War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (62 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.

B
uchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. The “Little Camp”-the isolation and quarantine section of Buchenwald. Block 57. One morning in late May of 1944.
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Three-tiered geometric boxes lined the barrack. Each housed as many as sixteen emaciated humans per shelf. A thirsty and exhausted Frenchman named Oliv struggled to climb down from the top level for his day’s work. But he was too weak to climb out and negotiate the eight feet down. As Oliv lay limp, a fat, well-fed inmate doctor walked in. The other French prisoners pleaded with the doctor that Oliv was too ill and suffered from severe rheumatism, making his every movement painful. The frail man needed medical attention. A small infirmary, stocked with medicines and called “the hospital,” had been established in the Little Camp. The doctor controlled access to the facility and the drugs. Those admitted to the hospital could be excused from work until nursed back to working strength-and thereby live another day.
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But the doctor, himself a prisoner yet reviled as a barbaric stooge of the SS, was known for refusing admission to the hospital except to those he favored-or those who could bribe their way in by turning over their relief packets. Most of all, the doctor hated the French communists. They-and their diseases-were everywhere in the Little Camp. The doctor believed that each inferior national group was a carrier of its own specific set of diseases. Frenchmen, he thought, brought in diphtheria and related throat diseases as well as scarlet fever. Simply put, the Little Camp doctor was unwilling to use his limited hospital to lessen the prisoners’ loads, extend their lives or relieve their suffering. The prisoners’ job was to work. His job was to ensure they kept working-until they could work no more.
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Furious and impatient, the Little Camp doctor pushed the others out of the way, stepped onto the lowest of the three tiers, reached up and grabbed Oliv’s emaciated foot as it dangled over the edge. He then yanked Olivover the short sideboard and down the eight feet to the floor. Oliv tumbled to the floor like a doll and cracked his skull. Blood soaked down the back of his shirt. As the life seeped out of Oliv, his comrades hauled him onto the lowest bunk, and then hurried out to their backbreaking labors at the quarry. When they came back to Block 57 that night, Oliv was dead. Next to the bathroom was a makeshift morgue; they moved his body there. Later, Oliv’s body waited its turn at the crematorium.
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The French inmates of the Little Camp never forgot the brutality the doctor showed them, while exhibiting seemingly incongruous medical compassion to others. They never forgot that while most of them were worked and starved into skeletons, the doctor ate well. Many prisoners lost 40 percent of their weight shortly after arriving in the Little Camp. But the doctor arrived at Buchenwald fat and stayed fat. No one could understand how a talented physician could render his skills so effectively to some, while allowing others to die horrible deaths. After Buchenwald was liberated in April of 1945, the stories about Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen emerged in French reports and then in occupation German newspapers and the Allied armed forces media. Katzen-Ellenbogen was accused of murdering a thousand prisoners by injection.
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The United States military conducted war crimes trials at Dachau for a variety of lesser-known concentration camp Nazis and their inmate collaborators, especially the medical killers. Katzen-Ellenbogen was among them, and was found guilty of war crimes, right along with the other so-called “butchers of Buchenwald.” He was sentenced to a long term in prison. The court finding, however, was not an easy one. It was complicated by conflicting stories of Katzen-Ellenbogen’s outstanding academic background and prewar record.
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Many found Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen and the many lives he led incomprehensible. How could he alternately function as a gifted psychiatrist and as a murderous man of medicine? At the time, none understood that Katzen-Ellenbogen viewed humanity with multiple standards. He was an American eugenicist. Nor was he just any eugenicist. Katzen-Ellenbogen was a founding member of the Eugenics Research Association and the chief eugenicist of New Jersey under then-Governor Woodrow Wilson.
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Viewing humanity through a eugenic prism, Katzen-Ellenbogen was capable of exhibiting great compassion toward those he saw as superior, and great cruelty toward those he considered genetically unfit. In Buchenwald, the French, with their Mediterranean and African hybridization, were eugenically among the lowest. They were not really worthy of life. At the same time, in Katzen-Ellenbogen’s view, those of Nordic or Aryan descent were treasured-to be helped and even saved. It all followed classic eugenic thought. But in Buchenwald, it was the difference between life and death.

How did one of America’s pioneer eugenicists wend his way from New Jersey to Buchenwald’s notorious Little Camp? The story begins in late nineteenth-century Poland. Katzen-Ellenbogen was the name of a famous line of Polish and Czech rabbis going back centuries. However, as the doctor’s life was built, he-or perhaps his immediate branch of the family-obscured any connection with a Jewish heritage. Like many EuropeanJews who had drifted from tradition, he spelled his last name numerous ways, hyphenated and unhyphenated, and sometimes even signed his name “Edwin K. Ellenbogen.” He was probably born as Edwin Wladyslaw Katzen-Ellenbogen in approximately 1882, in Stanislawow, in Austrian-occupied Poland.
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As a youth, Katzen-Ellenbogen developed severe vision problems. But he achieved academic success despite the affliction, attending fine schools and developing extraordinary powers of observation and ratiocination. First, he studied at a Jesuit high school in Poland. Then he attended the University of Leipzig, where he secured his medical degree in 1905. While in medical school, he became engaged to a girl from Massachusetts, Marie A. Pierce, daughter of a judge and scion of a prominent family of Americans dating back to the Minutemen. In 1905, Katzen-Ellenbogen sailed for America, settling briefly in Massachusetts, where he married Marie. He added “Marie” to his various middle names, and utilized her family’s connections to further his academic pursuits. Various letters of introduction were provided, as was the money Katzen-Ellenbogen needed to continue his university work in Europe. There he studied psychiatry with some of the best names in the field, during the formative years of the profession, and he also learned the mystifying medical art of hypnosis.
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In 1907, Katzen-Ellenbogen returned to the United States, where he was naturalized as a citizen and started work in state institutions, such as the Danvers State Hospital of Massachusetts. One of the early exponents of Freud in America, Katzen-Ellenbogen became a Harvard lecturer in abnormal psychology. He developed expertise on fake symptoms. He authored an article in the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
on “The Detection of a Case of Simulation of Insanity by Means of Association Tests.”
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Katzen-Ellenbogen began to specialize in epilepsy, especially with regard to mental deficiency. His expert testimony was pivotal in convicting a murderer who claimed diminished mental capacity due to an epileptic attack; the convicted man was electrocuted in 1912. He authored numerous articles on the subject and became a coeditor of the international quarterly,
Epilepsia.
One of his articles asserted that different races should have their own standards for imbecility. A child, he posited, “may be inferior as to race, but be up to the mark for its own racial standards … especially … in America. “
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In 1911, Woodrow WIlson became governor of New Jersey. Katzen-Ellenbogen was asked to become scientific director of the State Village for Epileptics at Skillman, New Jersey. It was there that he would develop his eugenic interests. “While there,” recalled Katzen-Ellenbogen, “I particularly studied … the hereditary background of epilepsy.” As the state’s leading expert, Katzen-Ellenbogen was then asked by Wilson to draft New Jersey’s law to sterilize epileptics and defectives. In the process, he became an expert on legal and legislative safeguards and jurisprudence.
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As a leading member of the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy, Katzen-Ellenbogen delivered an address on epilepsy and feeble-mindedness at Goddard’s Vineland Training School. In 1913, Katzen-Ellenbogen became charter member #14 of the Eugenics Research Association at Cold Spring Harbor. The doctor continued his active membership even after he sailed for Russia in 1915, never to return to the United States.
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Katzen-Ellenbogen bounced around the capitals of Europe for the next few years. He was about to board a ship in Holland when he received a telegram informing him that his only son had died in America after falling from a roof. Katzen-Ellenbogen was never the same. He became morose and introspective, questioning the value of human life, at least his own. “I contemplated to offer myself as physician to the leprosy colony in the upper State of New York,” he recounted. He also considered suicide. At the same time, Katzen-Ellenbogen deepened his fascination with things Catholic, purchasing a valued copy of a rare Madonna.
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As Katzen-Ellenbogen wandered through Europe, he impressed many people as a kind humanitarian. He met one woman briefly on a train in 1921 and discussed his favorite Madonna. More than two decades later, even after learning of his notorious war crimes, she wrote him, “I cannot believe that anyone who likes a picture of the Madonna can be entirely bad.” Years later, another woman, recalling their fond encounter in Germany, insisted, “There still are people in this world who believe in you.”
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In 1925, Katzen-Ellenbogen developed a relationship with a woman named Olga. She described him as “the companion of my life.” He described her as “my old housekeeper.” By any measure, Katzen-Ellenbogen developed deep parental feelings for Olga’s two orphaned grandsons, and raised them as though they were his own. Together with his daughter, Katzen-Ellenbogen led an
ad hoc
family of five.
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They were living in Germany when Hitler rose to power. Despite his Catholic observances, after the 1935 Nuremberg Laws Katzen-Ellenbogen found himself defined as Jewish and subject to encircling anti-Jewish decrees. Like many practicing Christians of Jewish ancestry, he fled across the Czech border in 1936, establishing a clinic in Marienbad. When anti-Jewish agitation spread into Czechoslovakia, Katzen-Ellenbogen moved again, this time to the democratic stronghold of Prague, where in 1938 he began working with refugee groups.
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After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, Katzen-Ellenbogen followed a typical route of flight. First, he crossed into Italy. After war broke out in September of 1939, he escaped to France. But when the Nazis bifurcated France in 1940, Katzen-Ellenbogen was caught in the occupied zone in Paris. As a result of his many recent relocations, he was a suspicious refugee in a city teeming with Gestapo agents. In 1941 he was arrested by Gestapo counter-intelligence corps, but he was soon released. Like many foreigners living in Nazi-occupied Paris, Katzen-Ellenbogen was ultimately arrested several times for questioning or detention. He was denied permission to leave for neutral Portugal. Finally, just as he was planning to leave for Prague in the late summer of 1943, Nazi security agents came for him. The knock on the door came at six in the morning.
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Many eugenicists considered Nazi racial policies a biological ideal. Katzen-Ellenbogen discounted his Jewish ancestry, considering himself a eugenicist first and foremost. This made him different, and almost appealing to the Gestapo, especially under the circumstances.

Although a prisoner, he was given access to top Nazi generals in Paris to discuss his detention status. The war-stretched Nazis needed doctors, especially in occupied lands. As a distinguished physician and psychiatrist who spoke German and also enjoyed American citizenship, Katzen-Ellenbogen became very useful to both the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht. Twice he was brought to the Reich military prison in France to examine a German soldier suffering from mental problems. Katzen-Ellenbogen even testified as an expert at the soldier’s court martial.
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Katzen-Ellenbogen found himself in a somewhat unique position. “I was the only doctor in France, a psychiatrist,” he recalled, “who was [also] qualified in Germany as a doctor, and they didn’t have anybody [with those skills] in the army.” Eventually, the overworked regular German army doctor visiting the military prison asked Katzen-Ellenbogen,
“As
you speak French anyway and other languages, relieve me here. And when something very important happens, they can telephone for me.” Thus, Katzen-Ellenbogen became a general practitioner for the German military in Paris even as he remained in custody. Eventually, Katzen-Ellenbogen’s services were requested for German military men outside the prison. For all intents and purposes, he was at the disposal of the German medical staff. But in September of 1943, when orders came from Berlin to transfer prisoners in France to slave labor camps in the Reich, Katzen-Ellenbogen was put on a train and shipped to the dreaded Buchenwald.
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