War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  The news was everywhere and inescapable. Centuries of religious prejudice had now been quantified into science. Even if Germans of Jewish ancestry had been practicing Christianity for generations-as many had-henceforth, they would all be legally defined as a race, without regard to religion. That was in 1935.

  Eleven years earlier, Harry H. Laughlin’s memo to Representative Albert Johnson’s House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization regarding Jewish racial quotas read: “For this purpose, it would be necessary to define a Jew. Tentatively, such a definition might read, ‘A Jew is a person fifty percent or more of whose ancestry are generally recognized as being Jewish in race. The definition applies entirely to race and in no manner to religion.”124

  Shortly after the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935, and in view of the negative publicity race laws were receiving, Nazi eugenicist Ernst Rodenwaldt thought it might be helpful to give Laughlin special recognition for his contribution to Reich policy. Rodenwaldt suggested an honorary degree for Laughlin. In a December 1935 letter to Carl Schneider, dean of the University of Heidelberg’s medical school, Rodenwaldt wrote, “Every race hygienist knows Laughlin as a champion of the eugenic sterilization. Thanks to his indefatigable studies and his indefatigable propaganda activity in America, there exist, since the end of the twenties, in several states of America, sterilization laws and we can report about 15,000 sterilizations until 1930, mainly in California. Professor Laughlin is one of the most important pioneers on the field of racial hygiene. I got to know him in 1927 in Cold Spring Harbor…. Heidelberg University honoring professor Laughlin’s pioneer work would, in my opinion, make a very good and compensating impression in America, where racial hygienic questions are propagated in the same way as here, but where many questions of the German racial hygienic laws are mistrusted.”125

  Schneider gladly approved the honor. Laughlin could not travel to Heidelberg to accept, but he expressed his gratitude in a letter to Schneider. “I was greatly honored,” Laughlin wrote, “to accept this degree from the University of Heidelberg which stands for the highest ideals of scholarship and research achieved by those racial stocks which have contributed so much to the foundation blood of the American people…. I consider the conferring of this high degree upon me not only as a personal honor, but also as evidence of a common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics as research in and the practical application of those fundamental biological and social principles.”126

  Some three years after Laughlin’s award, shortly after World War II broke out in September of 1939, the same Carl Schneider helped organize the gassing of thousands of adults adjudged mentally handicapped. The project was codenamed T-4 after the address of the staff, located at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. Mass gassings with carbon monoxide, which began in January 1940 at locations across Germany, proved most efficient. Victims were told to undress and to enter a room resembling a shower complete with tiled surfaces, benches and a drain. Crematoria were erected nearby to dispose of the bodies.127

  From 1936 to early 1939, Nazi Germany was considered a threat to the other countries of Europe, and indeed to all humanity. Refugees flooded the world. The Third Reich continued arming for war and demanded territorial concessions from its neighbors. In 1938 the Nazis annexed Austria, and then in early 1939 the Reich overran Czechoslovakia in prewar aggression and consolidation. Concentration camps of gruesome notoriety, from Dachau to Buchenwald, were established across Germany; the horror stories they inspired became common talk of the day. Nazi subversion was a new fear in American society.128

  Certainly, there were many vocal Nazi sympathizers in America. But those who supported any aspect of the Hitler regime, from economic contacts to scientific exchanges, did so at a substantial moral risk. Genuine revulsion with Nazified eugenics was beginning to sweep over the ranks of previously staunch hereditarians who could no longer identify with a movement so intertwined with the race policies of the Third Reich. A group of longtime eugenicists and geneticists spoke of a resolution to disassociate eugenics from issues of race. Letters to Davenport calling for his support were unsuccessful. Institutions such as the Eugenics Research Association, the American Eugenics Society, the Eugenics Record Office and a labyrinth of related entities all remained intact in their support of Germany.129

  Monthly coverage in JAMA became more skeptical and detached starting about 1936, with headlines such as “Strangulation of Intellectualism” placing the Nazi takeover of medical science into clearer perspective. One JAMA article unambiguously explained, “The president of the new [medical] society is no distinguished clinician; he is the Nazi district governor of Vienna, that is to say a politician who is also an official of the Nazi bureau of national health.” JAMA also began inserting quotation marks around Nazi medical expressions and statements to differentiate them from ordinary medical discourse.130

  After Raymond Fosdick assumed the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1936, the charitable trust became increasingly unwilling to fund any projects associated with the term eugenics, even Fischer’s genealogical studies. The idea of investigating family trees was just too emblematic of repressive Nazi persecution. Funding was also curtailed for some of the foundation’s traditional programs at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Money continued to flow for eugenic projects, but only when they were packaged as genetics, brain research, serology or social biology. For example, Rockefeller fellowships and scholarships from 1936 through 1939 allowed German genetic researchers to travel to Cold Spring Harbor and California for further study. But the fact that Rockefeller executives became exceedingly cautious about their continued sponsorship of Nazi medicine was a testament to the controversial nature of any contact with the Third Reich.131

  Indeed, on June 6, 1939, Fosdick circulated a pointed memo to Rockefeller Foundation executives. “I have read with a good deal of interest your Letter no. 40 of May 25th about our general relation with totalitarian countries, and particularly about the fellowship situation. The rumor which Mr. Kittridge brought back from Geneva to the effect that the Foundation was boycotting all requests from Germany is of course hardly correct…. I am frank in saying that at the present moment it would be not only embarrassing, but probably impossible, to make any major grants in Germany. There is a matter of public policy involved here which has to be taken into consideration, and I do not believe that this is the moment to consider any sizable requests for assistance from German sources.” Fosdick added that individual fellowships to German scientists would still be possible, but only if “sifted with rigid scrutiny to make sure that we are not being used for ulterior purposes.” He added, “I earnestly hope that this evil hour will soon pass.”132

  Despite Nazi Germany’s descent into pariah status, core eugenic leaders were steadfast in their defense of, fascination with, and general admiration for Hitler’s program. In late 1935, ERA president Clarence Campbell traveled to Berlin for the World Population Congress, an event staged under the patronage of Nazi Interior Minister Frick. Fischer was president of the congress. Campbell created a scandal back home when he loudly and passionately proclaimed his admiration for Hitler’s policy. “The leader of the German nation, Adolf Hitler,” declared Campbell, “ably supported by Frick and guided by this nation’s anthropologists, eugenists and social philosophers, has been able to construct a comprehensive racial policy of population development and improvement that promises to be epochal in racial history. It sets a pattern which other nations and other racial groups must follow if they do not wish to fall behind in their racial quality, in their racial accomplishments and in their prospects for survival.”133

  Campbell’s speech made headlines in the next morning’s New York Times: “US EUGENIST HAILS NAZI RACIAL POLICY.” When Campbell returned to America, he hit back at his critics in the lead article of the March-April 1936 issue of Eugenical News. “It is unfortunate that the anti-Nazi propaganda with which all countries have been flooded has gone far to obscure
the correct understanding and the great importance of the German racial policy.”134

  Throughout 1936, the American eugenic leadership continued its praise for Hitler’s anti-Jewish and racial policies. “The last twenty years witnessed two stupendous forward movements, one in our United States, the other in Germany,” declared California raceologist C. M. Goethe in his presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association. He added with a degree of satisfaction, “California had led all the world in sterilization operations. Today, even California’s quarter century record has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany.”135

  Eugenicist Marie Kopp toured 15,000 miles across Nazi Germany, and with the assistance of one of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, was able to undertake extensive research on the Nazi program in cities and towns. Kopp was even permitted access to the secret Nazi Heredity Courts. Throughout 1936, Kopp wrote articles for eugenic publications, participated in promotional roundtables with such luminaries as Margaret Sanger, and presented position papers praising the Nazi program as one of “fairness.” Kopp was able to assure all that “religious belief does not enter into the matter,” because Jews were defined not by their religious practices, but by their bloodlines.136

  At one American Eugenics Society luncheon, Kopp emphasized, “Justice Holmes, when handling down the decision in the Buck versus Bell case, expressed the guiding spirit.… ‘It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.'”137

  In 1937, Laughlin and his Cold Spring Harbor office became the U.S. distributor of a two-reel Nazi eugenic propaganda film entitled Erbkrank (The Hereditarily Diseased). Erbkrank began with scenes of squalid German slums where superior Nordic families were forced to live because so much public money was spent on bright, well-constructed institutions to house the feebleminded. Laughlin loaned the film to high schools in New York and New Jersey, to welfare workers in Connecticut, and to the Society for the Prevention of Blindness. Although he acquired the film from the Race Policy Office of the Nazi Party (Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP), he assured, “There is no racial propaganda of any sort in the picture; it is [simply] recognized that every race has its own superior family-stocks and its own degenerate strains.”138

  Yet in fact the film declared, “Jewish liberal thinking forced millions of healthy volk-nationals into need and squalor-while the unfit were overly coddled.” In another frame the movie explained, “The Jewish people has a particularly high percentage of mentally ill.” Indeed, one archetypal defective citizen was a mental patient described as a “fifty-five year old Jew-deceitful-rabble-rouser.”139

  No matter how dismal the plight of the Jews in Germany, no matter how horrifying the headlines, no matter how close Europe came to all-out war, no matter how often German troops poured across another border, American eugenicists stood fast by their eugenic hero, Adolf Hitler.

  In 1938, Germany accelerated the humiliation of the Jews, as well as the Aryanization and confiscation of their property. On November 10, 1938, the world was shocked by the German national anti-Jewish riots and pogroms known as Kristallnacht. Over one hundred synagogues were burned across the Reich, and thousands of Jews were marched off to concentration camps. The Gestapo and SS had by now subsumed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Society for Racial Hygiene and indeed all of German medicine.140

  Fischer, Lenz, Rüdin and the other stalwarts became the medical generals of Hitler’s campaign against humanity. In 1936, Rüdin assumed leadership of the Institute for Racial Hygiene in Munich, one of the main centers tasked with deciding which German citizens possessed Jewish blood, and how much. In 1937, Lenz and Rüdin, in a joint operation with the Gestapo, orchestrated the identification and rounding-up of some five hundred to six hundred “Rhineland bastards,” the offspring of Black French colonial soldiers; they were all secretly sterilized. Some 200,000 Germans of all backgrounds had been sterilized by 1937. After that the records were not published.141

  Fischer was increasingly accompanied by SS officer Wolfgang Abel, who was usually dressed in a typical black Nazi uniform. The two could be seen in each other’s company even when visited by American eugenicists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Together, Fischer and Abel manufactured fictitious eugenic profiles ofJews, Gypsies and other non-Aryan undesirables, accusing them of numerous hereditary afflictions. In order to justify their eugenic persecution, the Reich falsely ascribed flat feet, mental illness and an assortment of other maladies to those the Reich wanted to eliminate.142

  In one lecture, Fischer declared, “When a people wants, somehow or other, to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people.”143

  The concept of describing people as leading a “life unworthy of life,” sometimes known as “worthless eaters,” rose to the fore.144 Eugenic terminology and conceptualizations such as subhuman and bacterium were becoming more than jargon. They were becoming policy guidelines. Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared, “While we were pussy-footing around… the Germans were calling a spade a spade.” Goddard expressed his frustration another way: “If Hitler succeeds in his wholesale sterilization, it will be a demonstration that will carry eugenics farther than a hundred Eugenics Societies could. If he makes a fiasco of it, it will set the movement back where a hundred eugenics societies can never resurrect it.”145

  On September 1, 1939, Germany launched its blitzkrieg against Poland, beginning Word War II. The Reich needed hospital beds, and had to ration its wartime resources. Now the medical men of German eugenics would graduate from sterilization to organized euthanasia. Lenz helped draft euthanasia guidelines whereby a patient could be killed “by medical measures of which he remains unaware.” The continued existence of those classed defective could no longer be justified in Hitler’s war-strapped Reich. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed. Psychiatrists, steeped in eugenics, selected the victims after a momentary review of their records, jotted their destinies with a pen stroke, and then personally supervised the exterminations.146

  With the war raging, Lothrop Stoddard, a leader of the Eugenics Research Association, traveled to Nazi Germany. His 1940 book, Into the Darkness, celebrated Hitler and Nazi eugenics. “Nothing is so distinctive in Nazi Germany as its ideas about race,” wrote Stoddard. “Its concept of racial matters underlies the whole National Socialist philosophy of life and profoundly influences both its policies and practices. We cannot intelligently evaluate the Third Reich unless we understand this basic attitude of mind.147

  “As is well known, the Nazi viewpoint on race and the resultant policies are set forth by Adolf Hitler himself in the pages of Mein Kampf, the Bible of National Socialism. The future Fuehrer therein wrote: ‘It will be the duty of the People’s State to consider the race as the basis of the community’s existence. It must make sure that the purity of the racial strain will be preserved…. In order to achieve this end the State will have to avail itself of modern advances in medical science. It must proclaim that all those people are unfit for procreation who are afflicted with some visible hereditary disease, or are the carriers of it… having such people rendered sterile.”148

  Focusing on Hitler’s Jewish policy, Stoddard observed, “The relative
emphasis which Hitler gave racialism and eugenics many years ago foreshadows the respective interest toward the two subjects in Germany today. Outside Germany, the reverse is true, due chiefly to Nazi treatment of its Jewish minority. Inside Germany, the Jewish problem is regarded as a passing phenomenon, already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich.”149

  Stoddard was so favored by Hitler that der Führer granted him a rare, exclusive audience. In a chapter entitled “I See Hitler,” Stoddard wrote of the moment of his encounter in these words, “At that moment I was bidden to the Presence.”150

  Goebbels’s ministry escorted Stoddard around Berlin and arranged access to other senior Reich officials, especially those concerned with race policy. The Eugenics Courts, normally conducted in secret, granted Stoddard extraordinary permission to sit on the bench next to the judges and observe their racial judgments of Jews and non-Jews alike. His courtroom experiences were recounted in a chapter entitled “In a Eugenics Court,” in which he bemoaned the race tribunals for being “almost too conservative.”151

  As Hitler’s divisions smashed through Europe, his eugenic ideal would be enforced not only against those in Germany, but also against those in conquered or dominated countries. In country after country, Hitler rounded up the defective Jews and other subhumans, systematically making one region after another judenrein-Jew free. As Hess insisted, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”152

  For decades, Hitler’s bloody regime, the Holocaust and the Second World War would be perceived as merely the outgrowth of the unfathomable madness and blind hatred of one man and his movement. But in fact Hitler’s hatred was not blind; it was sharply focused on an obsessive eugenic vision. The war against the weak had graduated from America’s slogans, index cards and surgical blades to Nazi decrees, ghettos and gas chambers.