The Nazis' extermination programme was carried out in the name of eugenics - but they were by no means the only advocates of racial purification. In this extract from his extraordinary new book, Edwin Black describes how Adolf Hitler's race hatred was underpinned by the work of American eugenicists.
By Edwin Black, The Guardian,
At 4am on November 12 1915, a woman named Anna Bollinger gave birth
at the German-American Hospital in Chicago. The baby was somewhat
deformed and suffered from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities,
as well as other complications. The delivering physicians awakened Dr
Harry Haiselden, the hospital's chief of staff. Haiselden came in at
once. He consulted with colleagues. There was great disagreement over
whether the child could be saved. But Haiselden decided the baby was too
afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. It would be killed. The
method: denial of treatment.
Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of
Bollinger's, heard the news and sped to the hospital to help. She found
the baby, who had been named Allan, alone in a bare room. Walsh pleaded
with Haiselden not to kill the baby by withholding treatment. "It was
not a monster - that child," Walsh later told an inquest. "It was a
beautiful baby. I saw no deformities." Walsh had patted the infant
lightly. Allan's eyes were open, and he waved his tiny fists at her.
Begging the doctor once more, Walsh tried an appeal to his humanity. "If
the poor little darling has one chance in a thousand," she pleaded,
"won't you operate to save it?"
Haiselden laughed at Walsh,
retorting, "I'm afraid it might get well." He was a skilled and
experienced surgeon, trained by the best doctors in Chicago. He was also
an ardent eugenicist. Allan Bollinger duly died. An inquest was
convened a few days later. Haiselden defiantly declared, "I should have
been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child's life. My crime
would have been keeping in existence one of nature's cruellest
blunders." A juror shot back, "What do you mean by that?" Haiselden
responded, "Exactly that. I do not think this child would have grown up
to be a mental defective. I know it."
After tempestuous
proceedings, the inquest ruled: "We believe that a prompt operation
would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the child. We find no
evidence from the physical defects that the child would have become
mentally or morally defective." But they also decided that Haiselden was
within his professional rights to decline treatment. No law compelled
him to operate on the child. He was released unpunished, and efforts by
the Illinois attorney general to indict him for murder were blocked by
the local prosecutor. The doctor considered his legal vindication a
powerful victory for eugenics. "Eugenics? Of course it's eugenics," he
told one reporter.
Haiselden became an overnight celebrity,
known for his many newspaper articles, his speaking tours and outrageous
diatribes. In 1917, Hollywood came calling. The film was called The
Black Stork. Written by Jack Lait, a reporter on the Chicago American,
it was produced in Hollywood and given a massive national distribution
and promotion campaign. Haiselden played himself in a fictionalised
account of a eugenically mismatched couple whom he advises not to have
children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually, the woman
does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die. The
dead child levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ. It was
unbridled cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement; the film
played at movie theatres around the country for more than a decade.
National
publicity advertised it as a "eugenic love story". One advertisement
quoted Swiss eugenicist Auguste Forel's warning: "The law of heredity
winds like a red thread through the family history of every criminal, of
every epileptic, eccentric and insane person. Shall we sit still ...
without applying the remedy?" In 1917, a display advertisement for The
Black Stork read: "Kill Defectives, Save the Nation and See 'The Black
Stork'." Various methods of eugenic euthanasia - including gassing the
unwanted in lethal chambers - were a part of everyday American parlance
and ethical debate some two decades before Nevada approved the first
such chamber for criminal executions in 1921.
As America's
eugenics movement gathered pace, it inspired a host of imitators. In
France, Belgium, Sweden, England and elsewhere in Europe, cliques of
eugenicists did their best to introduce eugenic principles into national
life; they could always point to recent precedents established in the
United States.
Germany was no exception. From the turn of the
century, German eugenicists formed academic and personal relationships
with the American eugenics establishment, in particular with Charles
Davenport, the pioneering founder of the Eugenics Record Office on Long
Island, New York, which was backed by the Harriman railway fortune. A
number of other charitable American bodies generously funded German race
biology with hundreds of thousands of dollars, even after the
depression had taken hold.
Germany had certainly developed its
own body of eugenic knowledge and library of publications. Yet German
readers still closely followed American eugenic accomplishments as the
model: biological courts, forced sterilisation, detention for the
socially inadequate, debates on euthanasia. As America's elite were
describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as
"bacteria," "vermin," "mongrels" and "subhuman", a superior race of
Nordics was increasingly seen as the answer to the globe's eugenic
problems. US laws, eugenic investigations and ideology became blueprints
for Germany's rising tide of race biologists and race-based
hatemongers.
One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the
German army. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action.
While there, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which
extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American ethnological
stalwarts. And he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney,
president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who
extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its "corruption" by Jews, Negroes,
Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The
young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail.
In The
Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote: "Mistaken regard for what are
believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of
human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and
the sterilisation of such adults as are themselves of no value to the
community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and
human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race."
One day in the early 1930s, Whitney visited Grant to show off a
letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now
out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only
smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German,
thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race. The fan letter
called Grant's book "his Bible". The man who sent those letters was
Adolf Hitler.
Hitler displayed his knowledge of American
eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. In Mein Kampf, for
example, he declared: "The demand that defective people be prevented
from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest
reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act
of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved
sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health
as a whole."
Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the
recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic
quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings
toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course,
it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is
made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on
principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races
from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is
peculiar to the People's State."
Hitler proudly told his
comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. "Now that
we know the laws of heredity," he told a fellow Nazi, "it is possible
to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings
from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of
several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people
whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious
to the racial stock."
Nor did Hitler fail to grasp the eugenic
potential of gas and the lethal chamber, a topic that was already being
discussed in German eugenic circles before Mein Kampf was published.
Hitler, who had himself been hospitalised for battlefield gas injuries,
wrote: "If at the beginning of the war and during the war 12,000 or
15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under
poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our best German
workers in the field, the sacrifices of millions at the front would not
have been in vain. On the contrary: 12,000 scoundrels eliminated in time
might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the
future."
On January 30 1933, Hitler seized power. During the
12-year Reich, he never varied from the eugenic doctrines of
identification, segregation, sterilisation, euthanasia, eugenic courts
and eventually mass termination in lethal chambers. During the Reich's
first 10 years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as
the logical fulfilment of their own decades of research and effort.
Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilising hundreds
of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German
society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia passed its
1924 sterilisation act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia's
Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "The
Germans are beating us at our own game."
Most of all, American
raceologists were proud to have inspired the strictly eugenic state the
Nazis were constructing. In those early years of the Third Reich, Hitler
and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modelled
on laws already introduced across America and upheld by the supreme
court. Nazi doctors, and even Hitler himself, regularly communicated
with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that
Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the US. American
eugenicists were eager to assist.
This was particularly true of
California's eugenicists, who led the nation in sterilisation and
provided the most scientific support for Hitler's regime. In 1934, as
Germany's sterilisations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the
California eugenic leader and immigration activist CM Goethe was
ebullient in congratulating ES Gosney of the San Diego-based Human
Betterment Foundation for his impact on Hitler's work. Upon his return
in 1934 from a eugenic fact-finding mission in Germany, Goethe wrote
Gosney a letter of praise. The foundation was so proud of Goethe's
letter that they reprinted it in their 1935 annual report.
"You
will be interested to know," Goethe's letter proclaimed, "that your work
has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the intellectuals
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."
Related Reading:
Eugenics And The Nazis -- The California Connection
The Darwinian Basis for Eugenics
Progressives' Dirty, Little Secret
Sterilising the Left’s Eugenics History
'War Against the Weak--Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race'
Progressivism, Eugenics, and the Jewish Butcher of Buchenwald
The Return of the Anti-Chinese League
"Being A Progressive Means Never Having To Admit That You Were Wrong Or Saying You're Sorry."
The Left's Lie About Fascism Will Outlive Cockroaches In A Nuclear Winter
George Bernard Shaw Favours Euthanasia
Taking Life: Humans
Carrie Buck, 'Three Generations, No Imbeciles, But A Mandate'
How Progressives Killed Robert Goldstein Through Censorship, Police State Tactics, Unconstitutional Laws, & Railroading All The Way Into A Cattlecar On The Road To A Nazi Concentration Camp
Sterilisation in America
The Darwinian Basis for Eugenics
Progressives' Dirty, Little Secret
Sterilising the Left’s Eugenics History
'War Against the Weak--Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race'
Progressivism, Eugenics, and the Jewish Butcher of Buchenwald
The Return of the Anti-Chinese League
"Being A Progressive Means Never Having To Admit That You Were Wrong Or Saying You're Sorry."
The Left's Lie About Fascism Will Outlive Cockroaches In A Nuclear Winter
George Bernard Shaw Favours Euthanasia
Taking Life: Humans
Carrie Buck, 'Three Generations, No Imbeciles, But A Mandate'
How Progressives Killed Robert Goldstein Through Censorship, Police State Tactics, Unconstitutional Laws, & Railroading All The Way Into A Cattlecar On The Road To A Nazi Concentration Camp
Sterilisation in America
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