Authors: Edwin Black
Where did Hitler develop his racist and anti-Semitic views? Certainly not from anything he read or heard from America. Hitler became a mad racist dictator based solely on his own inner monstrosity, with no assistance from anything written or spoken in English. But like many rabid racists, from Plecker in Virginia to Rentoul in England, Hitler preferred to legitimize his race hatred by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in a more palatable pseudoscientific facade-eugenics. Indeed, Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side.
The intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were strictly American. He merely compounded all the virulence of long-established American race science with his fanatic anti-Jewish rage. Hitler’s extremist eugenic science, which in many ways seemed like the logical extension of America’s own entrenched programs and advocacy, eventually helped shape the institutions and even the machinery of the Third Reich’s genocide. By the time Hitler’s concept of Aryan superiority emerged, his politics had completely fused into a biological and eugenic mindset.
When Hitler used the term
master race,
he meant just that, a biological “master race.” America crusaded for a biologically superior race, which would gradually wipe away the existence of all inferior strains. Hitler would crusade for a master race to quickly dominate all others. In Hitler’s view, eugenically inferior groups, such as Poles and Russians, would be permitted to exist but were destined to serve Germany’s master race. Hitler demonized the Jewish community as social, political and racial poison, that is, a biological menace. He vowed that the Jewish community would be neutralized, dismantled and removed from Europe.
34
Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted, 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, write the legislation, and even hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.
Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, coined a popular adage in the Reich, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”
35
While in prison, at his “university,” Hitler codified his madness in the book
Mein Kampf,
which he dictated to Hess. He also read the second edition of the first great German eugenic text,
Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene (Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassen-hygiene),
which had been published in 1921. Germany’s three leading race eugenicists, Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, authored the two-volume set.
36
All three of the book’s authors were closely allied to American eugenic science and Davenport personally. Their eugenics originated at Cold Spring Harbor.
Baur, an intense racist, closely studied American eugenic science and formulated his ideas accordingly. He was comfortable confiding to his dear friend Davenport just how those ideas fused with nationalism. For example, in November of 1920, about a year before
Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene
went to press, Baur wrote to Davenport in almost perfect English, “The Medical Division of the Prussian Government has asked me to prepare a review of the eugenical laws and
Vorschriften
[regulations] which have already been introduced into the differed States of your country.” He emphasized, “Of especial interest are the marriage certificates
(Ehebestimmung)
-certificates
of health required for marriage, laws forbidding marriage of hereditarily burdened persons among others-[and] further the experiments made in different states with castration of criminals and insane.
37
“It is at present extraordinarily difficult [here in Germany] to gather together the desired material [about u.S. legislation],” Baur continued. “I am thinking, however, that perhaps in your institute [Carnegie Institution] all this material has been already gathered. That, perhaps, there may be some recent printed report on the matter. If my idea is correct I would be exceedingly thankful to you if you could help me with a collection of the material. “
38
Baur then bitterly complained about confiscatory war reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, and the presence of French and Belgian-African troops as enforcers. “The entire work of eugenics is very difficult with us,” Baur reported, “all children in the cities are entirely insufficiently nourished. Everywhere milk and fat are lacking, and this matter will become yet greater if we now shall give up to France and Belgium the
milch
[milk] cows which they have requisitioned [for war reparations]. The entirely unnecessary huge army of occupation eats us poor, but eugenically the worst is what we call the Black Shame, the French negro regiments, which are placed all over Germany and which in the most shameful fashion give free rein to their impulses toward women and children. By force and by money they secure their victims-each French negro soldier has, at our expense, a greater income than a German professor-and the consequence is a frightful increase of syphilis and a mass of mulatto children. Even if all French-Belgian tales of mishandling by German soldiers were true, they have been ten times exceeded by what now-in peace!-happens on German soil.
39
“But I have wandered far from my theme,” Baur continued. “We have under the new government an advisory commission for race hygiene … [which] will in the future pass upon all new bills from the eugenical standpoint. It is for this commission that I wish to prepare the
Referate
[reports] on American eugenic laws.” Baur added that the Carnegie researcher Alfred Blakeslee’s “paper is in press [for publication in Germany], the plate is at the lithographers.”
40
Baur was one of the principal German scientists Davenport had implored to join the International Eugenics Commission.
41
Baur’s coauthor, Fritz Lenz, like many German eugenicists, was long an aficionado of American sterilization. He lectured German audiences that they were lagging far behind America. Like Baur, Lenz was among the German eugenic leaders Davenport beckoned to join him at the helm of world eugenics. Lenz reluctantly refused Davenport’s entreaties to attend either an international commission or congress, and in 192 3 candidly declared to Davenport, “Europe goes with rapid steps toward a new frightful war, in which Germany will chiefly participate…. That is the position in Europe and, therefore, I do not believe the time for international congresses has arrived so long as France occupies the Ruhr, that is, not before the second World War. I do not wish this certainly; I know that our race in it would suffer more heavily than in the past World War but it cannot be avoided. “
42
Lenz suggested to Davenport that while he could not participate in international gatherings, German and American eugenics could and should continue to advance eugenic science between them, mainly by corresponding. California eugenic leader Popenoe had already established a vigorous exchange with Lenz. Lenz wanted such bilateral contact extended to the ERO as well. “I would be thankful,” he wrote Davenport, “if I also could secure the publications of the Eugenics Record Office in order to notice them [report on them] in the
Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie [Archives of Race Science and Social Biology].
I have much missed the bulletins of these last years.” Lenz closed his letter with “the hope of a work of mutual service.”
43
Lenz later predicted, “The next round in the thousand year fight for the life of the Nordic race will probably be fought in America.”
44
The third coauthor of
Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene
was Eugen Fischer, a Carnegie Institution “corresponding scientist” since 1904. Fischer was a close colleague of Davenport’s, and they would form an international eugenic partnership that would last years.
45
The two-volume
Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene
that Hitler studied focused heavily on American eugenic principles and examples. The book’s short bibliography and footnotes listed an abundance of American writers and publications, including the
Journal of Heredity,
various
Bulletins
of the Eugenics Record Office, Popenoe’s
Applied Eugenics,
Dugdale’s
The Jukes,
Goddard’s
The Kallikak Family
and Davenport’s own three books,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, The Hill Folk
and
The Nams.
Of course, the Baur-Fischer-Lenz work also featured themes and references from von Hoffmann’s
Racial Hygiene in the United States
and Hitler’s favorite, Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race.
46
The Baur-Fischer-Lenz volumes also included repeated explorations and reiterations of American eugenic issues. World War I U.S. Army testing had revealed that “the high percentage of blue eyes [among recruits] is remarkable.” The authors then noted the decline of blue-eyed men since the trait was measured in Civil War recruits. The anthropological fine points of American immigration were probed. For example, Fischer wrote, “In the children of Jews who have emigrated from eastern or central Europe to the United States, the skulls are narrower than those of their broad-skulled parents, and this comparative narrowness is more marked in proportion to the number of years that have elapsed since the migration…. Sicilians acquire somewhat broader heads in the United States.” Repeated references to American Indian, Negro, and Jewish characteristics were liberally sprinkled throughout the volumes. They also included information on the Eugenics Record Office and Indiana’s pioneering sterilization doctor, Harry Clay Sharp.
47
The Baur-Fischer-Lenz volumes were well received in Cold Spring Harbor. Davenport promised he would write a review for
Eugenical News.
Both
Eugenical News
and
Journal of Heredity
ran favorable reviews of each subsequent revised edition. One of Popenoe’s reviews in
Journal of Heredity,
this one in 1923, lauded the work as “worthy of the best traditions of German scholarship, and … to be warmly recommended.” Popenoe especially praised Lenz’s sixteen-point program, which outlined plans to cut off defective lines of descent and the “protection of the Nordic race.”
48
It was no accident that Hitler read
Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene.
It was published by Julius Lehmann of Lehmanns Verlag, Germany’s foremost eugenic publishing house. Someone at Lehmanns happily reported to Lenz that Hitler had read his book. Lehmanns Verlag also published Ploetz’s
Archiv fur Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie, th
e
Monatsschrift for Kriminalbiologie (Monthly Journal of Criminal Biology),
and von Hoffmann’s
Racial Hygiene in the United States.
The year after Hitler was imprisoned, Lehmanns published the German translation of Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race.
49
Julius Lehmann was not just a publisher with a proclivity for race biology. He was a shoulder-to-shoulder coconspirator with Hitler during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and was at Hitler’s side on November 8, 1923, when the National Socialists launched their abortive coup against the Bavarian government. After the beer hall ruckus, Bavarian officials were held hostage at Lehmann’s ornate villa until the uprising was suppressed. As the revolt collapsed, Lehmann, a financial supporter as well as a friend, convinced the Nazi guards to allow their captives to escape rather than execute them. Lehmann was the connection between the theory of the Society for Racial Hygiene and the action of militants such as the Nazis.
50
Hitler openly displayed his eugenic orientation and thorough knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. For example, in
Mein Kampf
he
declared: “The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole.”
51
Hitler mandated in
Mein Kampf
that “The Peoples’ State must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure…. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world…. It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into actual practice.”
52
Hitler railed against “this … bourgeois-national society [to whom] the prevention of the procreative faculty in sufferers from syphilis, tuberculosis, hereditary diseases, cripples, and cretins is a crime…. A prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically 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…. The result will be a race which at least will have eliminated the germs of our present physical and hence spiritual decay.”
53
Repeating standard American eugenic notions on hybridization, Hitler observed, “Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the off-spring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one …. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life.”
54