2003-11-09 -- Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California Connection

This was in the Sunday Chronicle, but it's worth posting in case
anyone missed it.  It is an important indication of how some of
America's largest companies and fortunes provided academic funding for
eugenic theories that damaged so many people in this country and was
ultimately the basis for Nazi race theory.  Some of these same
foundations provided the intellectual backing for Prop 187 (taking
away services from undocumented immgrants) and the recent Prop 54.

San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, November 9, 2003


Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

Edwin Black

URL:
sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/09/ING9C2QSKB1.
DTL

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and
exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race
didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United
States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to
power. California eugenicists played an important, although
little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for
ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In
its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings
deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic
stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national
policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as
marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California
became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics
practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the
marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies,"
and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before
World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in
California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of
all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics
movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's
eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as
Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul
Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the
California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University
of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been
for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the
Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman
railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most
respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford,
Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory
and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics'
racist aims.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race
and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which
the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions
such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at
Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index
cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the
removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring
Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as
well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New
York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian
and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject
them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program
and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he
went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the
American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous
eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and
the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which
coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society
in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a
closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and
pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics,

and propagandized for the Nazis.

Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In
1863,

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if
talented people married only other talented people, the result would
be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century,
Galton's ideas were imported to the United States just as Gregor
Mendel's principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenics
advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian
concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also
governed the social and intellectual character of man.

In a United States demographically reeling from immigration upheaval
and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in
the early 20th century. Elitists, utopians and so-called progressives
fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to
make a better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a
repressive and racist ideology. The intent: Populate the Earth with
vastly more of their own socioeconomic and biological kind -- and less
or none of everyone else.

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not
merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond,
blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to
inherit the Earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract
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.

How? By identifying so-called defective family trees and subjecting
them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their
bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive
capability of those deemed weak and inferior -- the so-called unfit.
The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the
population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911
"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." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States
was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In
1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War
I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which
argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which
presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the
standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics"
also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through
the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the
environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily
deficiency."

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement
an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors
practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their
own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk
from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would
be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at
Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant
at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal
neglect.

Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalized, the main solution for
eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and
sterilization, as well as more marriage restrictions. California led
the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with little
or no due process. In its first 25 years of eugenics legislation,
California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women. Many were
classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate," "oversexed" or
"sexually wayward." At the Sonoma State Home, some women were
sterilized because of what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or
labia.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed,
700 on women. The state's two leading sterilization mills in 1933 were
Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with
363 operations. Other sterilization centers included Agnews,
Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its
infamous 1927 decision, 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 are
enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be
coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years
later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their
own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the
campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the
efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing
sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his
anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more
palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to
recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that
science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own
mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in
1924 were made in America.

During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated
deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist
eugenicists. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1924, Hitler quoted
American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of
American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "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 United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the
progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great
interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "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."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenics leader Madison
Grant, calling his race-based eugenics book, "The Passing of the Great
Race," his "bible."

Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic"
or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became
the driving force behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi eugenics would
ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated
Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors
would become the unseen generals in Hitler's war against the Jews and
other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science,
devise the eugenic formulas, and hand-select the victims for
sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.

During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed
Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of
research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi
propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi
scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County
Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health
Association.

In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000
per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning
from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be
interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in
shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind
Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their
opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . 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."

That same year, 10 years after Virginia passed its sterilization act,
Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State
Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are
beating us at our own game."

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded
Germany's eugenic institutions.

By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in
today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926,
Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the
German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and
eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics
institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had
operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller
money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to
construct a major building and take center stage in German race
biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller
Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once
again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization
became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation
and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.

Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes,
mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically
gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society,
declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around ... the
Germans were calling a spade a spade."

A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For
decades,

American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into
heredity.

The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an
unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in
New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office:

JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR
PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS
ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.

At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer,
a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the
Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller
funding of that institute continued both directly and through other
research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer
left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that
was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in
the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer
wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor's journal he edited, that
Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."

Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.

On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the
German Research Society, "My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D.,
Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed
as Hauptsturmführer (captain) and camp physician in the Auschwitz
concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial
groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission
of the SS Reichsführer (Himmler)."

Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found
them,

he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports
and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation.
Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to
Berlin's eugenic institutes.

Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the
foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe
before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been
cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great
institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create
took on a scientific momentum of their own.

After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity -- an
act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California
statutes in their defense -- to no avail. They were found guilty.

However, Mengele's boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer re-
established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone
underground and renamed their crusade "human genetics." Typical was an
exchange July 25, 1946, when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, "It was indeed a
pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my
colleagues in Germany . . . I suppose sterilization has been
discontinued in Germany?" Popenoe offered tidbits about various
American eugenics luminaries and then sent various eugenics
publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee
and other goodies.

Verschuer wrote back, "Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a
great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The
letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I
hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make
possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation."

Soon, Verschuer again became a respected scientist in Germany and
around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the
newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American
eugenicists and geneticists.

In the fall of 1950, the University of Münster offered Verschuer a
position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became
a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary
member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian
Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the
Japanese Society for Human Genetics.

Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a
victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of
Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the
years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including
California, have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and
present, for sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics
movement.

Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the late 20th
century. Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human
code through the Human Genome Project. Now, every individual can be
biologically identified and classified by trait and ancestry. Yet even
now, some leading voices in the genetic world are calling for a
cleansing of the unwanted among us, and even a master human species.

There is understandable wariness about more ordinary forms of abuse,
for example, in denying insurance or employment based on genetic
tests. On Oct. 14, the United States' first genetic
anti-discrimination legislation passed the Senate by unanimous vote.
Yet because genetics research is global, no single nation's law can
stop the threats.



Edwin Black is author of the award-winning "IBM and the Holocaust" and
the recently released "War Against the Weak" (published by Four Walls
Eight Windows), from which this article is adapted.