Authors: Edwin Black
Unlike eugenic leaders associated with
Eugenical News,
Rockefeller officials did not propagandize for Nazism, nor did they approve of the Reich’s virulent repression. The Rockefeller Foundation’s agenda was strictly biological to the exclusion of politics. The foundation wanted to discover the carriers of defective blood-even if it meant funding Nazi-controlled institutions. Moreover, Rockefeller executives knew their money carried power, and they used it to ensure that the most talented scientists continued at the various Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, frequently shielding them from periodic Nazi purges.
For example, in early June of 1933, one of the foundation’s favorite researchers, Oskar Vogt, head of the Institute for Brain Research, was threatened with removal because of his perceived socialist leanings. Rockefeller mobilized.
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On June 7,1933, H. J. Muller, a University of Texas geneticist working at the Institute for Brain Research, alerted Robert A. Lambert in Rockefeller’s Paris office. Just days before, Lambert had toured various Berlin research facilities. In his letter, Muller warned Lambert, “If this director loses his position it is a foregone conclusion, and common knowledge, that the head of the genetics department and all other non-Gennans, as well as Gennans closely associated with the director, will also lose their positions…. I realize that the Rockefeller Foundation must preserve its neutrality so far as matters of politics are concerned. On the other hand, it wishes to have its funds used so that they can best serve the furtherance of truly scientific work. “
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Muller asked Lambert and other Rockefeller executives to consider “the making of a statement, not necessarily a public one, but, it may be, one expressed in a letter to some responsible person, such as for example [physicist] Dr. [Max] Planck, which could then be shown to the authorities concerned, so that they could be informed of your policy, in advance. Some statement similar to that which you made orally to the director of the institute here, would suffice, namely, that the Rockefeller Foundation would not feel justified, from the point of view of the furtherance of scientific work, in sending additional funds to the support of institutions in Germany, (1) if, on grounds other than their scientific work, worthy scientists, not engaged in political activity, are dismissed from institutions which have been founded or supported in part by funds of the Foundation, or (2) if persons who have been assigned stipends from the Foundation are dismissed from such institutions.”
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Oskar Vogt was not removed. He remained at his post until well after his Rockefeller funding had run its course.
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With each passing day, the world was flooded with more Jewish refugees, more noisy anti-Nazi boycotts and protest marches against any scientific or commercial exchanges with Germany, more public demands to isolate the Reich, and more shocking headlines documenting Nazi atrocities and anti-Jewish legislation. Still, none of this gave pause to America’s eugenicists. Correspondence on joint research flowed freely across the Atlantic. American eugenicists, and their many organizations and committees, from New York to California and all points in between, maintained and multiplied their contacts with every echelon of official and semiofficial Gennan eugenics. As the Reich descended into greater depths of depraved mistreatment and impoverishment of Jews, as well as territorial threats against its neighbors, these contacts seemed all the more insulated from the human tragedy unfolding within Europe. Eager and cooperative letters, reports, telegrams and memoranda did not number in the hundreds, but in the thousands of pages per month.
While concentration camps, pauperization and repression flourished in Nazi Gennany, and while refugees filled ships and trains telling horrifying stories of torture and inhumanity, it was business as usual for eugenics.
Nor were the contacts and scientific support a secret. For example, in March of 1934, eugenicist W. W Peter published a long article in the
American Journal of Public Health
defending Germany’s sterilization program. Peter had traveled some 10,000 kilometers over the course of six months, visiting every region of Germany to study the Reich’s plan. He gave it an unqualified endorsement, declaring, “This particular program which Germany has launched merits the attention of all public health workers in other countries.”
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Sterilizations had begun January 1 of that year. Within forty-eight hours, the Reich Interior Ministry’s eugenics expert announced that the list would include a vast cross-section of the population-from children as young as ten to men over the age of fifty. The ministry added that the first to be sterilized would not be residents of “institutions,” but those who were “at large.” Quickly, the procedure became known as the
Hitlerschnitte,
or “Hitler’s cut.” During 1934, the Third Reich sterilized at least 56,000 individuals-approximately one out of every 1,200 Germans.
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In mid-July of 1934 the IFEO met in Zurich, and congratulated Germany on a campaign being conducted “with characteristic thoroughness and efficiency … mainly on sound and truly eugenic lines.” That conclusion was publicized in
Eugenical News.
The idea was to rebut mounting criticism that the Reich’s mass sterilization program was not only a medical sham, but undisguised racial persecution. In Germany, “racial persecution” invariably meant “Jewish persecution.” Newspapers around the world were filled with condemnation of Germany and its treatment of the Jews.
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Jews were indeed on the minds of the eugenicists at Cold Spring Harbor. For example, the
New York Times
of January 7, 1934, had run an article on Hitler’s race policy headlined “NAZIS INSIST REICH BE RACE MINDED,” and subheadlined “No One Knows Exactly What That Means There, Except That Jews Are Target.” The article went into Laughlin’s clipping folder. So did other
New York Times
articles from January and early February about German-Jewish refuges in Europe, as did articles about financial assistance to Jews in the United States.
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The folder grew thick.
With so much anti-Nazi publicity in the air, putting a positive face on the Reich’s conduct was a continuing priority at
Eugenical News.
Even as the
New York Times
was denigrating the Reich’s eugenics as pure racial and religious oppression, and using quotes from Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick to illustrate the point, Laughlin was assuring colleagues that the Cold Spring Harbor publication would help counteract that impression among eugemcists. Laughlin’s January 13, 1934, letter to Madison Grant explained, “We propose devoting an early number of the
Eugenical News
entirely to Germany, and to make Dr. Frick’s paper the leading article. Dr. Frick’s address sounds exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenicist in reference to what ‘ought to be done,’ with this difference, that Dr. Frick, instead of being a mere scientist is a powerful Reichsrninister in a dictatorial government which is getting things done in a nation of sixty million people. Dr. Frick’s speech marks a milepost in statesmanship. The new German attitude and resolution mean that in the future, regardless of nationality, every statesman, who takes the long view of his country’s problems, will be compelled to look primarily to eugenics for their solution.”
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In the very next issue, March-April 1934, the speech in question, delivered by Frick nine months earlier, led off an edition devoted to German eugenics. It included a detailed directory of the Third Reich’s leading eugenicists, exuberant praise of the Nazi sterilization campaign, and one article describing the flood ofJewish refugees with the phrase, “it is ‘raining’ German Jews.” Another article examined the destinations of some 60,000 German-Jewish refugees: 25,000 had fled to France, 6,500 to Palestine, 6,000 to Poland and so on.
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There was room in the issue to discuss other minorities as well. One article discussed the question of sterilizing some six hundred “negroid children in the Rhine and Ruhr districts-Germany’s legacy from the presence of French colonial troops there during the war.”
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In a salute to the Führer, another article clearly suggested that Hitler’s eugenics would soon be applied across all of Europe. “This State Cause does not only concern Germany but all European peoples. But may we be the first to thank this
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man, Adolf Hitler, and to follow him on the way towards a biological salvation of humanity.”
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Eugenical News
was the official voice of the American eugenics movement. Its masthead declared it “the official organ of the Eugenics Research Association, the Galton Society, The International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, [and] the Third International Congress of Eugenics.” It was published at the Carnegie offices in Cold Spring Harbor. A three-man editorial committee, listed on every masthead, tightly controlled all text: Harry Laughlin, Charles Davenport and Morris Steggerda (Davenport’s assistant on the Jamaica project).
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Eugenical News
was read by virtually the entire eugenics community in America and enjoyed an equally attentive overseas readership. In Nazi Germany, race hygienists followed the publication closely. After the March-April 1934 issue, for example, Ploetz wrote a letter to the editor correcting several typos and adding a clarification. “The 60,000 Jews … were not expelled…. Nobody chased them away…. They went, frightened by the Jewish reports of horror.” Ironically, in the same issue,
Eugenical News
ran a report headlined “Jewish Physicians in Berlin” that declared, “The city of Berlin quite logically is trying to reduce the number of its Jewish physicians, which is not in keeping with the racial composition of the general population.” The article added that anti-Jewish laws were still not working and the numbers of Jewish doctors “were but slightly reduced.”
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Rockefeller funding continued even as anti-Nazi protest groups complained directly to foundation executives. For example, shortly after Hitler attained power, Rüdin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes became known as mere scientific fronts for Nazi ideology. The foundation’s own best contact within Rüdin’s institute, Dr. Walther Spielmeyer, confirmed in a November 3, 1933, letter, “Prof. Rüdin … also holds the post of Reichskomissar for Race Investigation.” Once word surfaced in late 1933 of the foundation’s ties to Rüdin and his Munich-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry, the anti-Nazi boycotters and protest movement mobilized. One typical complaint letter from
New Republic
editor Bruce Bliven to the Rockefeller Foundation, sent December 20, 1933, asked whether the reported link could be true. Concerned officials at the foundation jotted notes on Bliven’s letter: “June 3, 1932 $9,000 3 for 3 yrs.” Under that, someone wrote, “Inst for Anthro.” Under that: “Sexuality & Genetics.”
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On January 10, 1934, Rockefeller executive Thomas Appleget replied to Bliven that the foundation had indeed helped erect the building some years before, and had then approved another eight-year grant for two of its doctors. But, Appleget added, “Strictly speaking this [Rüdin’s institute] is not an institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft.” A Rockefeller colleague who saw the falsity scribbled in the margin, “TBA-What basis for this?” On January 31, Appleget wrote to Bliven “in correction of my earlier communication” and admitted that the Institute for Psychiatry was indeed “one of the regular institutes.”
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Protests did not subside. Two days later, Jewish newspapers across the country published notices similar to the one that appeared in the
American Hebrew:
“Recently the American Committee Against Fascist Oppression in Germany declared that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, a German institute for psychiatric research with headquarters in Munich, and subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation is carrying on a bitter pro-Nazi agitation…. The Committee accuses the Institute of spreading Nazi propaganda under the cloak of science and paid for by the money of the Rockefeller Foundation…. One of the Institute’s departments, devoted to the study of racial theories, has ‘proved’ through ‘scientific claims’ that Hitler’s theory regarding the superiority of the ‘Nordic race’ and the inferiority of the Semitic and other races is altogether correct …. Dr. Theodore Lang, founder of the National Socialist Doctors’ Association, is also a research worker at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; his Doctors’ Association is carrying on a bitter campaign against Jewish physicians in Germany.”
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The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America continued the pressure, sending the foundation the
American Hebrew
article and asking for an explanation. Worried Rockefeller officials sent a note to a foundation attorney explaining, “As a matter of fact, it is not research that would lend itself to propaganda purpose. Rüdin was, and continues to be, a member of the staff of the [Kaiser Wilhelm] Institute [for Psychiatry]. No grants have ever been made for his work or for the general budget of the Institute. Rüdin’s present political affiliations are not under the control of the Institute or the Kaiser William Gesellschaft [Society]. Undoubtedly some of the [anti-Semitic] publications, which your correspondent describes, have been written in the building that we donated…. In the circumstances, I think it is quite untrue to say that Foundation funds are being used to subsidize race prejudice.”
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Yet the protest letters still flowed in. “We are getting a number of inquiries from various liberal groups as to our connection with the Forschungsanstalt fur Psychiatrie [Research Institute for Psychiatry] in Munich…. The principal complaint is that Professor Rüdin … [is] apparently very active in the preparation of the anti-Jewish propaganda.” Rockefeller officials tried to provide assurances to protestors that they were not funding Rüdin himself but rather two doctors working under his direction. But this hardly believable story was itself internally contradicted. A March 16, 1934, letter to Appleget by the foundation’s Paris representative reminded, “There is however another grant of funds made through … the Notgemeinschaft der [Deutschen] Wissenschaft [Emergency Fund for German Science] which at least in part is utilized by Professor Rüdin…. $125,000 over a period of five years.” The sum of $125,000 equals more than a million dollars in twenty-first-century money.
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