War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  (a) Killing members of the group;

  (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

  (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions oflife calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

  (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

  (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”68

  Article III assigned equal guilt to those who were responsible for “direct and public incitement” to commit the crimes described as genocide, and those who in other ways become complicit. Article IV declared that the law could punish anyone in any country, “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.” American prosecutors at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials took their cue from the treaty.69

  In early July of 1947, the Allies indicted the leaders of the Reich’s militarized eugenics umbrella organization, the SS Race and Settlement Office, which forcibly sterilized thousands, kidnapped Polish children with Nordic racial features, organized the Nordic breeding program known as Lebens-born, developed extensive genealogy files on millions and conducted eugenic examinations of prisoners before deciding if they should be saved or exterminated. For these activities, SS Race and Settlement Office leader General Otto Hofmann stood among those in the dock.70

  The indictment clearly enumerated the various aspects of Nazi eugenics as genocide: “Kidnapping the children of foreign nationals in order to select for Germanization those who were considered of ‘racial value.’… Encouraging and compelling abortions on Eastern workers…. Preventing marriages and hampering reproduction of enemy nationals.”71

  A week after the indictment was served on the accused, the military occupation’s semiofficial newspaper, Die Neue Zeitung, drove home the point to the German people, publishing extracts of the U.N. Treaty on Genocide. The newspaper announced: “On 10 June the Secretary’s Office of the United Nations completed the first draft of an international convention for the punishment of government officials who attempted to exterminate racial, religious, national, or political groups…. Three distinct types of ‘genocide’ are listed.” The paper then itemized actions that qualified as genocide, including “open mass murder” and housing people in conditions calculated to kill. Die Neue Zeitung explained that the other of the three most significant forms of genocide was “sterilization of large groups and forcible separation of families as ‘biological genocide.’” The article itself was entered into the Nuremberg Trial record.72

  During the long trial, which lasted almost a year, prosecutors outlined a lengthy bill of eugenic particulars, including the murder of those who did not pass eugenic tests. “The SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) was responsible,” prosecutors declared, “among other things, for racial examinations. These racial examinations were carried out by RuSHA leaders or their staff members, called racial examiners.” Prosecutors charged that as part of the Reich’s genocidal campaign, RuSHA was continually engaged in “classification of people of German descent.” It added, “RuSHA, in carrying out racial investigations and examinations, took a leading part in the accomplishment of the [ extermination] program. Since negative results of racial investigations and examinations led to the extermination or imprisonment in concentration camps of the individuals concerned, the Staff Main Office… acted in close cooperation with the SS Reich Security Main Office [the chief SS agency overseeing physical extermination]. The Reich Security Main Office imposed capital punishment and imprisonment in concentration camps upon individuals designated by RuSHA.”73

  An entire portion of the prosecutors’ case, “Section 4: Sterilization,” presented documents and evidence concerning the mass sterilization of unfit individuals by Nazis throughout Europe during the Reich’s twelve-year reign of terror. Leaving no doubt, prosecutors declared, “The fundamental purpose… was to proclaim and safeguard the supposed superiority of ‘Nordic’ blood, and to exterminate and suppress all sources which might ‘dilute’ or ‘taint’ it. The underlying objective was to assure Nazi dominance over Germany and German domination over Europe in perpetuity.”74

  Eugenics was also pivotal to a gamut of other war crimes. Often before burning a town or murdering an entire community, Nazis identified and kidnapped the eugenically fit Nordic children so they could be raised in Aryan institutions. This was done, prosecutors stated, “in accordance with standards… [of] Nazi racial and biological theories.” What had occurred in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, was read into the record as an example. After Lidice was selected for obliteration, every adult man in the village was executed and most of the village’s women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. But the village’s children were dispatched to Poland for a thorough “medical, eugenic, and racial examination carried out by the physicians of the health offices.” Those deemed sufficiently Nordic were sent to live with Aryan families where they would undergo Germanization. Those deemed unfit were “deported.” The prosecutor stated, “Here ends all traces of these 82 children of Lidice.”75

  “And so,” prosecutors solemnly explained, “the final balance gives us these terrible facts: 192 men and 7 women shot; 196 women taken into concentration camps, of whom 43 died from torture and maltreatment; 105 children kidnapped…. The village was burned, buildings leveled, streets taken up and all other signs of habitation completely erased.” To protest the utter eugenic extermination of Lidice, many small towns later adopted the name of the village. Hence the people are gone, but the memory of Lidice lives on.76

  Count after count recited the fact that “racial value” following a eugenic analysis made all the difference between life and death, genocide and survival.77 Prosecutors sorted Germany’s many eugenic atrocities into specific categories of war crimes. Point 15, entitled “Hampering Reproduction of Enemy Nationals,” specified sterilization and marriage restriction: “To further weaken enemy nations, both restrictive and prohibitive measures were taken to discourage marriages and reproduction of enemy nationals. The ultimate aim and natural result of these measures was to impede procreation among nationals of Eastern countries.” Point 18, entitled “Slave Labor,” explained that through the racial examinations of RuSHA, “foreign nationals without any German ancestry were sent to Germany as slave labor,” where they were worked to death.78

  Point 21, “Persecution and Extermination of Jews,” explained how genealogy offices were critical to Hitler’s war against the Jews across Europe. “RuSHA also participated extensively in the persecution and extermination of Jews. The Genealogy Office (Ahnentafelamt) of RuSHA prepared and retained in its files the names of all Jewish families in the Reich and persons having any Jewish ancestry. This office also participated in preparing similar files in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Danzig, and France where it worked together with the SS Reich Security Main Office. These files were used for enforcing discriminatory measures againstJ ews and preparing transport lists ofJ ews to be taken from Germany and the occupied countries to the extermination camps in the East.”79

  On January 20,1942, SS Race and Settlement Office leader Hofmann had attended the infamous Wannsee Conference, the planning session associated with the Final Solution. The Wannsee Protocol produced after the conference made the eugenic guidelines clear. Mixed Jews of the “first degree,” that is, Jews with substantial German blood in their ancestry, could be exempted from “evacuation,” the code word for extermination, but only if they were sterilized. The Wannsee Protocol recorded: “Hofmann is of the opinion that extensive use must be made of sterilization.” The protocol also recorded that “[Persons of mixed blood] exempted from evacuation will be sterilized in order to obviate progeny and to settle the [mixed blood] problem for good. Sterilization is voluntary, but it is the condition for remaining in the Reich.”80

  Confronted by prosecutors at his trial with charges of eugenic extermination, Hofmann said little in his own defense, and openly admitted he was a Nazi eugeni
cist.

  PROSECUTOR: When did you become chief of the Eugenics Office in RuSHA?

  HOFMANN: At the beginning of 1939 I was appointed to this task….

  Q: What were your duties there?

  A: The Eugenics Office was responsible for carrying out the betrothal and marriage order which Himmler had issued on 31 December 1931 to the SS…. The RuSHA leader had to look after the eugenics research offices of the SS, regiments, and, according to his qualifications and talents, he influenced cultural life within the areas of the main district.81

  Hofmann could not understand why the United States thought his actions were crimes against humanity. He placed into evidence a special report on America produced by the Nazi Party’s Race-Political Office years before on July 30, 1937. “The United States,” asserted the report, “however, also provides an example for the racial legislation of the world in another respect. Although it is clearly established in the Declaration of Independence that everyone born in the United States is a citizen of the United States and so acquires all the rights which an American citizen can acquire, impassable lines are drawn between the individual races, especially in the Southern States. Thus in certain States Japanese are excluded from the ownership of land or real estate and they are prevented from cultivating arable land. Marriages between colored persons and whites are forbidden in no less than thirty of the Federal States. Marriages contracted in spite of this ban are declared invalid.” Typical laws were recited from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California and Florida.82

  The special report added, “Since 1907, sterilization laws have been passed in twenty-nine States of the United States of America.”83

  Hofmann’s document made one other point. It offered the following justification, originally translated from English into German and then back into English for the trial:

  In a judgment of the [U.S.] Supreme Court… it says, among other things: “It is better for everybody if society, instead of waiting until it has to execute degenerate offspring or leave them to starve because of feeble-mindedness, can prevent obviously inferior individuals from propagating their kind.”84

  Honann was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment.85

  For three-perhaps four-decades after the Treaty Against Genocide was adopted, the United States continued to sterilize targeted groups because of their eugenic or racial character, real or supposed; continued to prevent marriages because of their eugenic or racial character, real or supposed; and continued to hamper reproduction, interfere with procreation, and prevent births in targeted groups. After the Hitler regime, after the Nuremberg Trials, some twenty thousand Americans were eugenically sterilized by states and untold others by federal programs on Indian reservations and in U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico.

  They said it was legal. They said it was science. What was it really?

  CHAPTER 20

  Eugenics Becomes Genetics

  After Hitler, eugenics did not disappear. It renamed itself. What had thrived loudly as eugenics for decades quietly took postwar refuge under the labels human genetics and genetic counseling.

  The transition was slow and subtle and spanned decades. Some defected from American eugenics as early as the twenties, prompted by a genuine revulsion over a movement that had deteriorated from biological utopianism into a campaign to destroy entire groups. For others who defected in the thirties and early forties, it was the shock of how Adolf Hitler applied eugenics. For America’s eugenic holdouts, it was only the fear of guilt by scientific association with genocide that reshaped their memories and guided their new direction. It took a Holocaust, a continent in cinders and a once great nation bombed and battled into submission to force the issue.

  Originally, human genetics and eugenics were one and the same. At the tum of the twentieth century, American breeders of plants and animals had turned their hybridizing skills and social prejudices on their fellow man, trying to manage humanity the same way they managed crops and herds. The American Breeders Association created its Eugenics Committee in 1903. In 1904, the Carnegie Institution founded its eugenic installation at Cold Spring Harbor.1 The word genetics did not exist at the time.

  In England, meanwhile, research into Mendel’s decades-old discovery of cellular “elements” had advanced and was sorely in need of a new dedicated field of study. By 1905, William Bateson, the man who several years earlier had promulgated the rediscovery of Mendel’s theories, was now privately referring to the new science of heredity as “genetics,” from the same Greek root Galton employed. Bateson publicly announced the new science during his inaugural address during the Royal Horticultural Society’s Third International Conference on Hybridization in 1906. “The science itself is still nameless,” declared Bateson. “…I suggest for the consideration of this Congress the term Genetics, which sufficiently indicates that our labors are devoted to the elucidation of the phenomena of heredity and variation… and [their] application to the practical problems of breeders, whether of animals or plants.” When the conference proceedings were published, the society renamed the event the Third International Conference on Genetics.2 Genetics was born.

  Shortly thereafter, students of genetics began referring to the transmittable cellular elements as “genes.” By 1912, Cambridge University received a sizeable endowment for genetic studies and in 1914 established the world’s first chair in genetics. Mainstream European and American geneticists were primarily devoted to the study of hereditary mechanisms, probing the structure and interactions of enzymes, proteins and other cellular components. Plant and animal geneticists zealously explored the protoplasm of fruit flies, maize, sheep and other species, hoping to understand and manage the lower life-forms. They understood that man was a more complex animal that had both conquered, and was conquered by, his environment. In Europe, human studies of cellular mechanisms were undertaken, but slowly. Not so in America, where breeders distorted Mendelian principles into eugenics and then subsumed nascent human genetics. The two words were synonymous in the United States.3

  In 1914, the American Breeders Association changed its name to the American Genetic Association, and its publication from American Breeders Magazine to Journal of Heredity. The organization and its publication functioned as a scientific jumble, combining the best efforts of good agronomy and zoology with tainted, ill-advised and racist social engineering. The Carnegie Institution ran the Eugenics Record Office under its Department of Genetics, with Davenport as its director. Many of the nation’s leading geneticists, such as W E. Castle and Raymond Pearl, were among the earliest dues-paying members of the Eugenics Research Association. Genetics and biology departments across America taught eugenics as part of their curriculums. In 1929, Eugenical News changed its subtitle once again, this time to “Current Record of Human Genetics and Race Hygiene.”4

  However, by the late twenties and early thirties many human geneticists who had joined the eugenic charge were defecting. L. C. Dunn exemplified this growing trend. In 1925, he had coauthored Principles of Genetics, asserting in typical eugenic rhetoric that “even under the most favorable surroundings there would still be a great many individuals who are always on the borderline of self-supporting existence and whose contribution to society is so small that the elimination of their stock would be beneficial.”5 But in 1935, two years after the rise of Hitler, Dunn formally suggested that the Carnegie Institution shut down its Cold Spring Harbor eugenic enterprise. “WIth genetics,” Dunn told Carnegie officials, “its relations [with eugenics] have always been close, although there have been distinct signs of cleavage in recent years, chiefly due to the feeling on the part of many geneticists that eugenical research was not always activated by purely disinterested scientific motives, but was influenced by social and political considerations.” Dunn later became an outspoken critic of both Nazi eugenics and the American movement.6

  In 1937, Laurence Snyder, the incoming president of the Eugenics Research Association and chairman of its Committee on Human Heredity, became c
onvinced it was time for a break with the past. In a lengthy report to Laughlin and the Carnegie Institution, Snyder’s committee concluded that the end for organized eugenics was near. “The recent attacks upon orthodox eugenics,” the committee declared, “and indeed upon the whole present social set-up… emphasize more than ever the need for accurate facts and information on basic human genetics. These attacks, it may be stated in passing, come not from irresponsible nor untrained minds, but from some who have the authority of long and honorable scientific achievements behind them.”7

  Referring to the worries over a Europe in political turmoil and preparing for war, the committee report continued, “In these days when the social outlook of whole nations is undergoing far-reaching changes, any fact contributing to our knowledge of basic human welfare becomes of especial importance. The science of human genetics, judged by its past achievements and by what we may reasonably expect in its future developments, is more certainly basic to any well-formulated plan of human welfare.”8

  Unfortunately, noted Snyder, in America the concept of “human genetics” had itself become as tarnished as eugenics. “The interest of American geneticists in human genetics,” the committee reported, “appears to have been waning of late, as evidenced by the almost complete absence of papers on human heredity at the various scientific meetings. This state of affairs in America, in contrast to the condition in some of the European countries, is to be deplored. It has come about, in the opinion of your committee, because of two main reasons. First, there has appeared from time-to-time a good deal of unscientific writing on the subject of eugenics. Since the terms ‘eugenics’ and ‘human genetics’ are in the minds of many persons synonymous, human genetics has suffered a loss of prestige as a result. “9