Cruel World (3 page)

This was Adolf Hitler’s legacy. The Nazis’ evil utopian dream—a world controlled by a physically perfect people of pure ethnicity in which the racially unacceptable and economically useless would be eliminated—had lasted for only a brief moment in history. But in that time it had grown
to monstrous proportions, fertilized by indifference and unwitting support in the nations that had, with enormous human cost, put an end to it.

Hitler’s undeviating progress toward the creation of the Aryan superempire he described in
Mein Kampf
was carefully paced and politically astute. He was only too willing to adjust his ideology as necessary to procure temporary political support or economic advantage, even allying himself for a time with the “Judeo-Bolshevik” rulers of the Soviet Union, the better to devour Poland. Not even his obsession with race was inviolable. Hermann Rauschning, an early colleague, quoted Hitler as stating:

But first, it would be essential to establish total control of German society. New visions must be promoted to replace the bad aftereffects of the First World War, and the economy must be revived by stringent elimination of waste and by full employment. Above all, there must be no more factionalism or variance of point of view, but total obedience to a particular leader, and it must all be achieved without arousing domestic resistance or foreign sanctions.

From the beginning, Hitler recognized the importance of children in his scheme. The state must “declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.”
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But not all children. They must be healthy “Aryans,” free of “hereditary weakness,” and they must also be properly educated. Those not complying with the first criterion would be eliminated. The rest would be removed at a pliable age from the influence of family and religion and be inculcated with Nazi ideology, ranked from high functionary to serflike laborer according to certain rigid mental and physical standards, trained accordingly, and then be used as commodities where most convenient. The children of the conquered lands would be included. In occupied areas populated with unworthy beings such as Slavs, the indigenous would be eliminated or enslaved and the area would be repopulated with individuals “subject to special norms,” who would be chosen and resettled by “specially constituted racial commissions.” In this way it
would be possible to found “colonies whose inhabitants are exclusively bearers of the highest racial purity and hence of the highest racial efficiency.”
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As a result of these theories, expressed in
Mein Kampf
and implemented by gigantic overlapping bureaucracies, thousands of children would have experiences no child should ever have, spend years in wandering and exile, be separated from their families forever, and die. The process would begin at home.

(photo credit p1.1)

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.
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Hitler approved highly of this law, noting:

An illustration from a German school text on eugenics, showing various types
.
(photo credit 1.1)

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 heavy lobbying of the local welfare authorities and legislatures. The Eugenics Survey of Vermont,
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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.
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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.
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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: