The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070 * The Future of Freedom Foundation * Aug/94 * Book Revi

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The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
* The Future of Freedom Foundation * Aug/94 *


Book Review
==================
by Richard M. Ebeling

The Nazi Connection: 
Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism 
===============================================================
by Stefan Kuhl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 166 pages;
$22.00.

In his 1910 textbook, Elementary Principles of Economics, world-
renowned Yale Professor Irving Fisher devoted part of a chapter to
"Population in Relation to Wealth." Fisher warned of the problem of
"race suicide" caused by the fact that the most industrious and
productive members of society tended to have fewer children than
those belonging to lower racial and social groups. "If the vitality
or vital capital is impaired by a breeding of the worst and a
cessation of the breeding of the best, no greater calamity could be
imagined." But he was pleased to point out:

A method of attaining the contrary result, namely, reproducing from
the best and suppressing reproduction from the worst, has been
suggested by the late Sir Francis Galton of England, under the name
of "eugenics." This movement, which promises to become a strong
one, aims to prevent (by isolation in public institutions and in
some cases by surgical operations) the possibility of the
propagation of feeble-minded and certain other classes of
defectives and degenerates, also to develop a public sentiment
which shall condemn marriages in which either husband or wife has
a transmissible disease, or any inheritable taint of epilepsy,
insanity, etc., or is otherwise unfit to become a parent.

And in his 1911 textbook, Principles of Economics, in the chapter
on "Population," Harvard Professor  Frank W. Taussig noted:

More and more thought has been given of late years to the strange
contrast between our care in breeding animals and our carelessness
in breeding men. . . . Certain types of criminals and paupers breed
only their kind, and society has a right and a duty to protect its
members from the repeated burden of maintaining and guarding such
parasites. . . . The human race could be immensely improved in
quality, and its capacity for happy living immensely increased, if
those of poor physical and mental endowment were prevented from
multiplying. . . . More light will come in time from what is called
eugenics; that is, from systematic inquiry as to the transmittal of
inborn and acquired traits from generation to generation, with a
view to the possibilities of selection and breeding.

Professor Taussig did admit that "it is difficult to conceive any
such system which would not imply the sacrifice of present
happiness of countless individuals, for the sake of a cold and
distant ideal of ultimate racial improvement."

The significance of these passages is that two of America's most
respected economists of the time found it appropriate to basically
endorse the idea of racial breeding and control in standard
economics textbooks. It is one indication of how widespread such
notions had become in the first decades of the 20th century.

The modern eugenics movement began with Sir Francis Galton in the
1880s. The guiding premise was that genetic background influenced
the mental and physical development of both individuals and racial
and social groups. Science, it was believed, would enable a
discovery of those genetic "types" in humans that represented
racial and social degeneracy as well as those representing racial
and social improvement. Wise laws and state power could then see to
it that the racially and socially undesirable were prevented from
propagating more of their "inferior types" through methods such as
forced sterilization. At the same time, incentives and sexual
breeding techniques could induce the genetically superior to
increase their numbers and thus improve the race and the culture.

Beginning in 1907, with legislation passed in Indiana, forced
sterilization on the basis of eugenic doctrine began spreading
across the United States, with finally thirty states having such
laws on the books. In this century, upwards of 50,000 Americans
have been sterilized by order of the state. The constitutionality
of such compulsion was upheld in 1927, when the case Buck vs. Bell
went before the Supreme Court. With only one dissent, the court
said, in a majority opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes:

It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute
offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility,
society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing
their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is
broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.

The court, in other words, went beyond saying that a person is
guilty until proven innocent; it declared that hypothetical persons
were presumed guilty of criminal intent even before being conceived
and may not be brought into existence. The 1927 decision has never
been overturned, and is still a part of the law of the land.

After World War II, German lawyers defending those accused of being
Nazi war criminals for having forcibly sterilized two million
people as a part of Nazi racial doctrine pointed to the
sterilization laws in America and the 1927 Supreme Court decision
as justification for their clients' conduct.

In his recent book, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism
and National Socialism, Stefan Kuhl traces the relationships
between the Nazi racial theorists and members of the American
eugenics movement in the 1930s. American eugenicists and German
advocates of "racial hygiene" were already communicating and
sharing ''scientific'' information before the First World War. The
conflict in Europe, and particularly American entry into the war
against Germany, broke off all such ties. But shortly after the
war's end, contacts began to reemerge, with their American
colleagues being especially helpful in getting German eugenicists
accepted back into their community of scholars.

Throughout the 1920s, the German proponents of racial sterilization
drew upon the arguments of their American counterparts, using data
the American eugenicists had collected to justify the case for
distinguishing between "superior" and "inferior" racial types; they
also made the case that America was more enlightened and
progressive in its racial policies, since numerous American states
had passed sterilization laws, while German law was "backward" in
its narrow defense of individual rights that frustrated equivalent
German legislation.

With Hitler's coming to power in 1933, Germany's racial hygienists
came into their own, with institutes for race science and research
being established or expanded. They solicited articles by many of
the leading American eugenicists for their "scholarly" journals,
translated many of their works into German, and gave them wide
distribution. The Nazis used these American books and articles to
demonstrate that they were not alone in the world in advocating
compulsory racial improvement and purity.

A number of American eugenicists happily cooperated. Harry L.
Laughlin, who authored the "model" sterilization law for Virginia
that was then copied by several other states, saw his proposals
explicitly implemented in Germany's 1933 Hereditary Health Law,
that prohibited racial intermarriage and codified forced
sterilization in the new Germany. As a tribute, the University of
Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary degree in 1936, which he
enthusiastically accepted.

Even in the late 1930s and early 1940s, some American eugenics
publications refused to criticize Nazi race policy in general or
legal persecution of the Jews in particular. Some of the leading
eugenicists argued that to do so would be to unjustifiably mix
science with politics. But in 1942, American eugenicist T. U. H.
Ellinger published an article in the Journal of Heredity, in which
he said that after a visit to Germany in 19391940, it was clear to
him that Nazi treatment of the Jews was merely "a large-scale
breeding project, with the purpose of eliminating from the nation
the hereditary attributes of the Semitic race" and eugenic science
"can undoubtedly assist them in carrying out a reasonably correct
labeling of every doubtful individual. The rest remains in the
cruel hands of the S.S., the S.A. and the Gestapo."

In 1940, another leading American eugenicist, Lothrop Stoddard,
said, after spending four months in Germany, that the Nazis were
"weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a
scientific and truly humanitarian way" and that the "Jews problem"
was "already settled in principle and soon to be settled by the
physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich."
Stoddard had even sat in on some cases of the German Hereditary
Supreme Court and helped the judges reach a positive verdict for
sterilization concerning, "An 'apelike' man with receding forehead
and flaring nostrils who had a history of homosexuality and was
married to a 'Jewess' by whom he had three 'ne'er-do-well
children.'"

Professor Kuhl emphasizes that by the end of the 1930s a sizable
number of American eugenicists began to differentiate between what
they considered their own scientific studies and the racialism of
the Nazi regime. And a growing number refused to have anything to
do with their German counterparts. They believed that Nazi practice
was prejudicing their own work in the eyes of the international
community of scholars. But the fact remains that the American
eugenics movement, the compulsory sterilization laws in thirty
states, and the 1927 Supreme Court decision served as powerful
legitimizers for Nazi racial theory and practice. As the German
journal Grossdeutscher Pressdienst declared in 1936, "[F]or us
Germans it is especially important to know and to see how one of
the biggest states in the world with Nordic stock [the U.S.]
already has race legislation which is quite comparable to that of
the German Reich."