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,3 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. American diplomats reported that the new government’s public health offices were not yet in a position to perform this service “except when specifically requested,” but that they should be coping efficiently within a year. “Heretofore,” they added, “there has been no legal basis for preventing an incompetent suffering from a mental defect, chronic alcoholism, or squandermania from marrying . . . it will no longer be so under the new law.” The effects of the law were often devastating. Applicants who were found to have mentally ill relations or a hereditary illness were not only sterilized. They were forbidden to marry a “healthy person,” as to do so would prevent that partner from producing the offspring needed for the Thousand Year Reich.

Excerpted from Cruel World by Lynn H. Nicholas Copyright © 2005 by Lynn H. Nicholas. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.