This article is from Edwin BLACK, author of the New York Times bestselling books IBM and the Holocaust and the just-published War Against the Weak (Four Walls, Eight Windows).
Hitler turned the life of an entire continent into hell and destroyed millions of people in search of the so-called "superior race." The world considered the Fuhrer a madman and poorly understood the motives that drove him. However, the concept of a superior race - white-skinned blondes with blue eyes - was not formulated by him: this idea was developed in the United States by the American eugenic movement two to three decades before Hitler. Not only developed, but also tested in practice: eugenics forcibly sterilized 60,000 Americans, thousands were forbidden to marry, thousands were forcibly evicted to "colonies" and killed countless people in ways that are still being studied.
Eugenics is an American racist pseudoscience aimed at destroying all people except those who fit a given type. This philosophy grew into national politics through forced sterilization and segregation laws and marital bans in 27 states.
When assessing the intellectual abilities of people to be sterilized and compiling tests to determine the level of intelligence, knowledge of the US culture was taken into account, and not the real knowledge of the individual or his ability to think. It is quite natural that on this kind of tests, most immigrants showed low results, and were considered not completely normal in terms of intelligence. At the same time, the influence of society and the environment on a person was completely disregarded.
It should be noted that not only the characteristic features among members of the same family were studied, but there were also attempts to identify traits that are inherited within an ethnic group. So, eugenicists defined it as good blood - the blood of the first American settlers who arrived from the countries of Northern and Western Europe. They, according to eugenicists, have such innate qualities as love for science and art. Whereas immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe have a less favorable set of traits.
All this contributed to the introduction of restrictive laws for those entering America and laws against mixed marriages between representatives of different races and nationalities. Otherwise, as the eugenicists argued, there is a high likelihood of spoiling American blood.
But the most radical political action of the eugenic movement was the official permission for sterilization. By 1924, there were 3,000 forcibly spayed in the United States. Forced sterilization was carried out mainly for prisoners and the mentally retarded.
In Virginia, the first victim of forced sterilization was a seventeen-year-old girl, Carrie Buck. In 1927, she was accused of poor heredity, and therefore, pollution of the American race. The reason for accusing Carrie of unhealthy heredity was that her mother was in an insane asylum, and the girl herself gave birth to a child out of wedlock. Her child was judged subjectively abnormal by an ERO sociologist and a Red Cross nurse. However, when Carrie Buck's daughter went to school, it turned out that her abilities were no lower than usual, and the girl studied very well.
The Carrie Buck case set a precedent for the sterilization of 8,300 Virginias!
Moreover, the development of ERO was used by Nazi Germany. In 1933, on the American model, the Hitlerite government passed the sterilization law. This law is immediately reprinted in the USA, in the "Eugenics News". On the basis of the law, 350 thousand people were sterilized in Germany!
Not surprisingly, the head of the ERO in 1936 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for "the science of racial cleansing".
Hitler diligently studied American eugenic laws and arguments and sought to assert the rights of racial hatred and anti-Semitism, providing them with a medical justification and providing them with a pseudoscientific shell. The eugenics would not have gotten far beyond this strange talk if they had not had strong financial support from a corporation of philanthropists, mainly the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad business. They were part of a league of American scientists from universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale (as we know, this is a nest of Masonic ideology that grows loyal politicians and scientists), within whose walls data was falsified and manipulated in the name of eugenic racist goals.
The Carnegie Institution stood at the cradle of the American eugenics movement by establishing a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Millions of cards with the data of ordinary Americans were kept here, which made it possible to plan the methodical liquidation of families, clans and entire peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates campaigned among American legislators, social services, and country associations.
From Harriman's railroad coffers, funds were transferred to local charitable foundations - for example, the New York Bureau of Industry and Immigration - which were supposed to provide Jewish and other immigrants from the general population for their subsequent deportation, imprisonment or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped create and finance the German eugenic program and even subsidized Joseph Mengele's monstrous research at Auschwitz. Subsequently, the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Max Planck Institute (predecessor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) provided unrestricted access to information and assisted in ongoing investigations.
Long before leading American philanthropists came to the fore, eugenics was born of scientific curiosity in the Victorian era. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton developed the following theory: if talented people marry only talented people, their offspring will be noticeably better.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Galton's ideas were brought to the United States when Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenicists believed that Mendel's concept of the color and size of peas and cattle was applicable to the social and intellectual nature of man. In the early 20th century, America staggered under the onslaught of massive immigration and widespread racial conflicts. Elitists, utopians, and progressives, driven by latent racial and class tendencies and at the same time a desire to improve the world, turned Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. They dreamed of populating the planet with white-skinned blue-eyed people of the Nordic type - tall, strong and talented. In the course of this work, they intended to exclude from the life of blacks, Indians, Hispanics, Eastern Europeans, Jews - a crowded people with dark hair, poor and weak. How were they going to achieve this goal? By identifying "defective" family branches and condemning them to lifelong segregation and sterilization to destroy entire blood lines. The maximum program was the deprivation of the reproductive capacity of the "unfit" - recognized as weak and standing at the lowest stages of development.
In the 1920s, eugenic scholars of the Carnegie Institution established close personal contacts with German fascist eugenics. In 1924, when Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf, he frequently quoted the teachings of American eugenic ideology and openly demonstrated his good knowledge of American eugenic theorists and their phraseology. He proudly declared to his supporters that he adhered to American eugenic law. Hitler's fight for the super-race turned into a mad fight for the Supreme Race, in terms of American eugenics, when the concept of "Nordic" was replaced by "Germanic" or "Aryan". Racial science, racial purity and racial domination were the driving forces behind Hitler's fascism.
Nazi doctors turned into behind-the-scenes generals in the Fuehrer's war against Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior to the race. They developed science, invented eugenic formulas, and even personally selected victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination. In the first decade of the Reich, eugenicists across America unanimously welcomed Hitler's plans, seeing them as the consistent embodiment of their decades of research.
The matter, however, was not limited to the support of scientists. America funded and helped build German eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated $ 410,000 (4 million modern greens) to the work of hundreds of German researchers.
In May 1926, for example, Rockefeller paid $ 250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute, which became the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry. Ernest Rudin, one of the center's leading psychiatrists, later became its director and is believed by many to be the architect of Hitler's system of medical suppression. Even in the Kaiser Wilhelm scientific complex there was an institute for brain research. A grant of $ 317,000 allowed this institute to build a main building and become the center of domestic racial biology. Over the next several years, this institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Brain Institute - also headed by Rudin - became the main laboratory and testing ground for deadly experiments and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and other peoples. Since 1940, thousands of Germans from nursing homes, psychiatric clinics and other care institutions have been systematically gassed to death. In total, between 50,000 and 100,000 people were killed.
A special recipient of financial assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. If American eugenicists for decades only sought to obtain twins for research in the field of heredity, then the German Institute was able to conduct such research on an unprecedented scale.
At the time Rockefeller made his donation, the head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, the star of American eugenic circles. In Verschuer's early years in this position, Rockefeller financed the Institute of Anthropology directly, as well as through other research programs. In 1935 Verschuer resigned from the Institute to establish an eugenics center in Frankfurt. The study of twins in the Third Reich went brilliantly with the support of the government, which decreed the mobilization of all twins. Around this time, Verschuer wrote in Der Erbartz, a eugenic medical journal he himself edited, that the German war would lead to "a total solution to the Jewish problem."
On May 10, 1943, Verschuer's longtime assistant Joseph Mengele arrived in Auschwitz. Mengele selected the twins directly from the transports arriving at the camp, conducted atrocious experiments on them, wrote reports and sent them to the Verschuer Institute for analysis and generalization.
As The San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2003:
“The idea of a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed dominant Nordic race was born before Hitler. The concept was created in the United States and nurtured in California for decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenics have played an important, albeit little-known, role in the American eugenic movement for ethnic cleansing."
Eugenics is a pseudoscience that has set itself the goal of "improving" humanity. In its extreme, racist form, it meant the destruction of all "unusable" people, keeping only those who fit the Nordic stereotype. The ideas of this philosophy were enshrined in national politics by laws on forced sterilization, on segregation and restriction of marriages. In 1909, California became the third of 27 states to have such laws. As a result, about 60 thousand Americans were forcibly sterilized by eugenics practitioners, thousands were refused marriage with their chosen ones, thousands were herded into "colonies" and a huge number of people were persecuted in ways that are now being investigated. Before World War II, nearly half of the forced sterilizations took place in California. And even after the war, a third of such operations were carried out in this state.
California was considered the center of the eugenics movement in America. In the early 20th century, Californian eugenicists included powerful but little-known race scholars. Among them were Army venereologist Dr. Paul Popenow, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, and members of the California Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been largely an unusual topic of conversation in living rooms had it not been so generously funded by major philanthropic organizations, most notably the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They all collaborated with prominent American scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These scientists supported race theory and eugenics itself, and then fabricated and perverted data in favor of eugenic racist goals.
In 1904, Stanford University President David Starr Jordan introduced the concept of "race and blood" in his message "Blood of the Nation". The university scientist stated that the qualities of a person and his position (for example, talent and poverty) are passed on by blood.
Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities (such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration to help locate Jews, Italians and other immigrants in New York and other densely populated cities, deport them, restrict their movement, or force them to sterilize …
Nearly all spiritual guidance and political campaign material for the eugenic movement in America came from California quasi-autonomous eugenic societies such as the Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activities with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. … These organizations (which functioned as part of a tightly knit network) published racist eugenic leaflets and pseudoscientific journals Eugenical News, Eugenics, and propagandized Nazism.
The most common weapon of genocide in the United States was the death chamber (better known as the local government gas chamber). In 1918, Popenou, a World War I army venereologist, co-authored the highly sought-after textbook Applied Eugenics, which argued that “historically, the first method that speaks for itself, there is the death penalty … Its importance in maintaining the purity of the race should not be underestimated. There is also a chapter in this textbook on “death selectivity,” which “kills the individual with adverse environmental factors (eg, excessive cold, bacteria, or physical illness)”.
Eugenics breeders were convinced that American society was not yet ready for the use of organized killing. But many psychiatric clinics and doctors independently practiced impromptu lethality and passive euthanasia. At a clinic in Lincoln, Illinois, incoming patients were fed milk from cows with tuberculosis, believing that a genetically pure individual would be invulnerable. Lincoln accounted for 30% to 40% of deaths per year. Some doctors practiced "passive eugenocide" on each of the newborns. Negligence was widespread among other doctors in psychiatric hospitals, often resulting in death.
Even the US Supreme Court upheld eugenics approaches. In 1927, in his infamous decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “It’s best for the world if we don’t wait for a generation of degenerates to drown us in crime and let them enjoy their dementia when society can prevent reproduction. those who are not suitable for this. Three generations of degenerates is enough. This decision opened the way for forced sterilization and persecution by thousands who were considered inferior. Subsequently, during the Nuremberg Trials, the Nazis quoted Holmes as their justification.
It was only after eugenics had taken hold in the United States that a campaign was carried out to spread it in Germany. This was in no small part aided by the Californian eugenics, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and distributed them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied the laws of eugenics. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it and giving it an even more attractive pseudoscientific aspect of eugenics. Hitler was able to attract a large following among rational Germans by declaring that he was engaged in scientific research. Hitler's racial hatred was born in his head, but the ideological foundations of eugenics, which he adopted in 1924, were formulated in America.
During the 1920s, eugenic scholars at the Carnegie Institution developed deep personal and professional relationships with fascist German eugenics. In the book "Mein Kampf" ("Mein Kampf"), published in 1924, Hitler referred to the ideology of American eugenics, demonstrating a deep knowledge of it. “Today there is one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least some progress towards a better concept (on immigration) is noticeable. Of course, this is not our model German republic, but the United States."
In the early days of the Reich, American eugenicists hailed Hitler's achievements and plans as the logical conclusion of their decades of research. California eugenics republished materials containing Nazi propaganda for distribution in America. They also hosted Nazi science exhibitions, such as the August 1934 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, the annual meeting of the American Association of Health Workers.
In 1934, when the number of sterilizations in Germany exceeded 5 thousand a month, the leader of the Californian eugenics C. M. Goethe, upon his return from Germany, told one of his colleagues with admiration: “You will be interested to know that your work played a huge role in shaping the views of the group of intellectuals behind Hitler in his landmark project. Everywhere I felt that their opinions were very subject to American influence … I want you, my friend, that you remember all your life that you gave impetus to the development of a great government that rules 60 million people."
In addition to providing a plan of action, America has funded scientific institutions dealing with eugenics in Germany.
Since 1940, thousands of Germans have been regularly harassed by gas, forcibly taken from nursing homes, psychiatric institutions and other care places. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people were systematically killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenic Society, said about Nazism: "While we are careful, the Germans call a spade a spade."
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin was particularly favored by the Rockefeller Foundation. For decades, American eugenicists have needed twins to conduct research on heredity.
The institute was now ready to undertake such research at an unprecedented level. May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, sent a telegram to his office in Paris, "the June Executive Committee meeting nine thousand dollars for three years for the Institute for Anthropology of the Kaiser Wilhelm TWINS FOR RESEARCH AND INFLUENCE OF TOXIC SUBSTANCES IN THE germplasm for future generations".
Rockefeller's charitable giving period fell under the leadership of the institute, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a prominent figure in eugenic circles. Rockefeller continued to fund this institute at the beginning of Verschuer's leadership, both in the mainstream and through other research channels. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to create a rival eugenics institute in Frankfurt. This event was publicly announced in the American eugenic press. Supported by government decrees, experiments on twins began intensively in the Third Reich. Verschuer wrote in the eugenic medical journal Der Erbarzt, which he headed, that the war in Germany "will solve the Jewish problem once and for all."
As Michel Crichton wrote in 2004: “Her supporters were also Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill. She was approved by Chief Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandis, who ruled in her favor. Supported by: Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; novelist Herbert Wells; playwright George Bernard Shaw and hundreds of others. Nobel laureates provided support. The research was supported by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. A scientific complex at Cold Spring Harbor was established to carry out this research, and important research was also carried out at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins universities. Crisis laws have been passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts were supported by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council.
They said that if Jesus were alive, he would also support this program.
Ultimately, research, legislation, and public opinion about this theory continued for nearly half a century. Those who opposed this theory were ridiculed and called reactionaries, blind people, or simply denounced as ignorant. But what is surprising from the point of view of our time is that there were very few who resisted.
There was a plan - to identify mentally disabled people and stop their reproduction by isolation in special institutions or sterilization. They agreed that mostly Jews are mentally disabled; and many more foreigners and black Americans.
Such views have found widespread support. H. Wells spoke out against "poorly trained crowds of inferior citizens." Theodore Roosevelt argued that "society has no right to allow degenerates to reproduce their own kind." Luther Burbank demanded "it is forbidden for criminals and weak-willed to give birth." George Bernard Shaw stated that only eugenics will save humanity.
American eugenicists were jealous of the Germans, who took over the leadership in 1926. The Germans were amazingly successful. They brought the “mentally disabled” to ordinary houses and interrogated them one by one, and then sent them to the back room, which essentially served as a gas chamber. There, people were poisoned with carbon monoxide, and their bodies were transported to a crematorium located on a private property.
Over time, this program expanded into a wide network of concentration camps located near the railroad tracks, which made it possible to use efficient transport. In these camps, ten million "unnecessary people" were killed.
After World War II, it turned out that eugenics did not exist, and never did. Biographers of celebrities and the mighty of this world did not mention the interest of their heroes in this philosophy, and sometimes they did not recall it at all. Eugenics has ceased to be an academic subject in colleges, although some argue that her ideas continue to exist in a modified form.
By the way, it should be noted that the most active adherent of eugenic science, Dr. Mengele, who is notorious for his terrible experiments on living people, including children, and even newborn babies, was carefully transported to the United States at the end of the war, where he received all the necessary documents to move to Latin America. Where even the Mossad did not dare to touch him. And in 1979 he quietly and peacefully died of a stroke while swimming.
