War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (71 page)

Hallervorden to his interrogators after the war: “I heard that they were going to do that, and so I went up to them and told them, ‘Look here now, boys, if you are going to kill all those people, at least take the brains out so that the material could be utilized.’ … There was wonderful material among those brains, beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease…. They asked me: ‘How many can you examine?’ and so I told them an unlimited number-the more the better…. They came bringing them in like the delivery van from the furniture company. The Public Ambulance Society brought the brains in batches of 150-250 at a time. … I accepted the brains, of course.”
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Direct Rockefeller funding for Hallervorden and Spatz’s Institute for Brain Research during the Hitler regime stopped in 1934, and funding for Rüdin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry ended in 1935. However, there were undoubtedly additional Rockefeller funds made available to institute researchers through the German Research Society. Rockefeller also provided the seed money for research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology until the war broke out. Moreover, the foundation continued to fund individual physicians, such as Tubingen forensic psychiatrist Robert Gaupp, Breslau patho-psychologist Kurt Beringer, Munich psychiatrist Oswald Bumke and Freiburg neurologist Werner Wagner, each affiliated with his own institution. During these years, Rockefeller also subsidized social scientists in Nazi-annexed Vienna. Much of this money continued until 1939. During the thirties, millions in Rockefeller Foundation grants also flowed to other Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes devoted to the physical sciences. One such was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, which was engaged in weapons research.
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The mentality behind the foundation’s biological funding could best be seen in the words of Rockefeller Natural Science Director Warren Weaver. Just a few months after Hitler came to power in 1933, Weaver circulated a report to the trustees entitled “Natural Sciences-Program and Policy: Past Program and Proposed Future Program.” That report asserted, “Work in human genetics should receive special consideration as rapidly as sound possibilities present themselves. The attack planned, however, is a basic and long-range one.” A year later, Weaver asked “whether we can develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men?”
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In pursuing its breeding goals, the Rockefeller Foundation could reassure itself and others that it was not actually furthering the pseudoscience of eugenics. In fact, that 1933 report to the trustees specifically stated, “The attack [for heredity research] planned, however, is a basic and long-range one, and such a subject as eugenics, for example, would not be given support.” After rejecting eugenics by name, the report went on to advocate that “support should be continued and extended to include the biochemical, physiological, neurological and psychological aspects of internal secretions in general.”
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But while openly eschewing eugenics with statements and memos, Rockefeller in fact turned to eugenicists and race scientists throughout the biological sciences to achieve the goal of creating a superior race.

Rockefeller never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenic studies in Nazi-occupied Europe when the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller financed, the great institutions it helped found, and the science it helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.

What could have stopped the race biologists of Berlin, Munich, Buchenwald and Auschwitz? Certainly, the Nazis felt they were unstoppable. They imagined a Thousand-Year Reich of super-bred men. Hence when the twins, the prisoner doctors and those selected for the gas chamber looked at Mengele, time after time they reported the piercing look in his eyes. That look-Mengele’s glare-was the Nazi vision wedded to a fanatical science whose soul had been emptied, its moral compass cracked; a science backed not merely by iron dogma but by men wielding machine guns and pellets of Zyklon B. All of them were versed in the polysyllabics of cold clinical murder. Surely, to the victims of Auschwitz, it must have seemed like nothing could stop Nazi science from its global biological triumph.

But something did defeat Mengele and his colleagues. Not reason. Not remorse. Not sudden realization. Nazi eugenicists were impervious to those powers. But two things did stop the movement. OnJune 6, 1944, the Allies invaded at Normandy and began defeating the Nazis, town by town and often street by street. They closed in on Germany from the west. The Russian army overran the Auschwitz death camp from the east on January 27, 1945. Mengele fled.
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Hence, Auschwitz was indeed the last stand of eugenics. The science of the strong almost completely prevailed in its war against the weak. Almost.

O
n January 17, 1945, as the Russian army approached Auschwitz, Mengele went from office to office methodically gathering his research materials. “He came into my office without a word,” recounted pathologist Martina Puzyna. “He took all my papers, put them into two boxes, and had them taken outside to a waiting car.” Mengele and the documents fled first to Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and then into Czechoslovakia. There he joined up with Hans Kahler, a close friend, coauthor and one of Verschuer’s twins researchers. The Russians liberated Auschwitz on January 27, at about 3 P.M., and Mengele’s horrors were quickly discovered. International commissions listed him as a war criminal. But Mengele slipped through the Allied manhunt and eventually escaped to South America.
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Even as the Allies closed in, Verschuer still hoped he and Hitler’s Reich would prevail in its war against the Jews. Just months before Mengele abandoned Auschwitz, Verschuer published part of a lecture proclaiming, “The present war is also called a war of races when one considers the fight with World Jewry…. The political demand of our time is the new total solution
[Gesamtlosung]
of the Jewish problem.” By the beginning of 1945, the Reich was collapsing. On February 15,1945, amid the chaos of Berlin’s last stand, Verschuer found two trucks with which to ship his lab equipment, library, and several boxes of records to his family home in Solz.
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Nazi eugenicists continued their cover-up, in progress since the Normandy invasion. On March 12, 1945, Hans Nachtsheim, assistant director at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, wrote Verschuer in Solz. “A mass of documents have been left here which should be or have to be destroyed should the enemy ever come close to here…. We should not choose a moment … too late to destroy them.”
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In the first days of May, the Reich was reduced to rubble and
der Führer
had killed himself.
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Nazism and its eugenics were defeated. But now its architects and adherents would reinvent its past.

In April of 1946, the military occupation newspaper in Berlin,
Die Neue Zeitung,
published an article on various doctors who had fled Germany, and followed it up on May 3 with specific accusations against Verschuer. In the article, Robert Havemann, a communist and chemist who had resisted the Nazis, expressed out loud what many knew. He openly accused Verschuer of using Mengele in Auschwitz to obtain blood samples and eyeballs from whole murdered families.
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A nervous Verschuer reacted at once. He sent a sworn statement to Otto Hahn, the occupation-appointed administrator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, insisting that he had always opposed racial concepts. “Even before 1933,” averred Verschuer, “but also after, I took personal risks and attacked, as a scientist, in speeches and in writing, the race concept of the Nazis…. I argued against attributing values to races, I warned against the high estimation of the Nordic race, and I condemned the misuse of the results of anthropology and genetics to support a materialistic and racial point of view of life and history.”
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He went on to concede his relationship with Mengele, referring to him only as “Dr. M.,” and insisting it was totally innocent. Verschuer stated, “A post-doc of my former Frankfurt Institute, Dr. M., was sent against his will to the hospital of the concentration camp in Auschwitz. All who knew him learned from him how unhappy he was about this, and how he tried over and over again to be sent to the front, unfortunately without success. Of his work we learned that he tried to be a physician and help the sick….
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“After I went to Berlin [from Frankfurt],” Verschuer continued, “I began research on the individual specificity of the serum proteins and the question of their heredity…. For these experiments I needed blood samples of people of different geographic background…. At that time my former post-doc Dr. M. visited me and offered to obtain such blood samples for me within the context of his medical activity in the camp Auschwitz. In this manner I received-during this time, certainly not regularly-a few parcels of 20-30 blood samples of 5-10 mls.”
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Verschuer then asked Hahn to give him a character reference, and even drafted a statement for Hahn to sign: “Professor von Verschuer is an internationally known scientist who has kept away from all political activity…. Professor von Verschuer had nothing to do with the errors and misuses of the Nazis, by which his scientific field was particularly hit. He kept his distance from them and, whenever he was confronted by them, he criticized them courageously.” Hahn would not sign such a document.
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So Verschuer sought support from his allies in American eugenics. Shortly after Havemann’s expose, Verschuer wrote to Paul Popenoe in Los Angeles, hoping to reestablish cooperative ties. On July 25, Popenoe wrote back, “It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany…. I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?” Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenic luminaries and then sent various eugenic publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.
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Verschuer wrote back, “Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation.” Seeking American bona fides, Verschuer tried to make sure his membership in the American Eugenics Society was still active. “In 1940, I was invited to become a member of the American Eugenics Society,” Verschuer wrote. “Now that this calamitous war has ended, I hope that this membership can be continued. I would be grateful if you might make a gesture in this matter. In this context, I would like to mention that in recent months a former employee, a person devoid of character, has made extremely defamatory statements about me, which have also found their way into the American press. Therefore, it is possible that persons who do not know me better might have formed a wrong opinion of me. You will surely understand that it is important to me that any damage to my reputation be repaired and I would be very grateful for your kind help in doing so.”
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Verschuer wrote again at the end of September 1946, requesting Popenoe’s help. Because Verschuer was considered part of the Nazi medical murder apparatus, the Americans had halted his further work. “Since I wrote you,” said Verschuer, “I have learned that the American military government does not intend to permit the continuation of my scientific work. This attitude can only be due to the spread of false information about me and my work. I have regularly sent you all of my scientific publications and you have known me for many years through correspondence. Therefore, may I ask for two things? 1. For a letter of recommendation from yourself and other American scientists who know me, stating that you know me as a serious scientific researcher and that you value my continued scientific work; 2. I ask you and other American geneticists and eugenicists who know me to undertake steps with the American military government in Germany to bring about the granting of permission for me to continue my life’s work as a scientific researcher. It is my urgent wish that I be able to rebuild genetic and eugenic science from the ruins we stand upon in every area in Germany, a science that-free of the misuse of past years-may again attain international renown.”
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Popenoe, who had also been corresponding with Lenz, was eager to be helpful, but uncomfortable standing up for an accused Nazi doctor. “I am distressed to hear that you may not be allowed to go ahead with your scientific work,” Popenoe replied to Verschuer on November 7, 1946, “but it is hard for me to see how any of us over here could give any evidence that would be of value to you, even if we knew where to send it. Of course we could all testify that your scientific work before the war was objective and maintained very high standards. But if you have been ‘denazified,’ as I take to be the case from what you say, it was certainly not for that work, which is the only work I know about. None of us over here knows anything about what was going on in Germany from about 1939 onwards, but I suppose the action taken against you is due to your prominence in public life, as the successor of Eugen Fischer (who has been attacked bitterly in this country), etc. I could say nothing that would be pertinent, because I don’t know anything about it. I am being perfectly frank with you, as you see…. But as it stands now, all I could say is: ‘All his work that I saw before the war was of high quality,’ and the authorities would presumably reply, ‘That has nothing to do with it.”‘
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