Applied Eugenics
Hitler was not very original in his desire to promote the domination
of his own “race.” This is a desire that has been present since the
beginning of time. Even the author of Genesis has God proclaim that
he will “make man in our image, in the likeness of our selves.” The
idea was, and in many instances still is, to keep control of the
activities of life in the hands of those who look, think, and act
the way you do. Such control, if it is to be total, requires the
production of more people like oneself and the subjugation,
exclusion, or even the removal of those who are different in race,
class, or ideas. By the late nineteenth century biological science
had been added to the arsenal of the promoters of such social
control and had led to the creation of the field of eugenics, a
discipline based on fuzzy definitions and often deliberately skewed
research, which would be so perverted by the Nazis that its very
name has become unacceptable.
But in the mid-1920s, when Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published,
eugenics was quite the rage. In England and the United States, where
it had originated, eugenics was aimed principally at improving the
educated white upper and middle classes and controlling the increase
of the poor lower classes, whatever their ethnicity. The tendency to
poverty and all the negative characteristics associated with it,
such as crime and disease, were assumed to be inherited. In the
United States this theory was not only applied to those already
resident in the country: it was observed that many of the “poor”
were recent immigrants, mostly of Southern and Eastern European
origin, who also happened to be Catholic and Jewish. This led to the
inevitable conclusion that immigration from certain areas should be
limited. And indeed, promoters of eugenics were prominent among
those who testified in favor of the Immigration Acts of 1921 and
1924, which established quotas based on the percentage of each
nationality already in the United States in 1890, that is, before
the massive influx of the “alien stream” from Southern and Eastern
Europe. Hitler approved highly of this law, noting:
There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a
better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course it is
not our model German Republic, but the American Union…. By
refusing immigration on principle to elements in poor health, by
simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in
slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the folkish state
concept.
Although in the United States there was much advice on proper
marriage and the duty of the worthy to reproduce (ideal farm
families were, for example, put on display at state fairs), the main
thrust of eugenics was toward prevention of the increase of those
bearing characteristics considered “irremediable” at that time, such
as epilepsy, tuberculosis, alcoholism, insanity, and sexual
promiscuity. To these, some thinkers would add the rather less
well-defined conditions of “shiftlessness,” “asocial activity,” and
“feeblemindedness.” By the outbreak of World War I thirty American
states had laws prohibiting marriage for persons suffering from many
of these afflictions.
The eugenicists soon concluded that one of the simplest ways to
eliminate social degeneracy was through sterilization, a procedure
that had been used tacitly since the late nineteenth century on
certain criminal and insane inmates in state institutions in the
United States. By 1917 sixteen American states had passed laws
authorizing sterilizations in public institutions, and more would
follow. The practice was eventually extended to include people who
were not, in fact, either criminals or hopelessly insane, but who
had failed certain intelligence tests, or were considered socially
undesirable “trash.” The victims of these laws were classified by
grossly unscientific standards based on genealogical surveys, visual
evaluation, and hearsay. They were viewed not as human beings but as
objects that burdened the state.
Finding and classifying such individuals required intensive
fieldwork, while extending the laws required intensive lobbying of
the local welfare authorities and legislatures. The Eugenics Survey
of Vermont, which would result in that state’s 1931 sterilization
law, is a prime example of the methodology that would later be used
by the Nazis. The survey was set up by Henry F. Perkins, a
passionate and politically astute zoology professor at the
University of Vermont. Perkins himself did not do fieldwork. That
job was carried out by a very few dedicated operatives who had no
doubt about who was “trash,” and in particular, by the zealous
Harriet Abbott, who had been trained at the Eugenics Record Office
in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, cradle of the U.S. movement. Much
information was willingly provided by state welfare and correction
agencies that opened their files on individuals in the hope of
obtaining better funding from the state legislature. The program
required “a census of the feebleminded.” All schoolchildren would be
tested and “defectives” registered. Recipients of welfare and
inmates of institutions would also be tested, and the results would
be analyzed according to location, “race” (in this case French
Canadians and Native Americans were targeted), and family history.
Genealogical analysis would find inbreeding and other degenerate
trends, and each family’s “expense to the state” would be estimated.
From all this information Miss Abbott would create profiles of
defective families. Soon 6,000 people had been listed and sixty-two
family lines analyzed. Unfortunately, some of these included not a
few of Vermont’s most respectable citizens, and had to be revised.
The hard-line approach of these efforts led to the defeat of
Professor Perkins’s first attempt to promote a sterilization law in
1927. He and his colleagues did not give up, but they did tone down
their rhetoric and put more emphasis on such positive ideas as child
welfare, and in 1931, after fierce debate, the Act for Human
Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization was passed by the Vermont
legislature.
Laws such as this one did not go unchallenged. In England,
sterilization, viewed as a violation of the Offenses Against the
Person Act of 1861, was never legalized. To many in the United
States, the often involuntary sterilizations seemed to violate the
constitutional rights of the victims, and laws similar to that of
Vermont were suspended or rejected outright by a number of state
courts and legislatures. But the eugenics promoters were not easily
turned aside. In 1928 they found a case with which to challenge the
opposition: that of the “moral imbecile” Carrie Buck. They would
take Buck v. Bell all the way to the Supreme Court.
Carrie Buck was the daughter of a “feebleminded” woman who had been
institutionalized for years. In 1924, the seventeen-year-old Carrie,
about to be committed to the same institution on the same grounds,
had an illegitimate daughter. If the child could be shown to be
feebleminded too, the eugenics partisans reasoned, sterilization of
Carrie on hereditary grounds would be justified. The evidence was
based on the prevailing eugenics theories. The results of IQ tests
administered to Carrie and her mother showed them to be “morons.”
Harry Laughlin, one of the most active promoters of the science and
director of the Eugenics Record Office, served as an expert witness
and, on the basis of the family’s pedigree, but without actually
examining them, pronounced them members of “the shiftless, ignorant,
and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” A Red Cross
worker, sent by Laughlin, visited Carrie’s seven-month-old baby,
Vivian, and said that the child had “a look” that was “not quite
normal.” A test administered by the Eugenics Record Office concluded
that she was “below average.” The Supreme Court voted eight to one
that the family was afflicted with “hereditary feeblemindedness” and
noted that “sterilization on eugenic grounds was within the police
power of the state.” In his opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
wrote this much quoted statement:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon
the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could
not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for
these lesser sacrifices … in order to prevent our being swamped
with incompetence…. The principle that sustains compulsory
vaccination is broad enough to cover the cutting of the Fallopian
tubes…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
To make quite sure that this family did not reproduce, Carrie Buck’s
younger sister, Doris, who was not in an institution, was sterilized
also but told that the operation had been for a stomach problem. In
later years she and her husband tried in vain to have children. She
did not discover the reason for her inability to do so until 1980,
when, she said, “I broke down and cried. My husband and me wanted
children desperately. We were crazy about them. I never knew what
they’d done to me.”
It is clear that neither sister would be considered mentally
deficient by today’s standards. Little Vivian reportedly did fine at
school before her untimely death in 1932, and, a few years after the
sterilization of the sisters, the designers of the intelligence
tests would themselves acknowledge the inaccuracy of the tests
administered to the family. Despite this fact, the policy would
continue for decades in a number of states. As recently
as September 29, 2003, the governor of North Carolina made a public
apology and ordered compensation for some 7,600 people who had been
sterilized between 1929 and 1974.
By 1933, when Hitler came to power, nearly 20,000 legal
sterilizations had been performed in the United States. Welfare
programs necessitated by the Depression would encourage this effort,
bringing the total to around 36,000 by 1941. But despite Oliver
Wendell Holmes and the eugenics fanatics, science had already begun
to demonstrate the fallacies of the statistics and arguments used to
promote eugenics theory and the inherent prejudices it embodied.
Thinkers from Bertrand Russell to Clarence Darrow had also
recognized its threat to democracy. Political opponents, frequently
condemned in the heat of debate as lacking in intelligence, might,
according to Russell, suddenly find themselves under the knife; and,
stated Darrow in 1926, a group in power, intelligent or not, “would
inevitably direct human breeding in their own interests.” Hitler had
absorbed this message only too well. In Mein Kampf, he had said:
A prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part
of the degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only six
hundred years, would not only free humanity from an immeasurable
misfortune, but would lead to a recovery which today seems scarcely
conceivable. If the fertility of the healthiest bearers of the
nationality is thus consciously and systematically promoted, the
result will be a race that at least will have eliminated the germs
of our present physical and hence spiritual decay.
The Nazis got straight to work on these concepts. Despite the
examples of legal sterilization programs in the United States,
Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere, no such legislation had found
approval in the Weimar Republic. Hitler did not hesitate in 1933:
the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny, without
any consent clause, was approved on July 14. Ever the politician,
Hitler delayed its publication until July 25 so as not to endanger
the July 20 signing of his Concordat with the Vatican, for which
sterilization was, of course, anathema.
Publication of the law was backed by propaganda full of references
to examples from the United States, and indeed by vocal support from
some American eugenicists, who would not change their opinions until
such time as Hitler made shocking verbal attacks on other “Nordic”
peoples and on the United States itself.
Administration of the new regulation was carefully thought out.
People could volunteer for the procedure, or physicians could refer
their cases, without their consent, to hereditary health courts.
These consisted of a panel of three members, one of whom had to be
an expert eugenicist, who was unlikely to be very objective. There
was an appeals court, but once an appeal was denied, sterilization
was compulsory. The response was overwhelming: in the first two
years after the implementation of the law on January 1, 1934,
388,400 “denunciations” (ten times the American total for the
century) were filed, mainly by mental institutions. The courts and
operating rooms were pushed to keep up. An American observer,
watching from an operating room gallery in Berlin, described the
assembly-line procedure:
Down below six doctors were hard at work…. Hospital beds came
and went with methodical precision. The doctors made quick, deft
incisions in white abdomen walls, spread the slit, and applied
surgical clamps. They probed, delicately lifted a tube which they
wrapped and cut. The wound was sewed, and the body was wheeled off
to be replaced by another…. For more than an hour I saw women
come in with the cradle of life intact and leave empty shells.
By 1936, 168,989 procedures had been carried out, mostly for the
flexible category of “congenital feeblemindedness,” but also for
epilepsy, alcoholism, severe malformations, and deafness. There was some
consideration of age: all sterilization of children under eleven was
prohibited, as was forcible sterilization of juveniles under
fifteen. After that, the full force of the law could be imposed.
The number of those eligible for sterilization was extended beyond
the obviously handicapped by a clause in the Law Against Habitual
Criminals, passed in November 1933, which permitted incarceration of
wrongdoers and “asocials” in mental institutions where they could be
sterilized for “hereditary criminality.” As time went on the definition of
“asocial” became ever more elastic. A series of German eugenicists
struggled mightily to categorize this group. Various degrees of
affliction were identified, and enormous and sometimes contradictory
genealogical studies, much like those undertaken in Vermont, were
prepared to prove that asociality was hereditary. In the end, the
asocial label became a convenient catchall category for anyone who
did not fit into the Nazi social scheme. The Nazi criteria were
economic and reproductive, and they targeted the traditional welfare
categories of the homeless, the chronically unemployed, or
“work-shy,” who were an expense to the state, as well as homosexuals
and prostitutes, who would not have healthy children. In the summer
of 1938, Himmler decreed a Reich Campaign Against the Work-Shy and
sent some 11,000 of these “asocial” souls to concentration camps.
More victims for the sterilizers would be provided by the Marriage
Health Law of 1935, which required medical screening for hereditary
weaknesses before a marriage license could be issued.
Continues…
Excerpted from Cruel World
by Lynn H. Nicholas
Copyright © 2005 by Lynn H. Nicholas.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Lynn H. Nicholas
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-45464-0
