Authors: Edwin Black
Judgment: Guilty. Sentence: Life imprisonment.
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Katzen-Ellenbogen appealed, issuing a
pro se
cascade of letters, petitions and motions, stressing his American citizenship and desire to help mankind. Upon review, his sentence was commuted to fifteen years. Katzen-Ellenbogen then appealed for special clemency on the grounds of poor health. In July of 1950, a clemency board comprised of three civilian attorneys reduced his sentence to just twelve years, concluding, “Katzen-Ellenbogen’s health is poor. He is suffering from a coronary insufficiency causing severe myocardic damage, and a chronic congestive heart failure.”
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He had all the symptoms.
A
fter two or three days of terror in a sealed train, the Jews of Europe arrived at their eugenic apocalypse: Auschwitz.
Suddenly the wooden boxcar doors would growl open. The stifling stench inside from the sick and dying and the overflowing bucket of defecation would be replaced by the throat-stinging pungency of burning flesh as the victims glimpsed Hitler’s sprawling extermination center. SS troops, backed up by barking German shepherds, would begin shouting for the eighty or ninety people in each boxcar to jump down from the train and onto the ramp.
Quick!
Schnell!
Terrified, the helpless Jews massed into orderly groups, unaware they were being assembled for eugenic selection. Teams of doctors swarmed everywhere, organizing people into lines. Two groups would be selected: those strong enough to be worked to death, and those to be gassed immediately. Women and children under fourteen to one side. Men to the other.
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Then camp doctor Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, would review the frantic lines: one by one, Jew by Jew. Then with the power of his thumb, he pointed to the left, to the left, to the left, to the right, to the right, to the left. As he condemned and spared, moment-to-moment, he whistled, as though conducting a Devil’s orchestra.
2
Jews sent to the left were hustled to the showers for gassing, a procedure completely administered and supervised by doctors from start to finish. Once doctors gave the all-clear signal, groups of prisoners called
Sonderkommandos
were compelled to scavenge piles of corpses for gold teeth and rings. Only then were bodies carted off for cremation to destroy the evidence.
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Those sent to the right could live another day and in the process endure their own brutalities and degradation. The living were registered and tattooed. The exterminated required no registration.
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Subject to this selection, many survived and perhaps 1.5 million at this camp complex alone were murdered-some quickly, and some very slowly.
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Among those selected for death at Auschwitz, several hundred, mostly children, were briefly exempted. Some even lived to tell their stories. These lucky albeit misfortunate few were chosen for cruel medical experiments conducted by Mengele. First these children were coddled and fed well to keep them in pristine shape. Then they were subjected to painful procedures. Often they were murdered as soon as the tests were completed, so they could be fastidiously dissected.
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After the war Mengele’s sadistic experiments were considered by many to be the inexplicable actions of a scientist gone utterly mad. But in fact Mengele was following a fascinating research topic that was continuously discussed among eugenicists going back to Galton. This topic was as important to the researchers at Cold Spring Harbor and the funders at the Rockefeller Foundation as it was to Nazi medical murderers in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt.
No words will ever capture the inhumanity of Auschwitz. But one word does explain why Auschwitz was the last fanatic stand of the eugenic crusade to create a super race, a superior race-and finally a master race. As the cattle cars emptied their human cargo onto the ramp, as the helpless millions lined up for selection, they all heard one word, shouted twice. One word shouted twice could help them live as those next to them were sent to the gas chambers. One word shouted twice would link the crimes of Mengele to the war against the weak waged by the eugenics movement.
* * *
Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was crucial to the work at Auschwitz.
Verschuer lived the Nazi ideal long before Hitler emerged. A virulent anti-Semite and a violent German nationalist, he was among the student
Freikorps
militia that staged the Kapp Putsch in March of 1920. Two years later, Verschuer articulated his eugenic nationalist stance in a student article entitled “Genetics and Race Science as the basis for
Volkische
[People’s Nationalist] Politics.” “The first and most important task of our internal politics is the population problem…. This is a biological problem which can only be solved by biological-political measures.”
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In 1924, at about the time Hitler staged his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Verschuer lectured that fighting the Jews was integral to Germany’s eugenic battle. He was speaking on race hygiene to a nationalist student training camp when the question of Jewish inferiority came up. “The German,
Volkische
struggle,” he told the students, “is primarily directed against the Jews, because alien Jewish penetration is a special threat to the German race.” The next year, he helped found the Tübingen branch of Ploetz’s Society for Racial Hygiene and became its secretary. In 1927, Verschuer distinguished himself among German race hygienists when he was appointed one of three department heads at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Verschuer chaired its Human Heredity department.
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In 1933, Verschuer published numerous tables setting forth the exact ratios of environmental influences to human heredity. Later that year, when the State Medical Academy in Berlin offered its initial course on genetics and racial hygiene, Verschuer was one of the featured lecturers. He joined other eminent Nazi eugenicists in the program, such as Eugen Fischer and Leonardo Conti, who was a chief Nazi Party health officer and would later become Hitler’s main demographic consultant when the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were being formulated. Later, Conti was put in charge of the 1939 euthanasia program.
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In June of 1934, Verschuer launched
Der Erbarzt (The Genetic Doctor)
as a regular supplement to one of Germany’s leading physicians’ publications,
Deutsches Arzteblatt,
published by the German Medical Association. In it, Verschuer asked all physicians to become genetic doctors, which is why his eugenic publication was a supplement to the German Medical Association’s official organ. Sterilization of the unfit was of course a leading topic in
Der Erbarzt.
Eugenic questions from German physicians were answered in a regular “Genetic Advice and Expertise” feature. In the first issue, Verschuer editorialized that
Der Erbarzt
would “forge a link between the ministries of public health, the genetic health courts, and the German medical community.” Henceforth, he insisted, doctors must react to their patients not as individuals, but as parts of a racial whole. A new era had arrived, in Verschuer’s view: medical treatment was no longer a matter of doctor and patient, but of doctor and state.
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After the Nazi sterilization law took effect in 1934, German eugenicists were busy creating national card files, automated by IBM, to cross-index people declared unfit. A plethora of eugenic research institutes were established at various German universities to advance the effort. Their researchers scoured the records of the National Health Service, hospitals and hereditary courts, and then correlated health files on millions of Germans. In this process, Verschuer considered himself nothing less than a eugenic warrior. In 1935, he left the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics to found Frankfurt University’s impressive new Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Boasting more than sixty rooms, including labs, lecture halls, libraries, photography sections, ethnic archives and clinical rooms, the new institute was the largest of its kind in Germany. The institute’s mission, according to Verschuer, was to be “responsible for ensuring that the care of genes and race, which Germany is leading worldwide, has such a strong basis that it will withstand any attacks from the outside.” More than just a research institute, Verschuer’s institution held courses and lectures for the SS, Nazi Party members, public health and welfare officials, as well as medical instructors and doctors in general to indoctrinate them with scientific anti-Semitism and eugenic theory.
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Soon the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene had surpassed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in race biology and race politics, becoming the new model for German eugenic centers. Verschuer was doing his part to ensure that racial eugenics, the fulcrum of which was rabid Jew-hatred, became the standard for all medical training in Germany. He would soon boast that eugenics had become completely integrated into “the normal course of studies of medical students.’” In a report to the Nazi Party, he advocated registering all Jews and half-Jews. Hitler, said Verschuer, was “the first statesman to recognize hereditary biology and race hygiene.”
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By 1937, Verschuer had gained the trust of the highest Nazi authorities and was beginning to eclipse his colleagues, and by 1939 he was describing his personal role as pivotal to Nazi supremacy. “Our responsibility has thereby become enormous,” said Verschuer. “We continue quietly with our research, confident that here also, battles will be fought which will be of greatest consequence for the survival of our people.” In an article for a series called
Research into the Jewish Question (Forschungen zur Judenfrage),
Verschuer wrote, “We therefore say no to another race mixing with Jews just as we say no to mixing with Negroes and Gypsies, but also Mongolians and people from the South Sea. Our
voikisch
attitude to the biological problem of the Jewish Question … is therefore completely independent of all knowledge of advantages or disadvantages, positive or negative qualities of the Jews…. Our position in the race question has its foundation in genetics.” In another article he insisted, “The complete racial separation between Germans and Jews is therefore an absolute necessity.”
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Quickly, Verschuer became a star in American eugenic circles as well. His career and his writings fascinated the U.S. movement. When he became secretary of the Tübingen branch of the Society for Race Hygiene in 1925,
Eugenical News
announced it. His 1926 article on environmental influences for
Archiv for Rassenund Gesellschaftbiologie (Archives of Race Science and Social Biology)
was promptly summarized in
Eugenical News.
The publication also noted Verschuer’s 1927 appointment as one of three department heads at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. In 1928, Verschuer’s presence as a guest at an International Federation of Eugenic Organizations meeting was mentioned in
Eugenical News.
In the years leading up to the ascent of Hitler, his articles continued to be cited in
Eugenical News.
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Even after the Nazis assumed power in 1933, the American eugenic and medical media kept Verschuer in the spotlight. In January of 1934, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
cited a paper he presented at the German Congress of Gynecology. That same month,
Journal of Heredity
reviewed his book on the relationship between eugenics and tuberculosis. In the spring of that year, both
Eugenical News
and
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
highlighted him as a leader for his work in developing more than a thousand Nazi marriage screening centers. In September of 1934,
JAMA
questioned Verschuer’s estimate that the frequency of hereditary blindness in vulnerable populations was a full third, but this only confirmed his status as a major voice in genetic science. That same month,
Eugenical News
published an article entitled “New German Etymology for Eugenics” and cited two definitions for
Rassenhygiene;
Verschuer’s definition ran first, and Ploetz’s second. In
Eugenical News’s
next issue, November-December, Verschuer was listed in a feature titled “Names of Eminent Eugenicists in Germany.”
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By 1935, Verschuer was so admired by American eugenicists that
Eugenical News
heralded the opening of his Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene with the simple headline “Verschuer’s Institute.” The publication’s ecstatic article asserted that Verschuer’s new facility was the culmination of decades of preliminary research by Mendel, race theorist Count Gobineau, Ploetz and even Galton himself. Suggesting the far-reaching nature of his enterprise,
Eugenical News
made clear that Verschuer’s mission was not merely the “individual man” but “mankind” itself. Among the new institute’s several dozen rooms, the paper reported, were a number for “special investigators.”
Eugenical News
was so enamored that it departed from its usual text-only format and included two photographs: a picture of the building’s exterior plus one of an empty, nondescript corridor. The article closed, “Eugenical News extends best wishes to Dr. O. Freiherr von Verschuer for the success of his work in his new and favorable environment.”
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Goodwill among American eugenicists toward Verschuer was ceaseless. On April 15, 1936, Stanford University anatomist C. H. Danforth wrote to Verschuer offering to translate abstracts of one ofVerschuer’s journals. On July 7, 1936, Goddard, now located at Ohio State University, sent Verschuer several of his publications hoping that they might be useful to experiments at the new institute. On July 16, 1936, Popenoe wrote from the Human Betterment Foundation asking for statistics to rebut negative publicity about German sterilizations, saying, “We are always anxious to see that the conditions in Germany are not misunderstood or misrepresented.” E. S. Gosney, Popenoe’s partner at the Human Betterment Foundation, sent Verschuer three letters and two pamphlets in two months with the latest information on California’s sterilization program.
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