrote—claimed that he had found a way to “shatter” and reorient hereditary influences in animals and plants. In experiments performed on remote Siberian farms, Lysenko had supposedly exposed wheat strains to severe bouts of cold and drought and thereby caused the strains to acquire a hereditary resistance to adversity (Lysenko’s claims would later be found to be either frankly fraudulent or based on experiments of the poorest scientific quality). By treating wheat strains with such “shock therapy,” Lysenko argued that he could make the plants flower more vigorously in the spring and yield higher bounties of grain through the summer.
“Shock therapy” was obviously at odds with genetics. The exposure of wheat to cold or drought could no more produce permanent, heritable changes in its genes than the serial dismemberment of mice’s tails could create a tailless mouse strain, or the stretching of an antelope’s neck could produce a giraffe. To instill such a change in his plants, Lysenko would have had to mutate cold-resistance genes (à la Morgan or Muller), use natural or artificial selection to isolate mutant strains (à la Darwin), and crossbreed mutant strains with each other to fix the mutation (à la Mendel and de Vries). But Lysenko convinced himself and his Soviet bosses that he had “retrained” the crops through exposure and conditioning alone and thereby altered their inherent characteristics. He dismissed the notion of genes altogether. The gene, he argued, had been “invented by geneticists” to support a “rotting, moribund bourgeoisie” science. “The hereditary basis does not lie in some special self-reproducing substance.” It was a hoary restatement of Lamarck’s idea—of adaptation morphing directly into hereditary change—decades after geneticists had pointed out the conceptual errors of Lamarckism.
Lysenko’s theory was immediately embraced by the Soviet political apparatus. It promised a new method to vastly increase agricultural production in a land teetering on the edge of famine: by “reeducating” wheat and rice, crops could be grown under any conditions, including the severest winters and the driest summers. Perhaps just as important, Stalin and his compatriots found the prospect of “shattering” and “retraining” genes via shock therapy satisfying ideologically. While Lysenko was retraining plants to relieve them of their dependencies on soil and climate, Soviet party workers were also reeducating political dissidents to relieve them of their ingrained dependence on false consciousness and material goods. The Nazis—believing in absolute genetic immutability (“a Jew is a Jew”)—had resorted to eugenics to change the structure of their population. The Soviets—believing in absolute genetic reprogrammability (“anyone is everyone”)—could eradicate all distinctions and thus achieve a radical collective good.
In 1940, Lysenko deposed his critics, assumed the directorship of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Union, and set up his own totalitarian fiefdom over Soviet biology. Any form of scientific dissent to his theories—especially any belief in Mendelian genetics or Darwinian evolution—was outlawed in the Soviet Union. Scientists were sent to gulags to “retrain” them in Lysenko’s ideas (as with wheat, the exposure of dissident professors to “shock therapy” might convince them to change their minds). In August 1940, Nicolai Vavilov, a renowned Mendelian geneticist, was captured and sent to the notorious Saratov jail for propagating his “bourgeoisie” views on biology (Vavilov had dared to argue that genes were not so easily malleable). While Vavilov and other geneticists languished in prison, Lysenko’s supporters launched a vigorous campaign to discredit genetics as a science. In January 1943, exhausted and malnourished, Vavilov was moved to a prison hospital. “I am nothing but dung now,” he described himself to his captors, and died a few weeks later.
Nazism and Lysenkoism were based on dramatically opposed conceptions of heredity—but the parallels between the two movements are striking. Although Nazi doctrine was unsurpassed in its virulence, both Nazism and Lysenkoism shared a common thread: in both cases, a theory of heredity was used to construct a notion of human identity that, in turn, was contorted to serve a political agenda. The tw
o theories of heredity may have been spectacularly opposite—the Nazis were as obsessed with the fixity of identity as the Soviets were with its complete pliability—but the language of genes and inheritance was central to statehood and progress: it is as difficult to imagine Nazism without a belief in the indelibility of inheritance as it is to conceive of a Soviet state without a belief in its perfect erasure. Unsurprisingly, in both cases, science was deliberately distorted to support state-sponsored mechanisms of “cleansing.” By appropriating the language of genes and inheritance, entire systems of power and statehood were justified and reinforced. By the mid-twentieth century, the gene—or the denial of its existence—had already emerged as a potent political and cultural tool. It had become one of the most dangerous ideas in history.
Junk science props up totalitarian regimes. And totalitarian regimes produce junk science. Did the Nazi geneticists make any real contributions to the science of genetics?
Amid the voluminous chaff, two contributions stand out. The first was methodological: Nazi scientists advanced the “twin study”—although, characteristically, they soon morphed it into a ghastly form. Twin studies had originated in Francis Galton’s work in the 1890s. Having coined the phrase nature versus nurture, Galton had wondered how a scientist might discern the influence of one over the other. How could one determine if any particular feature—height or intelligence, say—was the product of nature or nurture? How could one unbraid heredity and environment?
The Gene Page 15