War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (51 page)

Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen at Buchenwald with a warm hat he claimed he never wore.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES

TOP LEFT

Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick propagandizing for forced sterilization in
Eugenical News,
March-April 1934.
AUTHOR ‘S COLLECTION

TOP RIGHT

Lavish praise for and photos of “Verschuer’s Institute” in
Eugenical News,
June 1936.
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

BOTTOM

Enthusiastic essay about Nazi breeding experiments in
Journal of Heredity, 1942.
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

Human Betterment Foundation Annual Report for 1935 citing a letter from board member C. M. Goethe to racist eugenicist E. S. Gosney, bragging: “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
VERMONT STATE PUBLIC RECORDS DIVISION

ABOVE AND BELOW, LEFT

Nazi eugenicist Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer examining twins; his assistant, Josef Mengele, continued the experiments at Auschwitz.
MAX PLANCK GESELLSCHAFT ARCHIV

Auschwitz’s murderous doctor, Josef Mengele.
AUSCHWITZ ARCHIV

N
egative 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