Cruel World (4 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Hitler had absorbed this message only too well. In
Mein Kampf
, he had said:

The Nazis got straight to work on these concepts. Despite the examples of legal sterilization programs in the United States, Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere,
¹³
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.
¹⁴

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:

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.
¹⁶
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.
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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.”
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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.

The diplomats were correct about the efficiency of the Nazi government in race matters. Within a few years, an enormous centralized bureaucracy not only had some 12,000 local medical officials working on sterilization and marriage issues, but also had set up a national hereditary index, or
Erbkartei
, where the racial characteristics of every inhabitant
would be recorded.
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All these measures seemed fine to Harry Laughlin, expert witness against Carrie Buck, who, despite the fact that he was himself an epileptic, accepted in 1935 an honorary degree from Heidelberg University (conferred, it must be admitted, in absentia), which he declared to be “evidence of a common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics as the practical application of those fundamental biological and social principles which determine the racial endowments and the racial health … of future generations.”
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Although sterilization of criminals, asocials, the mentally deficient, and the physically handicapped could be instituted without too much international criticism, sterilization of healthy, law-abiding individuals on purely racial grounds was not acceptable. This did not lessen Nazi determination to extend the process to those German citizens it defined as belonging to “alien races,” who, if allowed to mate with pure Aryans, would defile the nation. Patience and the use of less controversial methods, such as forced emigration, would be also be required in order to rid the nation of these groups. Essential to all the measures was the definition and registration of members of the “alien races,” which included, but were not limited to, Jews, Gypsies, and blacks.

Less than three months after Hitler’s takeover, Hermann Göring, in his capacity as Minister of the Interior of Prussia, which had jurisdiction over the Rhineland states, ordered a census of the so-called Rhineland Bastards, the illegitimate offspring of “colored” French and American troops sent to occupy that area following World War I. The use of “colored” troops as an occupation force had caused a tremendous controversy in the 1920s.
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German delegates had gone to the Versailles Treaty talks with instructions to try to prevent such a thing. In this they were supported by American military opinion that use of large numbers of “degraded” troops from the French colonies in Africa would open the French to unnecessary criticism. When questioned on this issue by President Woodrow Wilson, French Premier Georges Clemenceau promised to withdraw the colonial troops, stating, “It would be a grave error to occupy the Left Bank with black troops.” For reasons that are unclear, but that certainly included a strong desire to do the opposite of what the Germans wanted, this promise was not kept, and between 30,000 and 40,000 North African, Senegalese, and Malagasy soldiers were deployed, as were a small number of British colonials and even some American blacks. The affair did not become a cause célèbre until April 1920, when, despite contrary advice from both
the British and the Americans, a “colored” French contingent was sent to occupy Frankfurt in response to the illegal entry of German troops into the Ruhr. In the ensuing unrest, the French troops fired on a crowd, causing several casualties.

The German and international press went mad. In London’s
Daily Herald
, under the headline
BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPE. SEXUAL HORROR LET LOOSE BY FRANCE ON RHINE. DISAPPEARANCE OF YOUNG GERMAN GIRLS
, the journalist E. D. Morel wrote that “primitive African barbarians, carriers of syphilis” had been raping German women.
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Deputies in the German Reichstag spoke of the contamination of German youth, and one correctly noted that in America black men would be lynched for such offenses. The German government was careful not to condemn the black troops per se, instead criticizing the French government for sending an alien race to Europe in order to destroy its civilization. Meanwhile, the drama had elicited a plea from the Pope to remove the troops, and a petition of protest was signed by 50,000 Swedish ladies.

Reports to the U.S. State Department from officers in Germany and later press inquiries told a somewhat less sensational story. In their opinion, French discipline had been good and the few crimes committed—thirteen incidents in eighteen months—had been properly dealt with.
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Much of the furor was clearly an attempt to gain sympathy for Germany and to put pressure on France to end the occupation. In an attempt to influence the newly elected American President, Warren G. Harding, German propaganda relating to the “Black Horror” was increased in the United States in early 1921 and culminated in a meeting of 12,000 sympathizers in Madison Square Garden. It was not an unqualified success, as anti-German feeling was seemingly still stronger than racial passion in New York, and a counter-meeting by the American Legion garnered 25,000 attendees.
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In 1923, a Swedish cleric by the name of Liljeblad, who was trying to start his own movement against the “Black Horror,” requested statistics on the number of offspring of black troops in the Rhineland. The German government, not wanting the myth of mass rapine to be discredited, and very limited in its research powers in the occupied zone, had never put together any exact numbers. Liljeblad was forced to do his own calculations, which he based on inaccurate press accounts and hearsay. His conclusions were published in a book he marketed successfully both in the United States and Europe, and in which he declared that in fifteen years there would be 27,000 mixed-race children in the Rhineland, which would be a “curse for all Europe in the future.” Indeed, he said that he had himself
seen numbers of such children, including one in Mainz with “black and white stripes all over his back.” The German government’s own statisticians, stimulated by the good preacher’s request, had meanwhile done their own research, but could only come up with seventy-eight children, a figure they did not publish, preferring to profit from Dr. Liljeblad’s helpful polemics, which had elicited some 67,000 American signatures protesting the presence of the black troops on German soil.
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Further investigations, also kept quiet, did not appreciably raise the totals, and the issue, overshadowed by more important events and the gradual withdrawal of the offending troops, slowly faded.

But all the publicity had had its effect. In the first part of
Mein Kampf
, published in 1925, Hitler, in one of his diatribes on the willful defilement of German blood by the Jews, noted that “it was and is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thoughts and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization.”
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This theory was later backed up for the Nazi faithful by their ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who took France to task for “contributing to the dehumanization of Europe by means of the blacks, just as it had by introducing Jewish emancipation 140 years before.”
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Sporadic articles in the 1920s kept this idea in the public consciousness and passed on to the offspring of the black soldiers the negative characteristics emphasized in the original sensationalism. Fear of blacks soon filtered down to other German children. Six-year-old Melita Maschmann, who would later become a high-ranking Nazi youth leader, was filled with dread at the sight of black soldiers on a train: “We fled into an empty compartment. I cannot remember what my mother said to soothe us; but I remember a feeling of horror, as if all the misery of Germany were incarnate in those black-skinned men.”
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