War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. He was an extreme nationalist who also considered himself a race biologist and an advocate of a master race. He was willing to use force to achieve his nationalist racial goals. His inner circle included Germany’s most prominent eugenic publisher. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action.54 While in prison, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American raceo-logical stalwarts.55 Moreover, he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its corruption by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young Gennan corporal even wrote one of them fan mail.56

  In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant wrote: “Mistaken regard for what are 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.”57

  One day in the early 1930s, AES president Whitney visited the home of Grant, who was at the time chairing a eugenic immigration committee. Whitney wanted to show off a letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Rilce. The fan letter stated that Grant’s book was “his Bible.”58

  The man writing both letters to the American eugenic leaders would soon burn and gas his name into the blackest corner of history. He would duplicate the American eugenic program-both that which was legislated and that which was only brashly advocated-and his group would consistently point to the United States as setting the precedents for Germany’s actions. And then this man would go further than any American eugenicist ever dreamed, further than the world would ever tolerate, further than humanity will ever forget.

  The man who sent those letters was Adolf Hitler.59

  CHAPTER 14

  Rasse und Blut

  Negative eugenic solutions appeared in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.

  From 1895 to 1900, German physician Gustav Boeters worked as a ship’s doctor in the United States and traveled throughout the country. He learned of America’s castrations, sterilizations and numerous marriage restriction laws. When Boeters returned to Germany, he spent the next three decades writing newspaper articles, drafting proposed legislation and clamoring to anyone who would listen to inaugurate eugenic sterilization. Constantly citing American precedents, from its state marriage restriction statutes to sterilization laws from Iowa to Oregon, Boeters passionately argued for Germany to follow suit. “In a cultured nation of the first order-the United States of America-that which we strive toward [sterilization legislation], was introduced and tested long ago. It is all so clear and simple.” Eventually, Boeters became so fixated on the topic that he was considered delusional and was forced to retire from his post as a medical officer in Saxony-but not before prompting German authorities to seriously consider eugenic laws.1

  While Boeters was touring America, so was German physician Alfred Ploetz. A socialist thinker, Ploetz had traveled to America in the mid-1880s to investigate utopian societies. He became caught up in the post-Civil War American quest to breed better human beings. In Chicago, in 1884, he studied the writings of leading American utopians. He also spent several months working at the Icarian Colony, an obscure utopian community in Iowa. Ploetz was disappointed to find the Icarians socially disorganized, and he began to believe that racial makeup was the key to social success.2

  Ploetz also opened a medical practice in Springfield, Massachusetts, and began to breed chickens. Later, he moved to Meriden, Connecticut, where he graduated to human breeding projects. By 1892, Ploetz had already compiled 325 genealogies of local families and hoped to gather even more from a nearby secret German lodge. A colleague recalled that Ploetz was convinced “the Anglo-Saxons of America would be left behind, unless they adopted a policy that would change the relative proportions of the population.”3

  Like his medical and utopian colleagues, Ploetz was undoubtedly a devotee of the late nineteenth century’s hygiene and sanitary movement that sought to eradicate germs and disease. One of the leading exponents of this movement was Benjamin Ward Richardson, inventor of the lethal chamber and author of Hygeia, A City of Health. The same conflicts that perplexed late-nineteenth-century British and American social Darwinists, from Spencer to New York’s human breeding advocates, also confronted German hereditarians. By the mid-1880s, Ploetz had propounded a eugenic racial theory. Galton’s term eugenics had not yet been translated, and Ploetz coined the term Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene). He articulated his notions of racial and social health in a multivolume 1895 work, The Foundations of Racial Hygiene. Volume one was entitled Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak. His colleagues later argued that the term Rassenhygiene should not be translated into English as race hygiene, but as eugenics. The two were one and the same.4

  Ploetz believed that a better understanding of heredity could help the state identify and encourage the best specimens of the German race. Ironically, while Ploetz believed in German national eugenics and harbored strong anti-Semitic sentiments,5 he included the Jews among Germany’s most valuable biological assets. After returning to Germany, Ploetz in 1904 helped found the journal Archiv for Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of Race Science and Social Biology), and the next year he organized the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft for Rassenhygiene) to promote eugenic research. Both entities functioned as the principal clear-inghouses for German eugenics for years to come. Understandably, Ploetz emerged as Germany’s leading race theorist and was often described as “the founder of eugenics as a science in Germany.”6

  Even as Boeters and Ploetz were formulating their American-influenced ideas, German social theorist Alfred Jost argued in his 1895 booklet, The Right to Death, that the state possessed the inherent right to kill the unfit and useless. The individual’s “right to die” was not at issue; rather,Jost postulated, it was the state’s inherent “rights to [inflict] death [that are] the key to the fitness of life.”7 The seeds of German negative eugenics were planted.

  With Nordic superiority as the centerpiece of American eugenics, Davenport quickly established good personal and professional relations with German race hygienists. As director of the Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution, Davenport was more than happy to correspond frequently with German eugenic thinkers on matters major and mundane. In the first decade of the twentieth century, typed and handwritten letters sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, encompassing requests for copies of the latest German research to replies to German appeals for Carnegie donations for a memorial to Mendel.8

  Quickly, Davenport and the Carnegie Institution became the center of the eugenic world for German researchers. America was enacting a growing body of eugenic laws and governmental practices, and the movement enjoyed wealthy backers and the active support of U.S. officials. While a small group of German social thinkers merely expounded theory, America was taking action. At the same time, by virtue of their blond and blue-eyed Nordic nature as well as their stellar scientific reputation, Germany’s budding eugenicists became desirable allies for the Americans. A clear partnership emerged in the years before World War 1. In this relationship, however, America was far and away the senior partner. In eugenics, the United States led and Germany followed.

  One of Davenport’s earliest German allies was the anthropologist and eugenicist Eugen Fischer. Fischer was among the first “corresponding scientists” recruited by Davenport when the Cold Spring Harbor facility opened in 1904. Before long Davenport and Fischer were exchanging
their latest research, including studies on eye color and hair quality. In 1908, Fischer expanded into research on race mixing between whites and Hottentots in Africa, focusing on the children known as “Rehoboth bastards.” Miscegenation fascinated Davenport. He and his colleagues, both German and American, jointly pursued studies on race mixing for years to come.9

  When Davenport elevated eugenics into a global movement, he chose German eugenicists for a major role, and British leaders went along. Indeed, the First International Congress of Eugenics in London was scheduled for July of 1912 to coincide with summer visits to Great Britain by leading German and American eugenicists. At the time, these two groups were seen as the giants of eugenic science.10 But in fact there was only room for one giant in the post-Galtonian world-and that would be America.

  When Ploetz founded the Society for Racial Hygiene in Berlin in 1905, it was little more than an outgrowth of his own social circle and his publication, Archiv for Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie. By the end of 1905, the Society for Racial Hygiene had just eighteen German and two non-German members. Even when so-called “branches” opened in other German cities, these chapters usually claimed only a handful of members. The society was less a national organization devoted to Germany’s territorial borders than it was a Germanic society devoted to the Nordic roots and Germanic language innervating much of northwestern Europe. Ploetz himself maintained Swiss citizenship, as did some of his key colleagues. Thinking beyond Germany’s borders, Ploetz expanded the group within a few years into the International Society for Race Hygiene. So-called branches were established in Norway and Sweden, but again, these branches were comprised of just a handful of eugenic compatriots.11

  As society members traveled through other traditionally Germanic and Nordic lands, however, they recruited more fellow travelers. By 1909, Ploetz’s growing international organization numbered more than 120 members, although most were German nationals. In the summer of that year, the organization gained prestige when Galton agreed to become its honorary president, just as he had for the budding Eugenics Education Society.12

  Two years later, in 1911, Ploetz raised his group’s profile again, this time by participating in the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden. But the Anglo-American bloc was clearly reluctant to see the German wing rise on the world eugenic stage. After a series of negotiations, the Anglo-American group for all intents and purposes absorbed Ploetz’s budding international network into their larger and better-financed movement.13

  Ploetz was brought in as a lead vice president of the First International Congress of Eugenics in London in 1912. He was one of about fifteen individuals invited back to Paris the next year to create the Permanent International Eugenics Committee. This new and elite panel evolved into the International Eugenics Commission and later became the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, which governed the entire worldwide movement. After some failed attempts to regain leadership, Ploetz and his societies finally bowed to American eugenicists and their international eugenics agencies.14

  After 1913, the United States continued to dominate by virtue of its widespread legislative and bureaucratic progress as well as its diverse research programs. These American developments were closely followed and popularized within the German scientific and eugenic establishment by Geza von Hoffmann, an Austro-Hungarian vice consul who traveled throughout the United States studying eugenic practices. Von Hoffmann’s 1913 book, Racial Hygiene in the United States (Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika), exhaustively detailed American laws on sterilization and marriage restrictions, as well as methods of field investigation and data collection. With equal thoroughness, he delineated America’s eugenic organizational structure-from the Rockefeller Foundation to the institutions at Cold Spring Harbor. Then, in alphabetical order, he summarized each state’s eugenic legislation. A comprehensive eighty-four-page bibliography was appended, with special subsections for such topics as “euthanasia” and “sterilization.”15

  Most importantly, von Hoffmann’s comprehensive volume held up American eugenic theory and practice as the ideal for Germany to emulate. “Galton’s dream,” he wrote, “that racial hygiene should become the religion of the future, is being realized in America…. America wants to breed a new superior race.” Von Hoffmann repeatedly chided Germany for allowing mental defectives to roam freely when in America such people were safely in institutions. Moreover, he urged Germany to follow America’s example in erecting race-based immigration barriers. For years after Racial Hygiene in the United States was published, leading German eugenicists would credit von Hoffmann’s book on America’s race science as a seminal reference for German biology students.16

  Laughlin and the Eugenics Record Office were the leading conduits of information for von Hoffmann. The ERO sent von Hoffmann its special bulletins and other informational summaries. In turn, von Hoffmann hoped to impress Laughlin with updates of his own. He faithfully reported the latest developments in Germany and Austria, such as the formation of a new eugenic research society in Leipzig, a nascent eugenic sexology study group in Vienna, and genetic conference planning in Berlin.17

  But it was the American developments that captivated von Hoffmann. Continually impressed with Laughlin’s ideas, he frequently reported the latest American news in German medical and eugenic literature. “I thank you sincerely,” von Hoffmann wrote Laughlin in a typical letter dated May 26, 1914, “for the transmission of your exhaustive and interesting reports. The far-reaching proposal of sterilizing one tenth of the population impressed me very much. I wrote a review of [the) report… in the Archiv for Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie [Ploetz’s journaI].”18

  Eager to be a voice for German eugenics in America, von Hoffmann also contributed articles about German developments to leading U.S. publications. In October of 1914, his article “Eugenics in Germany” appeared in the Journal of Heredity, explaining that while sterilization was being debated, “the time has not yet come for such a measure in Germany.” In the same issue, the Journal of Heredity published an extensive review of Fischer’s book about race crossing between Dutch and Hottentots in Africa, and the resulting “Rehoboth bastard” hybrids. Indeed, German eugenic philosophy and progress were popular in the Journal of Heredity. In 1914, for example, they published an article tracing the heredity of Bismarck, an article outlining plans for a new experimental genetics lab in Berlin, an announcement for the next international genetics conference in Berlin, and reviews of the latest German books.19

  In the fall of 1914, the Great War erupted. During the war, “the eugenics movement in Germany stood entirely still,” as one of Germany’s top eugenic leaders later remembered in Journal of Heredity. Ploetz withdrew to his estate. Sensational headlines in American newspapers reported and denounced German atrocities against civilians, such as bayoneting babies and mutilating women’s breasts. Many of these stories were later found to be utterly unfounded. But despite the headlines, the American eugenics movement strengthened ties with its German scientific counterparts. In 1916, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race declared that the white Nordic race was destined to rule the world, and confirmed the Aryan people’s role in it. German nationalists were heartened by America’s recognition of Nordic and Aryan racial superiority. Reviews of the book inspired a spectrum of German scientists and nationalists to think eugenically even before the work was translated into German.20

  American fascination with the struggling German eugenics movement continued right up until the United States entered the war in April of 1917. In fact, the April issue of Eugenical News summarized in detail von Hoff-mann’s latest article in Journal of Heredity. It outlined Germany’s broad plans to breed its own eugenically superior race after the war to replace German men lost on the battlefield. The article proposed special apartment buildings for desirable single Aryan women and cash payments for having babies.21

  America entered the war on April 6, 1917. Millions died in battle. At th
e eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, a defeated Germany finally agreed to an armistice, ending the bloody conflict. The Weimar Republic was created. A peace treaty was signed inJune of 1919. American eugenics’ partnership with the German movement resumed.22

  Laughlin prepared a detailed pro-German speech for the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Eugenics Research Association, held at Cold Spring Harbor in June of 1920. In the text, Laughlin analyzed Germany’s newly imposed democratic constitution point by point, identifying the clauses that authorized eugenic and racial laws. These included a range of state powers, from “Article 7… [allowing] protection of plants from disease and pests” to “Articles 119 to 134 inclusive [which] prescribe the fundamental law of Germany in reference to the social life.” Declaring that “modern civilization” itself depended on German and Teutonic conquest, Laughlin closed by assuring his colleagues, “From what the world knows of Germanic traits, we logically concede that she will live up to her instincts of race conservation….” Laughlin never actually delivered the speech, probably because of time constraints, so Eugenical News published it in their next issue, as did a subsequent edition of the official British organ, Eugenics Review. Reprints of the Eugenics Review version were then circulated by the ERO.23

  Scientific correspondence also resumed. Shortly after Laughlin’s enthusiastic appraisal, a eugenicist at the Institute for Heredity Research in Potsdam requested ERO documentation for his advisory committee’s presentation to the local government. Davenport dispatched materials and supporting statements “that will be of use to you in your capacity as advisor to the Government in matters of race hygiene.” ERO staffers had missed their exchanges with German colleagues, and Davenport assured his Potsdam friend, “I read your letter to our staff at its meeting on Monday and they were interested to hear from you.” Information about the new advisory committee was published in the very next issue of Eugenical News. German race scientists reciprocated by sending their own research papers for Davenport’s review, covering a gamut of topics from inherited human traits to mammalian attributes.24