by Edwin Black
But efforts by German eugenicists to join America’s international movement were still hampered by the aftershocks of the war. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany agreed to pay the Allies massive war reparations, 132 billion marks or 33 billion dollars. This crippled the finances of all of Germany, including its raceologists. Meanwhile, German nationalists were enraged because France and Belgium now occupied the Rhineland. France’s army had long included African soldiers from its colonies-such as Senegal, Mali and North Africa-who were now mingling with German women and would ultimately father several hundred children of mixed race in Germany.25
Infuriated Germans refused to cooperate with international committees that included Belgian or French scientists. Nor did they have the money to travel, even within Europe. The International Congress of Hygiene, for instance, originally scheduled for May of 1921 in Geneva, was cancelled because “the low value of the currency of many countries and the high value of the Swiss franc make it impossible for many countries to send delegates,” as one published notice explained.26
Hence German scientists were unable and unwilling to attend the Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York in September of 1921. Instead, they sent bitter protest letters to Cold Spring Harbor, denouncing the French and Belgian occupation of their land and seeking moral support from colleagues in America. Indeed, even though invitations to the congress were mailed to eugenicists around the world by the State Department, the Germans were excluded due to escalating postwar diplomatic and military tensions. Three weeks before the Second Congress, Davenport wrote to one prominent Berlin colleague, Agnes Bluhm, “profound regrets that international complications have prevented formal invitations to the International Eugenics Congress in New York City.” He added his “hope that by the time of the following Congress such complications will have been long removed.” So once again American science took center stage in international eugenics. Alienated from much of the European movement, Germany’s involvement in the field was now mainly limited to correspondence with Cold Spring Harbor.27
In 1922, Germany defaulted on its second annual reparations payment. France and Belgium invaded Germany’s rich industrial Ruhr region on January 11, 192 3, to seize coal and other assets. During the height of the harsh Ruhr occupation, the Weimar government began printing money day and night to support striking German workers. This shortsighted move made Germany’s currency worthless nearly overnight, leading to unprecedented hyperinflation.28
All of these factors contributed to Germany’s isolation from organized eugenics. Efforts by Davenport in 1920 and 1921 to include German scientists in the International Eugenics Commission were rebuffed. None of the players wanted to sit together. Determined to bring German eugenicists back into the worldwide movement, Davenport traveled to Europe in 192 2. He selected Lund, Sweden, as the site of the 1923 conference, because, as he confided to a German colleague, “it would be convenient to Berlin.” It also circumvented Allied nations such as Belgium, England and France. Davenport then arranged for his colleagues on the IEC to take the first step and formally invite German representatives to join the commission. But tensions over the Rhineland and reparations were still too explosive for the Germans to agree. By the spring of 192 3, Davenport had to concede in frustration, “German delegates would not meet in intimate association with the French.”29
Davenport wrote to one key German eugenicist, “I implore you, that you will use your influence to prevent such a backward step. The only way we can heal the wounds caused by the late war is to repress these sad memories from our scientific activities. It will do a lot to restore international science and to set an example for other scientific organizations to follow if a delegate is sent to the meeting of the Commission to be held in Lund next autumn.“30
But the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian forces further inflamed angry German eugenicists. “Cooperative work between Germans and French seems to be impossible so long as the Ruhr invasion lasts,” one embittered German eugenic leader wrote Davenport. “If in America a foreign power had entered and held in its grasp the chief industrial area surely no American man of science would sit with a representative of that other nation at a table. Therefore, one should correspondingly not expect Germans to do this.”31
Weimar continued to print money around the clock, creating hour-to-hour hyperinflation. Fabulous stories abounded of money being carted around in wheelbarrows and being used to stoke furnaces. One famous story centered on a Freiburg University student who ordered a cup of coffee listed on the menu for 5,000 marks; by the time he ordered a refill, the second cup cost 9,000 marks. Another told of an insurance policy redeemed to buy a single loaf of bread. The American dollar, which had traded for 1,500 marks in 1922, was worth 4.2 trillion marks by the end of 1923.32
German extremists tried to exploit the hyperinflation crisis to start a political revolution to abrogate the Treaty of Versailles. Among the agitators was Adolf Hitler. In November of 1923, Hitler organized the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. He hoped to seize power in Bavaria and march all the way to Berlin. His rebellion was quickly put down. Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, to be served at Landsberg Fortress. Referring to his jail cell as his “university,” Hitler read voraciously. It was during these prison years that Hitler solidified his fanatical eugenic views and learned to shape that fanaticism into a eugenic mold.33
Where did Hitler develop his racist and anti-Semitic views? Certainly not from anything he read or heard from America. Hitler became a mad racist dictator based solely on his own inner monstrosity, with no assistance from anything written or spoken in English. But like many rabid racists, from Plecker in Virginia to Rentoul in England, Hitler preferred to legitimize his race hatred by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in a more palatable pseudoscientific facade-eugenics. Indeed, Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side.
The intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were strictly American. He merely compounded all the virulence of long-established American race science with his fanatic anti-Jewish rage. Hitler’s extremist eugenic science, which in many ways seemed like the logical extension of America’s own entrenched programs and advocacy, eventually helped shape the institutions and even the machinery of the Third Reich’s genocide. By the time Hitler’s concept of Aryan superiority emerged, his politics had completely fused into a biological and eugenic mindset.
When Hitler used the term master race, he meant just that, a biological “master race.” America crusaded for a biologically superior race, which would gradually wipe away the existence of all inferior strains. Hitler would crusade for a master race to quickly dominate all others. In Hitler’s view, eugenically inferior groups, such as Poles and Russians, would be permitted to exist but were destined to serve Germany’s master race. Hitler demonized the Jewish community as social, political and racial poison, that is, a biological menace. He vowed that the Jewish community would be neutralized, dismantled and removed from Europe.34
Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler’s war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, write the legislation, and even hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.
Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, coined a popular adage in the Reich, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”35
While in prison, at his “university,” Hitler codified his madness in the book Mein Kampf, which he dictated to Hess. He also read the second edition of the first great German eugenic text, Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene (Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassen-hygiene), which had been published in 1921. Germany’s three leading race eugenicists, Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, authored the two-volume set.36 All three of the
book’s authors were closely allied to American eugenic science and Davenport personally. Their eugenics originated at Cold Spring Harbor.
Baur, an intense racist, closely studied American eugenic science and formulated his ideas accordingly. He was comfortable confiding to his dear friend Davenport just how those ideas fused with nationalism. For example, in November of 1920, about a year before Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene went to press, Baur wrote to Davenport in almost perfect English, “The Medical Division of the Prussian Government has asked me to prepare a review of the eugenical laws and Vorschriften [regulations] which have already been introduced into the differed States of your country.” He emphasized, “Of especial interest are the marriage certificates (Ehebestimmung)-certificates of health required for marriage, laws forbidding marriage of hereditarily burdened persons among others-[and] further the experiments made in different states with castration of criminals and insane.37
“It is at present extraordinarily difficult [here in Germany] to gather together the desired material [about u.S. legislation],” Baur continued. “I am thinking, however, that perhaps in your institute [Carnegie Institution] all this material has been already gathered. That, perhaps, there may be some recent printed report on the matter. If my idea is correct I would be exceedingly thankful to you if you could help me with a collection of the material. “38
Baur then bitterly complained about confiscatory war reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, and the presence of French and Belgian-African troops as enforcers. “The entire work of eugenics is very difficult with us,” Baur reported, “all children in the cities are entirely insufficiently nourished. Everywhere milk and fat are lacking, and this matter will become yet greater if we now shall give up to France and Belgium the milch [milk] cows which they have requisitioned [for war reparations]. The entirely unnecessary huge army of occupation eats us poor, but eugenically the worst is what we call the Black Shame, the French negro regiments, which are placed all over Germany and which in the most shameful fashion give free rein to their impulses toward women and children. By force and by money they secure their victims-each French negro soldier has, at our expense, a greater income than a German professor-and the consequence is a frightful increase of syphilis and a mass of mulatto children. Even if all French-Belgian tales of mishandling by German soldiers were true, they have been ten times exceeded by what now-in peace!-happens on German soil.39
“But I have wandered far from my theme,” Baur continued. “We have under the new government an advisory commission for race hygiene… [which] will in the future pass upon all new bills from the eugenical standpoint. It is for this commission that I wish to prepare the Referate [reports] on American eugenic laws.” Baur added that the Carnegie researcher Alfred Blakeslee’s “paper is in press [for publication in Germany], the plate is at the lithographers.”40
Baur was one of the principal German scientists Davenport had implored to join the International Eugenics Commission.41
Baur’s coauthor, Fritz Lenz, like many German eugenicists, was long an aficionado of American sterilization. He lectured German audiences that they were lagging far behind America. Like Baur, Lenz was among the German eugenic leaders Davenport beckoned to join him at the helm of world eugenics. Lenz reluctantly refused Davenport’s entreaties to attend either an international commission or congress, and in 192 3 candidly declared to Davenport, “Europe goes with rapid steps toward a new frightful war, in which Germany will chiefly participate…. That is the position in Europe and, therefore, I do not believe the time for international congresses has arrived so long as France occupies the Ruhr, that is, not before the second World War. I do not wish this certainly; I know that our race in it would suffer more heavily than in the past World War but it cannot be avoided. “42
Lenz suggested to Davenport that while he could not participate in international gatherings, German and American eugenics could and should continue to advance eugenic science between them, mainly by corresponding. California eugenic leader Popenoe had already established a vigorous exchange with Lenz. Lenz wanted such bilateral contact extended to the ERO as well. “I would be thankful,” he wrote Davenport, “if I also could secure the publications of the Eugenics Record Office in order to notice them [report on them] in the Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie [Archives of Race Science and Social Biology]. I have much missed the bulletins of these last years.” Lenz closed his letter with “the hope of a work of mutual service.”43 Lenz later predicted, “The next round in the thousand year fight for the life of the Nordic race will probably be fought in America.”44
The third coauthor of Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene was Eugen Fischer, a Carnegie Institution “corresponding scientist” since 1904. Fischer was a close colleague of Davenport’s, and they would form an international eugenic partnership that would last years.45
The two-volume Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene that Hitler studied focused heavily on American eugenic principles and examples. The book’s short bibliography and footnotes listed an abundance of American writers and publications, including the Journal of Heredity, various Bulletins of the Eugenics Record Office, Popenoe’s Applied Eugenics, Dugdale’s The Jukes, Goddard’s The Kallikak Family and Davenport’s own three books, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, The Hill Folk and The Nams. Of course, the Baur-Fischer-Lenz work also featured themes and references from von Hoffmann’s Racial Hygiene in the United States and Hitler’s favorite, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race.46
The Baur-Fischer-Lenz volumes also included repeated explorations and reiterations of American eugenic issues. World War I U.S. Army testing had revealed that “the high percentage of blue eyes [among recruits] is remarkable.” The authors then noted the decline of blue-eyed men since the trait was measured in Civil War recruits. The anthropological fine points of American immigration were probed. For example, Fischer wrote, “In the children of Jews who have emigrated from eastern or central Europe to the United States, the skulls are narrower than those of their broad-skulled parents, and this comparative narrowness is more marked in proportion to the number of years that have elapsed since the migration…. Sicilians acquire somewhat broader heads in the United States.” Repeated references to American Indian, Negro, and Jewish characteristics were liberally sprinkled throughout the volumes. They also included information on the Eugenics Record Office and Indiana’s pioneering sterilization doctor, Harry Clay Sharp.47
The Baur-Fischer-Lenz volumes were well received in Cold Spring Harbor. Davenport promised he would write a review for Eugenical News. Both Eugenical News and Journal of Heredity ran favorable reviews of each subsequent revised edition. One of Popenoe’s reviews in Journal of Heredity, this one in 1923, lauded the work as “worthy of the best traditions of German scholarship, and… to be warmly recommended.” Popenoe especially praised Lenz’s sixteen-point program, which outlined plans to cut off defective lines of descent and the “protection of the Nordic race.”48
It was no accident that Hitler read Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene. It was published by Julius Lehmann of Lehmanns Verlag, Germany’s foremost eugenic publishing house. Someone at Lehmanns happily reported to Lenz that Hitler had read his book. Lehmanns Verlag also published Ploetz’s Archiv fur Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie, the Monatsschrift for Kriminalbiologie (Monthly Journal of Criminal Biology), and von Hoffmann’s Racial Hygiene in the United States. The year after Hitler was imprisoned, Lehmanns published the German translation of Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race.49
Julius Lehmann was not just a publisher with a proclivity for race biology. He was a shoulder-to-shoulder coconspirator with Hitler during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and was at Hitler’s side on November 8, 1923, when the National Socialists launched their abortive coup against the Bavarian government. After the beer hall ruckus, Bavarian officials were held hostage at Lehmann’s ornate villa until the uprising was suppressed. As the revolt collapsed, L
ehmann, a financial supporter as well as a friend, convinced the Nazi guards to allow their captives to escape rather than execute them. Lehmann was the connection between the theory of the Society for Racial Hygiene and the action of militants such as the Nazis.50
Hitler openly displayed his eugenic orientation and thorough knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. For example, in Mein Kampf he declared: “The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole.”51
Hitler mandated in Mein Kampf that “The Peoples’ State must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure…. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world…. It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into actual practice.”52
Hitler railed against “this… bourgeois-national society [to whom] the prevention of the procreative faculty in sufferers from syphilis, tuberculosis, hereditary diseases, cripples, and cretins is a crime…. A prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only six hundred years, would not only free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune, but would lead to a recovery which today seems scarcely conceivable…. The result will be a race which at least will have eliminated the germs of our present physical and hence spiritual decay.”53