Sir Francis Galton, one of Britain’s most respected scientists, first postulated that there could be a crisis of the gene pool which could lead to the deterioration of the human race. The concept was embraced wholeheartedly in the United States and refined in California decades before Hitler rose to power.

Eugenics: the beginning

Early in the twentieth century, anti-immigration advocates united forces with eugenicists because they were overly concerned about the immigration of inferior races to the United States, “dangerous human pests” which led “the rising tide of imbeciles, polluters of the human race.” As the theory of eugenics suggested, the human race’s gene pool was becoming severely compromised because the best human beings were not reproducing as rapidly as the inferior ones —immigrants, degenerates, the unfit, the “feeble minded” and Jews. “This,” it was argued, “could lead to the deterioration of the human race.”

Eugenics pseudo-scientists and anti-immigration advocates took it upon themselves to put a stop to this outrage. A plan was devised to identify the feeble-minded—Jews were feebleminded, it was agreed, but so were blacks and foreigners—then put them in institutions where they would be either isolated or sterilized to prevent them from breeding.

Margaret Sanger, one of the movement’s most vocal advocates, argued that “fostering the good for nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty . . . there’s no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles . . . this dead weight of human waste.” When interviewed on the subject, Theodore Roosevelt said that “so-ciety has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind,” while George Bernard Shaw said that “only eugenics can save mankind.”

A “science” aimed at improving the human race, eugenics, in its most extreme, racist form, meant to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit.” Elements of the philosophy became national policy. Segregation laws were written, marriage laws enacted, and forced sterilization performed on thousands of mental institu-tions patients. California became the third state to adopt these laws in 1909, and the state soon became the epicenter of the American eugenics movement.

At its best, Eugenics was a scientific curiosity born in the Victorian era. At its worst, a repressive and racist ideology reinvented in the United States with the intention to “subtract [from the population] emancipated Negroes, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists who fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world.” Eugenicists wanted blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. Only this group, they believed, was fit to populate the earth.

The movement would have eventually fizzled had it not been for the extensive financing of philanthropic organizations like the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman fortune, which paid local charities to seek out Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants to “subject them to deportation, confinement, and forced sterilization,” as the plan was to eventually wipe away the reproductive capacity of the inferior and the unfit until none were left in the world.

Supreme Justice

In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” Twenty or so years later, the Nazis at the Nur-emberg trials quoted the Justice’s words in their defense, for only after the eugenics movement had become full-cemented in the United States was it exported to Germany. Hitler became an avid student of American eugenics laws. In fact, he legitimized his anti-Semitism by presenting it in the scientific platter of eugenics and declaring that science was on his side. Granted, Hitler’s racism was his own, but the academic backing of the movement had been coined in the United States.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler quoted American eugenics, demonstrating thorough knowledge of the subject, even as he had substituted the term “Nordic” Race with “Aryan.” Racial purity and dominance became the momen-tum that propelled Nazism. Doc-tors were commissioned to “create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and hand select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.” Euthanasia, as a matter of fact, was point 8 in the Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder’s Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ Plasm in the Human Population, funded by the Carnegie Institution in 1911.

From the US with love

At the Reich’s onset, eugenicists across the United States “wel-comed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort,” and it was the Rockefeller Foundation who practically financed the beginnings of the German eugenics program, including the investigations of Josef Mengele before he went to Auschwitz. As the rationale of the time went, it was better to stop possible immigrants at the source, rather than allow them to get to the United States and run the risk of them slipping through the sieve. The Rockefeller Foundation thus continued to finance German researchers up until the onset of the Second War even though it was widely known that in Germany the eugenics program involved the gassing of mental institution patients.

Beginning in 1940, between fifty and one hundred thousand mental institutions patients and other facilities were gassed. “While we were pussy footing around . . . the Germans were calling a spade a spade,” said Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society.

By this time, Hitler was already fully vested in the eugenics program to rid German asylums of mental defectives and the rest of Europe of undesirables. “I have studied with great interest,” Hitler told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concern-ing prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

Thus a small theory postulated in 1863 mushroomed out of proportion close to one century later. By the end of the Second World War, it is estimated that approximately 17 million people were murdered in what Michael Berenbaum describes as a “geno-cide state,” where every arm of Germany’s bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. “Churches and the Interior Minis-try supplied birth records showing who was Jewish. German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the ovens.” As Berenbaum put it, The Final Solution of the Jewish Question was “in the eyes of the perpetra-tors . . . Germany’s greatest achievement.”

As in the United States with so called defectives, in Germany “anti-Jewish policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.” And even though virtually the entire population of PolishJews died in concentration camps, Hitler’s ultimate ambition since the onset of the war was to “exterminate, expel, or enslave the Polish people.”

“All Poles,” Hitler vowed, “will disappear from the world.” The Nazis decided that Poland was to be eradicated and that in no more than 15 years the “Polish state, under German occupation, was to be fully cleared of ethnic Poles.” Only 3-4 million Poles were to be allowed to survive, and this only to serve as slaves for German settlers. “They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist.”

“Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need,” Hitler said.

Wherever they went, the Germans imposed a brutal racist regime, tossing into the ghettos “everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened and which anyway had to be destroyed.” As with the eugenics laws that had been refined in Cali-fornia thirty years before, Aktion T4 was the perfected form of the program. It was “established in 1939 to maintain the genetic purity of the German population by killing or sterilizing German and Austrian citizens who were disabled or suffering from mental illness.” During the first two years of the war, more than 500,000 pa-tients, including children, were sent to euthanasia centers to be killed, while another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized. It is worth to note that in the United States “only” about 60,000 Americans had been sterilized before the war, with California doing nearly half of these coercive sterilizations. “Even after the war, the state ac-counted for a third of all such surgeries.”

Sterilization experiments

But the thing was, sterilizing patients through surgical means proved to be too slow a method for the Germans. From early 1941 until 1945, sterilization experi-ments were conducted at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and other places by Dr. Carl Clauberg. “The purpose of these experiments was to develop a method of sterilization which would be suitable for sterilizing millions of people with a minimum of time and effort. These experiments were conducted by means of X-ray, sur-gery, and various drugs. Thousands of victims were sterilized. Aside from its experimentation, the Nazi government sterilized around 400,000 individuals as part of its compulsory sterilization program. Intravenous injections of solutions speculated to contain iodine and silver nitrate were successful, but had unwanted side ef-fects such as vaginal bleeding, severe abdominal pain, and cervical cancer. Therefore, radiation treatment became the favored choice of sterilization. Specific amounts of exposure to radiation destroyed a person’s ability to produce ova and sperm. The radiation was administered through deception. Prisoners were brought into a room and asked to fill out forms, which took two to three minutes. In this time, the radiation treatment was administered and, unbeknownst to the prisoners, they were rendered completely sterile.”

Whenever sterilization failed, castration was the next logical method to be applied: Approximately 15, 000 gay men were sent to concentration camps to be tortured, used in hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, castrated, and killed.

The Final Solution

But when in the United States eugenicists had “pussy footed” around the issue of euthanasia, as Leon Whitney put it, in Germany the Final Solution of the Jewish Question was a “plan for killing all the Jews in Europe.” Now, how to accomplish this when precious ammo was needed in the battle field? How to effectively murder hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, without wasting bullets on them? Resourceful as they were, the Germans began experimenting on concentration camp inmates to determine which was the most effective killing method. While Mengele continued his experiments on twins, other doctors set about freezing inmates, infecting them with malaria, exposing them to mustard gas, giving them sea water (and nothing else) to subsist, feeding them poison, injecting them with a sulfonamide solution or typhus, setting them on fire, making them the targets of incendiary bombs, dropping them from high altitudes or locking them in the back of a van to kill them using gas from the exhaust, all in the quest for efficient killing. When this proved to be too slow, more lethal gases were tried. “For large-scale killing by gas, however, fixed sites would be needed, and it was decided, probably by Eichmann, that the Jews should be brought to camps specifically built for this purpose.” It is estimated that six million Jews died both in the concentration and extermination camps, where up to 2,000 inmates could be gassed at once. Only about one third of the victims died instantaneously. The rest were slowly poisoned for as long as twenty minutes. Joann Kremer, and SS doctor who super-vised the gassings, testified that “shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives. When they were removed, the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.”

Though the final death toll of the Second War will probably never be known, it is estimated that not less than 20 million people died because of it, almost all of them victims of one of the largest genocides in history. “After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eu-genicist. Biographers of the cele-brated and the powerful did not dwell on the attraction of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.”

The American Solution

After the war eugenics was de-clared an act against humanity— an act of genocide. With time, the United States managed to white-wash its history and even to al-most completely erase its participation in this tragedy by wiping out all mention of eugenics from medical volumes and history books “by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by suc-ceeding generations that never knew the truth.”

Not knowing about them, however, does not mean that the injustices have stopped. Mengele’s boss, doctor Otmar von Verschuer, a longtime hero in American eugenics circles, managed to escape prosecution in the Nuremberg Trials. He “reestablished his connections with California eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade Human Genetics.”

But the modus operandi of these former eugenicists needed to change, and a new way of controlling the propagation of undesirables needed to be devised. In the late 1940’s penicillin was denied to syphilitics in the Black Ghetto. Dr. Mayer, better known as The Man with the Golden Knife, continued roaming the country in his quest to lobotomize as many patients as possible. It was during this time that he perfected his method and was able to perform a frontal lo-botomy in under five minutes.

World War II sprouted an-other epidemic of mentally unfit soldiers. Again the war served to emphasize that mental illness can occur among common folk and not just the “genetically weak.” Still, lobotomy continued being performed well after the war. In extreme cases, a topectomy was performed on live patients to “scoop” out parts of the brain by neurosurgeons in what was called the “Columbia Greystone Study” to determine the extent of mental illness.

The amount of lobotomies being performed after WWII rose in the United States. As late as 1968, doctors still insisted that some people needed to be lobotomized to prevent violent crimes. Their main targets became women classified as “bad girls,” diagnosed as “passionate,” “disobedient, oversexed” or “sexually wayward.” Exactly the same diagnosis that had been used at the Sonoma State Home in California several years before to coercively sterilize women that had been deemed “unfit.”

Redlich and Hollinshead conducted a study on the kind of mental treatment rich people bought and found out that it was vastly different from the treatment poor people could afford. The most severe kinds of psychosis were found among the poorest people, which proved the point of social selection vs social causation. There is the possibility, however, that neurosis was a diagnosis given to well to do people while the poor got diagnosed as psychotics and then lobotomized.

Ervin Goffman, a Sociologist who worked in a mental institution to do research, compared mental institutions with concen-tration camps. When mental hos-pitals were built all across the United States in the 1840’s, Dorothea Dix argued that the worst asylum was going to be better than the best house. Sadly, she was proved wrong. Mental hospitals soon became “hell holes” where brutal, sadistic staff terrorized the inmates and food was prepared by patients who had tuberculosis. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that mental hospitals in the US were not much different from the con-centration camps of the Germans.

In his book Being Sane in Insane Places, David Rosenheim wrote that conducts are patholo-gized. You are in a mental institution, therefore everything you do is crazy. “It’s the institution, not the illness, that drove people crazy.” The mental hospital was a dehumanizing environment that manufactured its raw material; it made crazy people out of merely sick people. Now that they had been corralled in these institutions, patients became sitting duck for those savvy enough to realize that the sterilization and segregation laws enacted at the turn of the century had not been modified. The number of lobotomies peaked in 1955 because “there was a rising epidemic in mental illness.” It is interesting to note that the main targets of this practice came from social groups labeled as minorities, being the term “minorities” the new euphemism for former “defectives” and “undesirables,” the people specifically targeted by eugenicists before the war to be sterilized and, in extreme cases, euthanized. Of course, as George Orwell wrote in The Politics of Language, language can always be manipulated linguistically to dis-guise what’s being said. Not too long before, Final Solution had been the preferred euphemism for genocide.

Now people argue that all this happened a long time ago, that times are different now. Lately, however, we have been witnessing a re-emergence of an ideology of unabashed, immoral individualism: Why waste money in the chronically ill if they’re not going to get better? Why provide welfare to illegal immigrants or educate their children when they’re only parasites living off the tax system? Justice Wendell Holmes must be turning in his grave knowing that, instead of implementing a Solution once and for all, the system is letting thou-sands of children starve because of the imbecility of their parents —they just don’t get it through their heads that they are not wanted in this country. Sadly for the gentrified genetic lines out there, until a new American Solu-tion is devised, they will continue to propagate their kind.

by America Martin