CHAPTER 15: Hitler's Eugenic Reich

On the evening of Friday, September 27, 1929, the upper echelon of
eugenics met in majestic and Mussolini-ruled Rome, in the highceilinged
library of the newly created Central Statistical Institute.'

They came from Sweden, Norway, Holland, Italy, England, Germany
and the United States, gathering as the International Federation of
Eugenic Organizations. Among this group, two men ruled supreme:
Charles Davenport and Eugen Fischer. A large map dominated the room.
This was no ordinary map, but an atlas of the defective populations on
every inhabited continent.2

The men were flushed with excitement. Just two hours earlier, they had
met personally with Mussolini at the Piazza Venezia, with a view ofTrajan's
Column of antiquity. Indeed, their mission was a return to hereditary
antiquity. All were intensely aware that they were assembled for a sacred
duty in a city they revered as "the oldest capital of the world." Davenport
read the preliminary report of the Committee on Race Crossing. Entire
populations of the unfit were designated. The eugenic atlas and other maps
were scrutinized for the "regions in which the Committee had ascertained
that tolerably pure races were intermarrying ... [creating] first generation
hybrids." These would be the first people subjected to eugenical measures.3

Jon Alfred Mjoen of Norway displayed a map of his country, pinpointing
regions with high concentrations of tuberculosis; he proclaimed that
the tubercular zones constituted "a map of race crosses in Norway." Mjoen
wanted to target Lapp, Finn and Norwegian hybrids. Captain George Pitt-
Rivers of England called for anthropologists to help catalog ethnographic
statistics, asserting that the most dangerous effect of miscegenation was its
disruption of "the ethnic equilibrium shown in the differential survival
rate." The Dutch representative focused on the mixed breeds of the Java
islands. In describing America's problem, Davenport spoke of U.S. Army
intelligence testing that documented high levels of mental defectives. He
also discussed tuberculosis rates in Virginia, comparing what he called "the
Black Belt" against other areas in the state. Fischer insisted that the "whole
weight of the Federation should be engaged in supporting this work." He
suggested that "Jew-Gentile crosses providing excellent material were
obtainable in most European countries, and that bastard twins would give
splendid data."4

During the course of their deliberations, the eugenic leaders agreed
that paupers, mental defectives, criminals, alcoholics and other inferior
strains should be incarcerated en masse. They resolved that "all ... members
[should] bring to the notice of their governments the racial dangers
involved in allowing defective persons, after training and rehabilitation in
institutions, to return to free life in the community." In other words, they
were advocating permanent incarceration. Only later did someone think to
amend the resolution to read, "whilst retaining their ability to procreate."s

The worldwide cataloging of the unfit was to begin at once. It would
start on "the American continent and certain small and large islands in the
oceans." At this point, America was still the only country with years of
experience in state-sanctioned sterilization and other eugenic legislation.
Fischer chimed in, however, that changes in the German criminal code
were coming, and these would soon enable widespread sterilization and
other eugenic measures there.6

Hitler's arrival on the eugenic scene changed the entire partnership
between German and American eugenicists.

America had shown Germany the way during the first two decades of
the twentieth century, treating the struggling German movement with
both parental fascination and Nordic admiration. But when Hitler
emerged in 1924, the relationship quickly shifted to an equal partnership.
National Socialism promised a sweeping hereditary revolution, establishing
dictatorial racial procedures American activists could only dream of.
During the period between wars, the American movement viewed National
Socialism as a rising force that could, if empowered, impose a new biological
world order. Nazi eugenicists promised to dispense with the niceties of
democratic rule. So even if America's tower of legislation, well-funded
research and entrenched bureaucratic programs still monopolized the
world of applied eugenics in the 1920s, National Socialism promised to
own the next decade. American eugenicists welcomed the idea.

As early as 1923, Davenport and Laughlin decided that Eugenical News
should add a subtitle to its name. It became Eugenical News: Current Record
of Race Hygiene.7 In doing so, the publication discarded any pretense that it
might be anything other than a race science journal. Adding Germany's
unique term for eugenics, race hygiene, was also a bow by the American
movement to the Germans.

By 192 3, articles from Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie
(Archives of Race Science and Social Biology) were highlighted and summarized
almost quarterly in Eugenical News. In fact, no longer did such reviews bear
specific headlines about interesting articles; rather, the summaries
appeared as though they were regular columns, often just headlined
"Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie," and proceeded to explore
the contents of the journal's latest issue. Articles by Lenz, Fischer and Baur
were among those most frequently featured.s

In the 1920s, German raceologists became even more sought after as
authors and topics for the Journal of Heredity and Eugenical News, thus
increasing their influence in American eugenic circles. For instance, in May
of 1924 Fritz Lenz authored a long article for the Journal of Heredity simply
titled "Eugenics in Germany," with the latest news and historical reminiscences.
California eugenicist Paul Popenoe, head of the Human Betterment
Foundation, functioned as Lenz's principal translator in the United States.
Similar articles were published from time to time as updates, thus keeping
the American movement's attention riveted on the vicissitudes of the
German school. A typically enthralled review of the latest German booklet
on race hygiene ran in the October 1924 Eugenical News with the lead sentence:
"It was a happy thought that led Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, a leading
eugenicist as well as a physician, to translate the little book of Dr. H.W.
Siemens, of Munich, into English."9 Such fawning editorial treatment
appeared in virtually every edition of American eugenic journals.

Nor was coverage of German race hygienists and their work limited to
the eugenic press. They were reported as legitimate medical news in almost
every issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, chiefly by the
journal's German correspondent. For example, in May of 1924, Erwin
Baur's latest lecture to Berlin's local eugenics society was covered in great
detail in a two-column story.JAMA repeated, without comment or qualification,
Baur's race politics. "A person of moderate gifts may be educated to
be very efficient," the article read, "but he will never transmit other than
moderate gifts to his own offspring. The attempts to elevate the negroes of
the United States by giving them the same educational advantages the
white population receives have necessarily failed." The article also regurgitated
Baur's contention that the Jukes family was proof positive of eugenically
damaged ancestry. "Race suicide," JAM A continued from Baur's
speech, "brought about the downfall of Greece and Rome, and Germany is
confronted by the same peril." JAMA used no quotation marks and presented
the statements as unredacted medical knowledge. 10

Nor did the rise of Hitler in Weimar race politics, after 1924, diminish
the frequency or prominence of German raceologists' exposure in the
American eugenic press. The January 1926 issue of Eugenical News featured
a long article, written by Lenz, entitled "Are the Gifted Families in
America Maintaining Themselves?" Dense with statistics and formulas,
Lenz's article analyzed recent California eugenic research with a German
mindset, warning "the dying out of the gifted families ... of the North
American Union [United States] proceeds not less rapidly; and also among
us in Europe .... I think one ought not to look at the collapse of the best
elements of the race without action.""

When Lehmann's fascist publishing house released a series of race
cards, that is, popular trading cards depicting racial profiles-from the
Tamils ofIndia to the primitive Baskirs of the Ural Mountains-their availability
was fondly reported in Eugenical News. Fascinated with the novelty,
Eugenical News suggested, however, that the cards could be improved if the
pictures would reveal more body features. German race cards, just like
many baseball cards, came ten to a package. '2

In May of 1927, Eugenical News reported the introduction of a German
"race biological index," to eugenically rate different ethnic groups. The article
repeated German warnings "of the danger of an eruption of colored races
over Europe, through the French colonies and colonial troops." In the article,
German researchers urged "further studies in America, both of Indians
and American negroes, as compared with those still living in Africa."13
German race analyses of American society were always well received.

Unqualified German racial references to Jews gradually became commonplace
in American publications as well. For example, in the April 1924
issue of Eugenical News, an article reviewing a new German "racial pride"
book published by Lehmanns mentioned, "In an appendix the Jews are
considered, their history and their role in Germany." A German article on
consanguineous marriages summarized in the November 1925 issue of
Eugenical News stated, "Their evil consequences ... are pointed out
[and] ... are commoner among Jews and royalty than elsewhere in the population."
A December 1927 summary of a German article reported, "The
social biology and social hygiene of the Jew is treated by the distinguished
anthropologist, Wissenberg of Ukrania. This has largely to do with the
vital statistics of the Jews in Odessa and Elizabethgrad, with special relation
of the Jews to acute infection." In April of 1929, a Eugenical News book
review entitled "Noses and Ears" informed readers, "The straight nose of
Gentiles seems to dominate over the convex nose of Jews."14 No explanation
was necessary or offered for these out-of-context references to Jews.
That Jews were eugenically undesirable was a given in German eugenics,
and many American eugenicists adopted that view as well.

By the mid-twenties, Germany had achieved preeminence in both
legitimate genetic research and racial biology. Germany's new status arose,
in large measure, from its distinguished Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. An outgrowth
of the esteemed Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institutes would over time develop a network of research institutions
devoted to the highest pursuits of science. These included the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Physics, boasting a shelf of Nobel Prizes, a sister
institute for chemistry, another for biology, another for pathology, and
many more. The twenty-plus Kaiser Wilhelm organizations were easily
confused and bore related names. But while they were related, they were
independent and often located in different cities. In fact, at one point
Davenport confessed to a London colleague, "There are so many Kaiser
Wilhelm Institutes, that it is necessary to specify."15

Also among the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were several that would soon
make their mark in the history of medical murder. The first was the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. The second was the Institute for
Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. The third was the Institute
for Brain Research. All received funding and administrative support from
Americans, especially the Rockefeller Foundation.

J ames Loeb, an American banker and art lover of German-Jewish descent
who lived in Europe, was among the first to subsidize the organizations that
evolved into the Kaiser Wilhelm group. In early 1916, Loeb granted 500,000
marks to the German Psychiatric Institute in Munich. 16Loeb's money, however,
was quickly overshadowed by the Rockefeller Foundation's.

Rockefeller's connection to German biomedicine traced back to the
early years of the twentieth century, when Germany's scientific preeminence
was first challenged by America and its new system of corporate philanthropic
funding begun by Carnegie, Rockefeller and Harriman. Medical
educator Abraham Flexner was among the first to establish significant corporate
philanthropic financial links with Germany. Flexner completed his
monumental Carnegie Institution survey, Medical Education in the United
States and Canada, in 1910. The prodigious report compared North
America's medical inadequacy to Germany's excellence. Flexner next
turned to Europe, creating the 1912 report, Medical Education in Europe.
Soon Flexner was renowned for his pioneering reports and was invited to
help lead medical efforts at Rockefeller's powerful new foundation. 17

One of Flexner's first Rockefeller efforts yielded the 1914 study,
Prostitution in Europe, which featured an introduction by John D. Rockefeller
J r. himself. Prostitution was a topic of recurring interest to both
Rockefeller and his foundation. At about this time, 1914, German academicians
began to realize that generous American-style philanthropy was a
springboard to higher scientific achievement. Several esteemed German
academicians and industrialists organized the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in
this vein, with Kaiser Wilhelm II as its chief patron. The society sponsored
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, dedicated to a spectrum of new scientific
disciplines. But the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, and the crippling
inflation of the early twenties paralyzed the KWI and German scientific
progress.IS

To literally save German science, Rockefeller money-guided by
Flexner's recommendations-came to the rescue in November of 1922.
Because anti-German feeling engendered by the war still roiled in
America, and because Rockefeller, like many, distrusted German universities,
viewing them as hotbeds of political agitation and warmongering academics,
the Rockefeller Foundation circumvented the universities, the
traditional channels of scientific funding. Instead, the foundation inaugurated
its own special funding committee. Flexner selected his longtime
Berlin friend Heinrich Poll to lead the committee. Poll had assisted
Flexner during his earlier survey of German medical schools. Poll, also a
leading eugenicist, advised the Prussian Ministry of Health and lectured
extensively on hereditary traits and feeblemindedness. Since relations
between Germany and the United States were still uneasy late into 1922,
the foundation in large part administered the massive donations through its
Paris office. 19

Rockefeller Foundation money began to flow immediately. During the
final weeks of 1922, 194 fellowships were awarded, totaling $65,000. The
next year, 262 fellowships were awarded for a total of $135,000. By 1926,
Rockefeller had donated some $410,000-almost $4 million in twentyfirst-
century money-to hundreds of German researchers, either directly
or indirectly through international programs that passed funds through to
German recipients.2o

Quickly, Rockefeller's freely flowing money, distributed by Poll,
became a forceful and intrusive factor in German research. Scientists across
Germany eagerly sent in reports of their worthiness, each hoping to be the
next recipient. By March of 192 3, leading German researchers, such as
Fritz Haber, were grumbling to each other about "King Poll," whom they
said exercised an intolerable control over Rockefeller grants and therefore
German science itself.21

Ignoring any criticism, the Rockefeller Foundation only increased its
extravagant spending. Loeb was instrumental in convincing Flexner to
marshal Rockefeller millions for Loeb's favorite, the German Psychiatry
Institute. Rockefeller officials were fascinated with the promise of psychiatry,
and they began aligning themselves with German psychiatrists of all
stripes. The German Psychiatry Institute was the first to receive big
money. In May of 1926, Rockefeller awarded the institute $250,000 shortly
after it amalgamated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to become the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. The following November,
Rockefeller trustees allocated the new institute an additional $75,000.22

Among the leading psychiatrists at the institute was Ernst Rudin, who
headed the genealogical and demographic department. Rudin would soon
become director of the institute. Later, he would become an architect of
Hitler's systematic medical repression. 23

Who was Rudin? A founding father of German eugenics in the Weimar
days, Rudin was considered by American circles as among the most promising
raceologists in Germany. In the 1890s, Rudin joined Alfred Ploetz in a
quest for utopian socialism. The two men became fast friends after Ploetz
married Rudin's sister. From the beginning, Rudin's impulse was to stop
dangerous human breeding. At the 1903 International Congress Against
Alcoholism, Rudin declared that the condition was an inherited trait.
Alcoholics, he argued, should be segregated and allowed to marry only if
they were first sterilized. In 1905, Rudin cofounded the Society for Racial
Hygiene (Gesellschaft fUr Rassenhygiene) with Ploetz. During the next several
years, Rudin pontificated against the unfit in articles and in his travels.24

After World War I, as the chief of the German Psychiatry Institute's
genealogical and demographic department, Rudin began assembling a
massive catalog of family profiles from the records of prisons, churches,
insane asylums, hospitals, and from family interviews. By 1926, Rudin was
granted special permission by the Reich Ministry of the Interior to consult
criminal and institutional records and report back with his own findings. In
other words, Rudin's operation began forming the same types of discreet
governmental relationships that the Eugenics Record Office had structured
in the United States during the previous fifteen years.2;

Rudin, of course, was quite visible in America. Articles by and about
him had run in the national eugenic press for years. In May of 1922, the
Journal of Heredity published a brief about a discussion by Rudin on the
inheritance of mental defects. In June of 1924, Eugenical News informed its
readership that Rudin was building an extensive collection of family histories,
and assured "a vast quantity of data has been obtained." Later that
year, in the September issue, Eugenical News published a follow-up report,
asserting that Rudin's studies of the "inheritance of mental disorders are
the most thorough that are being undertaken anywhere. It is hoped that
they will be long continued and expanded." A 1925 Eugenical News article
praising the family tree archives of the German Psychiatric Institute celebrated
Rudin, "whose dynamic personality infuses itself throughout the
entire establishment." By this time Rudin was the star of German eugenics.
Later, the Journal of the American Medical Association also published a long
report about Rudin's work on heredity and mental disease.26

Davenport's efforts to bring the Germans back into the international
movement were more than successful. In 1928, the International
Federation of Eugenic Organizations met in Munich. Rudin functioned as
the gracious host when IFEO members, including the impressed American
delegation, were treated to a guided tour of Riidin's department at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. The next year, the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Psychiatry was selected for IFEO membership. In 1932,
Davenport consented to relinquish the presidency of the IFEO, and Rudin
was elected to succeed him. Laughlin was proud to offer the nomination.
The vote was unanimous.27 German race hygiene was now primed to seize
the reins of the international movement and become senior in its partnership
with the American branch.

In 1927, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes added another eugenic establishment,
the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics
(Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fUr Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik),
located in Berlin-Dahlem. The name itself symbolized the affinity between
the American and German movements. Earlier, Eugenical News had
adopted a subtitle in homage to the German term race hygiene; now the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes reciprocated by including the term eugenics in
tribute to the American movement.28

The first director of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity
and Eugenics was Eugen Fischer, a longtime Carnegie Institution associate
and Davenport collaborator. This new institute was not funded by
American capital, but rather by an assortment of German government
agencies-local, Prussian and federal-to whom eugenics and race science
were becoming increasingly important. The Ministry of the Interior provided
the largest single donation: 500,000 marks. The Prussian Ministry of
Science donated some 400,000 marks, including the land itself. Small
amounts were also contributed by the provinces of Upper Silesia, the
Rhine, Westphalia and the municipality of Essen. Funds from industrialists,
such as the Thyssen brothers, comprised just token monies.29 While
the institute's initial funding was German, it enjoyed both the envy and
unqualified support of the American eugenics establishment.

The grand opening of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity
and Eugenics took place in September of 1927 as an official function of the
Fifth International Congress on Genetics in Berlin. Davenport was chairman
of the human eugenics program and an honorary president of the congress.
Baur was chairman of the local German eugenics committee. The
congress was the first major international scientific event to be held in
Germany since the Great War.3D

The congress began on September 11, 1927, with approximately one
thousand delegates from all over the world gathered in a gala Berlin setting.
Registrants were first greeted with a Sunday dinner at the zoo, then a
barrage of sumptuous banquets staged by the Berlin Municipality and formal
dinner events enlivened by divertimenti, followed by the finest liquors
and cigars. Museum tours were scheduled for the ladies, and everyone was
invited to a special performance at the Opera House.31 Germany was
unfurling the red carpet to celebrate its regained scientific leadership.

Welcoming grandiloquence by both government officials and local academics
eventually gave way to the real business of the conference: genetics.
A procession of several dozen research papers and exhibits reported the latest
developments in a spectrum of related disciplines, from genuine scientific
revelations about the genetics of plants and animals, to the most recent
advances in cytology, to the newest slogans and Mendelian math of traditional
racial eugenics. A large Carnegie contingent was on hand to contribute
its own research, proffering papers and delivering lectures.32

On the afternoon of September 27, Davenport and his colleagues traveled
to Berlin-Dahlem for the much-anticipated grand opening of the new
Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Davenport
had been eager to congratulate his friend Fischer in person from the
moment he had learned about his appointment almost a year earlier.
Situated on about an acre of land, with a museum in the basement and a
complex of lecture rooms, measurement labs and libraries on most other
floors, the institute was the new centerpiece of eugenic research in
Germany. As the leader of American eugenics, Davenport proudly delivered
one of the commemorating addresses at the grand opening. The next
year, the IFEO added the new institute to its roster. Davenport was so
impressed with Fischer's institute that he felt obliged to provide a brief history
of eugenic progress in America to the institute's administratio .33

The third Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany's eugenic complex was
the Institute for Brain Research. Like other Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, this
one grew out of a research operation created years earlier by the family of
psychiatrist Oskar Vogt, which merged into the KWI in 1915. In those days
the Institute for Brain Research was housed in a modest neurologicallaboratory
also run by Vogt. Everything changed when the Rockefeller money
arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a
major building and take center stage in German race biology. Rockefeller
funders were especially interested in the Institute's Department of
Experimental Genetics, headed by Russian geneticist Nikolai Timofeeff-
Ressovsky. The Institute for Brain Research received additional grants from
the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years.34

By the late twenties, Davenport and other Americans had created a
whirlwind of joint projects and entanglements with German eugenics. No
longer content to direct purely domestic efforts, the two schools now eyed
the rest of the world. They graduated from discussion and philosophy to
concrete plans and actions. Among the most ambitious of these was a project
to identify and subject to eugenic measures every individual of mixed
race, everywhere. The approach would be along the lines created in the
United States. Identification was the first step. In 192 7, Davenport proposed
a systematic survey of mixed-race populations in every region of the
world. It would cover all Mricans, Europeans, Asians, Mexicans, indigenous
peoples and others who had mixed during centuries of modern civilization.

The global search for hybrids originated around February of 1926.
Davenport had made the acquaintance of wealthy raceologist Wickliffe
Draper, who shared Davenport's anxiety about human hybridization. The
plan was to conduct field surveys using questionnaires, just as eugenicists
had done in various counties and remote areas around the United States.
But this time they would cover not just a state, not just a nation, but eventually
every populated region on earth.35

They needed a demonstration project. Davenport's first impulse was to
survey New York City, but he thought mixed-race individuals would be easier
to identify in foreign countries or colonies. "I am suggesting Jamaica,"
Davenport wrote Draper on February 23, 1926, " ... because I take it that
there is a larger proportion of mulattoes." Within three weeks, Draper
wrote a check to the Eugenics Research Association for $10,000 to defray
the costs of a two-year study of "pure-blooded negroes, as found in the
western hemisphere ... and of white, as found in the same places with especial
reference to inheritance of the differential traits in mulatto offspring. "36

Over the next two years, Davenport's investigators deftly researched
the family backgrounds of 370 individuals, taken from the local penitentiary
and from the city center of Kingston. The American Consul in
Jamaica interceded with the British Colonial Office to provide special
access to the island's jails, schools and doctors. Some eight thousand sheets
of information were generated by field workers and archived in the
Eugenics Record Office.37

But the Jamaica project featured something totally new. For the first
time, personal information and eugenic traits were punched into IBM's
Hollerith data processing machines. International Business Machines
would be a perfect match for eugenics. People tracking was the company's
business. IBM's technology involved hundreds of thousands of customdesigned
punch cards processed through punching, tabulating and sorting
machines. Hollerith punch cards could store an almost unlimited amount
of information on people, places and processes by virtue of the holes strategically
punched into their columns and rows. Hollerith processors then
read these holes and tabulated the results. Hollerith cards were originally
developed for the U.S. Census, and IBM enjoyed a global monopoly on
data processing. More than just counting machines, Hollerith systems
could cross-tabulate all information on individuals and then match or
cross-reference the data to their plain paper or already-punched street
addresses or other geographic identifiers. Hence, people identified with
certain traits could be easily located for additional eugenic action.38

For example, these high-speed tabulators could quickly identify a specific
class of eugenic subjects, say, all first-generation morons of Mexican
extraction with vision problems. All relatives across extended family trees
could be connected to the selected individuals. Or the machines could
identify all eugenically inferior residents in a single village, plus their
descendants living elsewhere. At the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, IBM
machines could rapidly search out the holes, stack the cards and provide
seemingly miraculous results. Continuous refinements in high-speed
Hollerith technology would soon permit alphabetizing and printouts. As
massive numbers of individuals passed from identification to segregation to
sterilization and beyond, even the workflow could be managed by IBM
technology, using card designs, punching patterns and equipment arrays,
each custom configured to a specific use. Mass eugenics required efficient
systems.39 IBM was willing.

IBM managers desired the lucrative ERO account, but the process of
punching in the hundreds of thousands of existing index cards at Cold
Spring Harbor was simply too massive and expensive an undertaking. But if
brought into a project at the outset, IBM could cost-effectively tabulate all
names, racial information, medical characteristics and other eugenic data.
This required IBM engineers to confer with Davenport's eugenic investigators
to jointly plan the program, ensuring that data was collected in a
fashion that could be systematically coded and punched into Hollerith
machines for later retrieval and management. To design the system correctly,
the IBM engineers needed to know both the eugenic information
that Carnegie researchers wanted to input as well as how they wanted the
results retrieved. IBM always needed to know the end result in order to
design the system. In a report on the Jamaica project, Davenport confirmed,
"The test records were scored as received chiefly by Miss Bertha
Jacobson. Codes for each of the traits to be tabulated were worked out,
adapted to the Hollerith punch cards. Ratios were computed."40

IBM custom-designed the layout for at least forty-five variables to be
punched in on the Jamaica project for later retrieval by eugenicists. Sex and
race were to be punched into column 1. Age in column 2. Height in columns
3 and 4. Cranial capacity in column 18. Foot length in column 24.
Army Alpha intelligence testing in column 33, and Beta testing in column
32. Information on fingerprints was punched into columns 44 and 45. At
one point, Davenport considered securing data from banks about how
much money was in each individual's account and cross-referencing this
information against eugenic standards.41

The 1927-1928 Jamaica race-crossing investigation was the first time
IBM devised a system to track and report racial characteristics. Five years
later, IBM, under the leadership of its president, Thomas J. Watson, would
adapt the same technology to automate the race warfare and Jewish persecution
in Hitler's Reich. IBM custom-designed the indispensable systems
that located European Jews and other undesirables, and then provided a
multiplicity of custom-tailored punch card programs to help the Nazis
trace family trees, index bank accounts and other property, organize
eugenic campaigns and even manage extermination in death camps.
Indeed, a decade later, the SS Race Office employed a punch card with
physical attributes specified column-by-column in a fashion almost identical
to those first worked out for the Jamaica study.42

The pilot investigation in Jamaica went well, so well that the Carnegie
Institution proudly published a major research volume on the project. Even
as the program was underway, in February of 1927, Davenport was confident
enough to contact Fischer in Germany and discuss ideas with him.
"No one has greater experience in the field than you," wrote Davenport,
"and we shall of course want to get the benefit of that experience." A few
days later, he notified the IFEO secretary in London that a race-crossing
committee would be needed "in view of ... the international nature of the
problem." In short order, Fischer was invited to join the committee.
Davenport would chair the pane1.43

The campaign to identify mixed-race people of all varieties across
America began on November 14, 1928, with one of the ERO's well-honed,
massive letter-writing efforts. Beginning that day, scores of letters were
mailed by Davenport to eugenic contacts at universities, prisons, agricultural
colleges, as well as to members of the American Breeders Association
and other interested parties in every state from California to Florida and
even the Alaska territory. It was the first step in searching out the racially
unacceptable. Davenport's letters were all variations on a few forms:

The LEE.O. is making a survey of the points of contact of dissimilar human
races in different parts of the world. In carrying out this program may I call
upon you for some assistance? We should be glad if you would inform us if
there are areas where widely different races of mankind have recently begun
to come into contact in your state. By races we have in mind not only primary
races, like white, negro, Indian and Orientals but also very dissimilar
European races. Especially important would be localities where the first and
second hybrid generations can be secured in considerable numbers.44

A letter went to sociologist Raymond Bellamy at the Florida State
College for Women; Bellamy replied, "I am glad to do anything I can to
help," and specified Negroes and Seminole Indians in South Florida, and
Cubans in Tampa. A copy went to W. E. Bryan, a plant breeder at the
University of Arizona in Tucson; Bryan reported race-mixing between
American Indians and Mexicans, and suggested using a field worker who
could speak Spanish. A letter went to J. S. Blitch, superintendent of the
Florida State Reformatory; Blitch responded that of his 1,640 prisoners,
fewer than a third were white, the rest being "plain negro stock." UCLA
official Bennet Allen replied that Los Angeles was home to many ethnic
groups, including Japanese, Mexican, Italian, and Portuguese. He also
reported that the Mexicans and the Japanese rarely married outside their
respective groups. Henry Bolley of the orth Dakota Agricultural
College's Botany Department reported "half-breeds among our North
Dakota Indians, but I think largely of French origin," as well as farmers of
Russian and possibly Polish heritage.45

On February 29, 1929, Davenport went global. He mass mailed letters
to eugenic contacts and official sources in countries on every continent,
signing them as president of the IFEO's Committee on Race Crossing.
The letters all declared:

The committee on race crossing of the Federation is seeking to plot the
lines, or areas, where race crossing between dissimilar, more or less pure
races is now occurring or has been occurring during the last two generations.
The committee would appreciate very much your assistance. We
should be glad to have a statement from you as to the location in your country
or the principal regions of such race crossing, the races involved (e.g.
European and negro, European and Amerindian, Chinese, Malay, North
European and Mediterranean) together with the number of generations
during which hybridization has been going on on a significant scale.-l6

In Norway, Dr. Halfdan Bryn focused on "the northern parts of the
country," where, over the centuries, Laplanders and Alpines had mixed with
pure Nordics; Bryn added that his forthcoming book, to be published by
Lehmann in Munich, would include plenty of pictures of "Norwegian
hybrids." In Moscow, Professor Bunak, director of the Institute of
Anthropology, explained that the Eastern European plains, the Caucasus,
Siberia and Turkistan all featured "numerous tribes, [such] as North
European, Baltic, Mediterranean, Armenoid, U ralian (Ougrofinnic),
Mongolic, Turck and others" who had intermingled during the past twenty
to thirty centuries; more recently, Yakoutian-Russians and other "racehybrids"
had proliferated through the regions. In colonial Rhodesia, a
museum zoologist acknowledged some Bantu and Asiatic mixtures, but he
assured Davenport that "miscegenation is regarded by decent persons as
severely as it probably is in the Southern States of the USA." Reports came
from Brazil, China, Holland, France, Fiji, Chile and many more countries.47

In locations with no known eugenic contacts, Davenport resorted to
Laughlin's network of American consuls. In the Azores, Vice-Consul
Prescott Childs demonstrated an excellent knowledge of eugenic principles
and reported that due to the islands' remoteness, very few of Breton or
Flemish blood had mixed with pure Portuguese; Childs added that his real
"eugenic concern" was too much intermarriage, which he believed led to
increased insanity. In Harbin, American Consul C. C. Hansen pointed out
that a number of Russians had migrated into orth Manchuria resulting in
"intermingling of Chinese men with Russian women"; Hansen reported
the villages along various rivers where "half-caste children ... of the first
generation" could be located. In Nairobi, American Consul Charles
Albrecht outlined the geographic districts of Kenya and attached a list of
photographers "who might be able to furnish you with photographs of race
hybrids." In Estonia, Tahiti and other remote locations, American consuls
pledged their assistance.48

At 6:15 P.M. on Friday, September 27, 1929, the International Federation
of Eugenic Organizations met in Rome to consider the preliminary
report of the Committee on Race Crossing. From their perspective, identification
and eugenic countermeasures of all sorts were more than pressing-
the world was in crisis, and they were in a race against time.
Mussolini, a dictator, was not hampered by the checks and balances of
democracy. The IFEO wanted to enlist him to help impose stern eugenic
measures in Italy. Since the summer, Fischer and Davenport had been
working on a special appeal to It Duce. Now, in the Piazza Venezia, they and
their colleagues would have an audience with Mussolini.49

Fischer stepped forward to read the long appeal. It was not lost on the
delegation that they were in Rome, seat of the Catholic Church, which
strenuously opposed all forms of eugenics. "It seems natural and desirable,"
Fischer read, "when considering eugenic problems, that some expression of
our hopes and wishes should be addressed to the great statesman
who ... shows more than any other leader today ... how much he has the
eugenic problems of his people at heart." Fischer went on to label the
effects of race mixing "catastrophes," and urged immediate measures to
"[set] a model to the world by showing that energetic administration can
make good the damage." In an emotional crescendo to his appeal, Fischer
declared, "The urgency brooks no delay; the danger is imminent."50

Two hours later, the men retreated to the elegant library of the Central
Statistical Institute where they huddled over maps, reports, tables and surveys
as they plotted the course of their global eugenic action. Virginia, the
Java Islands, Norway, Germany, all of Europe, all of the United States, all
of the British Empire. The world. With trained field workers and Hollerith
data processing equipment, the unfit could be quickly and methodically
identified, quantified, qualified and prioritized for countermeasureswhether
they resided in big cities, the hinterlands or island villages. Every
delegate was instructed to lobby his government for cooperation.51

Davenport was encouraged. Fascism was on the rise in Europe, and he
realized it was time to relinquish the reins. On December 2, 1929,
Davenport wrote to Fischer asking him to assume chairmanship of the
Committee on Race Crossing. Rudin would soon replace Davenport as
IFEO president as well. The Germans were the future. Davenport wrote
Ploetz in Munich, "Personally, I am very glad that the Federation is now
under the Leitung [leadership] of a German."52

Fischer was willing to assume leadership of the Committee on Race
Crossing, but who would pay the postage and printing costs? Davenport
replied that the IFEO treasury would, since "it is more important to spend
our money that way than almost any other." Davenport and Fischer coauthored
a questionnaire to be sent worldwide "to the persons living and
working in foreign regions, physicians, missionaries, merchants, farmers
and travelers," asking them to "send as detailed and significant data as possible."
The questionnaires would be produced in English, Spanish and
German. Davenport and Fischer reported in a joint memo that the data
would eventually identify not only race-crossed individuals, "but entirely
foreign people, that is the so-called colored ones."53

As the thirties opened, many key players in the American eugenics
movement continued to support German raceology. In December of 1929,
the Rockefeller Foundation began a five-year subsidy of Fischer's German
national "anthropological survey" with a donation totaling $125,000.
Although the study was labeled "anthropological," it was in fact racial,
eugenic and, in part, directed at German Jewry. German officials who supported
the proposal for the study made this clear in a letter to the foundation.
They would not survey a single large sample of people "of an ancient
type"; instead, they would select multiple smaller cross-sections of the general
population, which would "be examined in its genealogical and historical
relationships with the help of church records, place and family
histories." The Germans specified, "In this way it is hoped to find new
solutions about the appearance of certain signs of degeneration, especially
the distribution of hereditary pathological attributes. "54

The letter continued, "From the eugenic standpoint, questions will be
submitted on the biological conditions of families, the number of births
and abortions, succession and rate of births, and finally questions on the
decline of births and birth registration in the region being investigated ....
A determination of blood groups will also be undertaken .... There is also
planned an investigation of the Westphalian aristocracy, of the old-establishedJewish
population of Frankfurt, and the so-called old lineage of some
other towns .... For certain eugenic discussions it seemed of the greatest
importance to obtain useful support for the question of ... pathological
lines of heredity among the population."55

Rockefeller executives quickly approved the idea, channeling the
money through the Emergency Fund for German Science. Rockefeller
trustees authorized the grant in the midst of the devastating worldwide
depression ignited by the stock market crash of 1929. As breadlines
stretched across American cities, the economic crisis also crippled the
German economy. 56German eugenicists needed all the financial assistance
they could get.

In August of 1930, Germany's Archiv fUr Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie
ran a tribute to Ploetz on his seventieth birthday. Among those extending
kudos were Davenport and Popenoe on behalf of the United States. In
October of 1930, Eugenical News called the edition "a worthy tribute of
esteem and affection for the genial and high-minded scholar whom it honors."
In the same issue of Eugenical News, an article entitled "Jews in West
Africa" reviewed a book claiming "evidence of Jewish infiltration" among
the Masai tribes of Africa as a result of a "trek ofJews from Jerusalem to the
Niger." The book was deemed "a good example of the deductive
method ... so great as to make the book a very valuable contribution." The
next news item congratulated J. F. Lehmann, now openly azi, for being
Germany's leading eugenic publisher. At about that time, the IFEO created
a Committee on Racial Psychiatry under Rudin's chairmanship.57

In December of 1930, Eugenical News reprinted Rudin's long paper,
"Hereditary Transmission of Mental Diseases." In it Rudin declared,
"Humanity demands that we take care of all that are diseased-of the hereditarily
diseased too-according to our best knowledge and power; it
demands that we try to cure them from their personal illnesses. But there is
no cure for the hereditary dispositions themselves. In its own interest, consequently,
and with due respect to the laws of nature, humanity must not go
so far as to permit a human being to transmit his diseased hereditary dispositions
to his offspring. In other words: Humanity itself calls out an energetic
halt to the propagation of the bearer of diseased hereditary dispositions. "58

Rudin advocated sterilization of all members of an unfit individual's
extended family. "It becomes clear," he argued, "that, in these cases, propa
gation ought to be renounced ... for other degrees of relationship, e.g., for
the nephews and nieces, grandchildren .... We must make the eugenic ideal
a sacred tradition. It must be rooted so deeply in man, and at the right time,
that the respect he owes it becomes a matter of course with him, and that
he will find love without trespassing on the laws of eugenics."59

In 1931, Rockefeller approved an additional ten-year grant totaling
$89,000 to Rudin's Institute for Psychiatry. This grant funded research by
two doctors into the links between blood, neurology and mental illness. It
reflected a growing trend among some philanthropic foundations to avoid
funding scientific organizations focused on eugenics, which in recent years
had come under fire for being too political and too scientifically shoddy.60
Genetics, psychiatry, brain research, anthropology and sociology were all
preferable destinations for American biologic research dollars. One
Rockefeller memo observed, "Race biology today suffers immensely from
its mixture with political dogmas and drives"; in that instance, the foundation
had granted $90,000 to a eugenic geneticist who had studied at Cold
Spring Harbor, because they felt the recipient was worthy. Moreover,
eugenicists were constantly seeking the "carriers"-the normal people who
transmitted defective genes that might crop up once in several generations.
Because of the bad publicity surrounding this idea, and the growing belief
that eugenics was more racism than science, the new breed of eugenicists
began looking for blood identifiers that seemed ethnically neutral. Even
still, the searches remained race-specific.61

Whether under the banner of psychiatry, anthropology, genetics or
race hygiene, American funding was still consciously promoting eugenic
research. For example, in 1931, the Carnegie Institution contributed
$5,000 for an international genetics congress and the separate Carnegie
Endowment added $3,500. Davenport also contacted the Rockefeller
Foundation to enlist their support for this event.62

Also in 1931, the famous Baur-Fischer-Lenz volume, Foundation of
Human Heredity and Race Hygiene (Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehl'e
und Rassenhygiene), was translated into English. One chapter was
entitled "Racial Psychology" and cited a study demonstrating that "the
racial endowment of the Jews finds expression in the nature of the offences
they commit." Another passage asserted that "fraud and the use of insulting
language really are commoner amongJews," adding, "It is said thatJews are
especially responsible for the circulation of obscene books and pictures, and
for carrying on the White Slave Trade. Most of the White Slave traders are
said to be Ashkenazic Jews." Another passage insisted, "The Jews could not
get along without the Teutons." The term Jewish Question (Judenfrage),
which was used throughout the book, required no explanation.63

A 1931 review of the newly translated book in Eugenical News lauded
the work and declared, "the section on methodology is especially valuable,"
adding that it was now the "standard treatise" on the topic. The review
concluded, "We welcome the English translation, which seems to have
been well done .... We bespeak for it a wide circulation."64

During 1931 and 1932, Hitler became an increasingly loud and pernicious
voice for persecution, fascist repression and warlike territorial occupation.
In America he was heard on radios, seen in newsreels and read in
newspapers. Virulent and very public anti-Semitism was sweeping across
Germany.65 None of this caused American eugenic circles to pause in their
support of German eugenics.

In the March-April edition of Eugenical News, the long essay "Hitler
and Racial Pride" heaped praise on the up-and-coming leader. One passage
proclaimed, "The Aryans are the great founders of civilizations .... The
mixing of blood, the pollution of race ... has been the sole reason why old
civilizations have died out." The Hitlerite term Aryan was now becoming
synonymous with the traditional Nordic. In another passage, the article
cited an earlier New York Times report declaring, "The Hitlerites hold the
Nordic race to be 'the finest flower on the tree of humanity' ... It must be
bred ... according to the 'criteria of race hygiene and eugenics."'66

On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched
a radiogram to its Paris office:

JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND
DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG
INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS
AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES
TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM. NATURE OF STUDIES REQUIRES
ASSURANCE OF AT [Rockefeller's director of science in Europe,
Augustus Trowbridge].67

At about that time, Fischer and other eugenicists were busy presenting
drafts of compulsory sterilization laws to the Weimar authorities. During a
committee meeting on the subject in the summer of 1932, Fischer shouted
at the Nazi representative, "Your party has not been in existence nearly as
long as our eugenic movement!" One leading eugenicist at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Biology later bristled, "The Nazis took over the
whole draft and they used the most inhumane and execrable methods to
put the humane measures, which we had conscientiously and responsibly
drafted, into everyday practice."68

The Third International Congress of Eugenics was held in New York
City in August of 1932, once again at the American Museum of Natural
History. Although organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation were
donating vast sums to German eugenics for research and travel, the grants
were frequently limited to specific activities within Germany or neighboring
countries. Hence there was no money for the German delegation to
travel to Manhattan. or did Carnegie make up the shortfall. Davenport
apologized in a letter to Fischer. "Of course, the depression at this time has
interfered with our efforts to secure funds to help defray the expense of our
foreign colleagues .... We are very much disappointed that you and other
friends from Europe may not be able to ... come to the United States and
see the work going on there. We had hoped you would come and find your
expenses paid by giving some lectures." But the German delegation did not
come, and instead sent a few poster exhibits from the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. At the opening
ceremonies Davenport lamented the absence of the German delegation
and lauded their leadership.69

The September-October Eugenical News carried another long article
praising Hitler and his eugenic ideas. It also explained how his ideology
had been guided by such American authors as Lothrop Stoddard and
Madison Grant. German elections were looming, and the article prophesied
the results. "The Hitler movement sooner or later promises to give
him full power, [and] will bring to the Nordic movement general recognition
and promotion by the state." The article added, "When they [the
Nazis] take over the government in Germany, in a short time there may be
expected new race hygienic laws and a conscious Nordic culture and 'foreign
policy."'7o

The next month, November of 1932, Germany held a fractious election.
Hitler received twelve million votes, approximately a third, but no
majority. A coalition government was out of the question because other
parties refused to share power with Hitler and vice versa.71

January 30, 1933, as America awoke, swastikas flew above Berlin,
Munich, Leipzig and the other strongholds of azi agitation. Brownshirted
mobs marched through the streets in celebration, swaggered in
beer halls, rode their bicycles in tandem and joyously sang the "Horst
Wessel Song." For years the Nazis had promised that upon assuming
power they would rebuild Germany's economy, dismantle its democracy,
destroy the German Jewish community and establish Aryans as the master
race. On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg, exasperated
with fruitless all-night attempts to create a governing coalition, finally
exercised his emergency powers. Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler
interim chancellor. The Third Reich was born.72

***

Years later, many would deny knowledge of what Germany was doing,
would claim they only discovered Hitler's merciless anti-Semitic and political
repression, as well as the Reich's fascist medical programs, after the
Allies triumphed in 1945. But in truth, Hitler's atrocities against Jews and
others were chronicled daily on the pages of America's newspapers, by wire
services, radio broadcasts, weekly newsreels, and national magazines.73
Germany bragged about its anti-Jewish measures and eugenic accomplishments.
An entire propaganda operation was established under Joseph
Goebbels to publicize the information.74 Simultaneously, American
eugenicists kept day-to-day tabs on the azi eugenic program. As of
January 30,1933, however, the American-German eugenic partnership was
obsolete. Germany was now completely leading the way, despite a hurricane
of anti-Nazi denunciations and retaliatory economic boycotts.75

Once in power, Hitler's government immediately began issuing legal
decrees to exclude Jews from professional and governmental life, and used
other brutal methods-including condoned street violence-to eliminate
political opponents. Dachau concentration camp opened on March 20,
1933, amid international news coverage of the event. Refugees, including
many Jewish scientists, poured out of Germany. Their plight was visible in
the cities of the world.76

It did not take Germany long to implement its eugenic vision. The first
law was decreed July 14, 1933: Reich Statute Part I, 0.86, the Law for the
Prevention of Defective Progeny. It was a mass compulsory sterilization
law. Riidin was coeditor of the official rules and commentary on the law.77

Nine categories of defectives were identified for sterilization. At the top
of the list were the feebleminded, followed by those afflicted by schizophrenia,
manic depression, Huntington's chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body
deformities, deafuess and, of course, hereditary blindness. Alcoholism, the
ninth category, was listed as optional to avoid confusion with ordinary
drunkenness. The Reich announced that 400,000 Germans would immediately
be subjected to the procedure, beginning January 1, 1934.78

A massive sterilization apparatus was created: more than 205 local
eugenic or hereditary courts would be ruled by a physician, a eugenicist and
a panel chairman. For contested cases, there were at least twenty-six special
eugenic appellate courts. Anyone could be reported for investigation.
Doctors who failed to report their suspect patients would be fined. In hearings,
physicians were obligated to provide confidential patient information.
Fischer's institute was asked to quickly train the legion of race experts
required for the task.79

Germany's program was immediately seized upon by the world's media
as the latest example of Hitler's inhumane regime. Many eugenic leaders
felt pressured into publicly disassociating themselves from Nazi barbarism,
but their denunciations were only lip service. An anxious C. P. Blacker,
director of Britain's Eugenics Society, watched as his own sterilization campaign
lost public support as the obvious comparisons were made. "This
Society deprecates the use of the term Eugenics to justify racial animosities,"
Blacker announced, adding that he condemned, "its misuse as an
instrument of tyranny by racial or social majorities."8o

While much of the world recoiled in revulsion, American eugenicists
covered eugenic developments in Germany with pride and excitement. By
the summer of 1933, Eugenical News had become bimonthly due to
Depression-era finances, and had changed its subtitle again, this time to
Current Record of Genetic News and Race Hygiene. Cold Spring Harbor
quickly obtained a full copy of the eighteen-paragraph Nazi sterilization
law from German Consul Otto Kiep, and rushed a verbatim translation
into the next issue as its lead item. In accompanying commentary,
Eugenical News declared: "Germany is the first of the world's major nations
to enact a modern eugenical sterilization law for the nation as a
unit .... The law recently promulgated by the Nazi Government marks
several substantial advances. Doubtless the legislative and court history of
the experimental sterilization laws in 27 states of the American union provided
the experience, which Germany used in writing her new national
sterilization statute. To one versed in the history of eugenical sterilization
in America, the text of the German statute reads almost like the 'American
model sterilization law."'81

Proudly pointing out the American origins of the Nazi statute, the article
continued, "In the meantime it is announced that the Reich will secure
data on prospective sterilization cases, that it will, in fact, in accordance
with 'the American model sterilization law,' work out a census of its socially
inadequate human stocks."82

Countering criticism that Hitler's program constituted a massive
human rights abuse, Eugenical News asserted, "To one acquainted with
English and American law, it is difficult to see how the new German sterilization
law could, as some have suggested, be deflected from its purely
eugenical purpose, and be made 'an instrument of tyranny,' for the sterilization
of non-Nordic races." The publication argued that in the 16,000
sterilizations performed in America over recent years, not a single "eugenical
mistake" had been made. The publication concluded, "One may condemn
the Nazi policy generally, but specifically it remained for Germany
in 1933 to lead the great nations of the world in the recognition of the biological
foundations of national character."83

Throughout 1933, American eugenic groups continued their enthusiastic
coverage of and identification with German mass sterilization. Birth
Control Review ran an extensive article entitled "Eugenic Sterilization, An
Urgent Need," authored by Rudin himself, and also reprinted a pamphlet
he had prepared for British eugenicists. "Act without delay," urged Rudin.
By this time Margaret Sanger had left the publication, and Birth Control
Review had relaxed its previous position that birth control was for everyone,
not just the unfit, and that it was wrong to encourage greater birth rates for
the eugenically preferred. Indeed, Rudin's article did just that. "Not only is
it our task to prevent the multiplication of bad stocks," he demanded, "it is
also to preserve the well-endowed stocks and to increase the birth rate of
the sound average population."84

Eugenic influence continued in mainstream medical publications. In
1933, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on the new
sterilization statute as if it were an almost routine health measure. JAMA's
coverage included unchallenged data from Nazi eugenicists such as: "The
fact that among the] ews the incidence of blindness is greater than among
the remainder of the population of Germany (the ratio is 63 to 53) is doubtless
due to the increased danger of hereditary transmission resulting from
marriage between blood relatives."85

JAMA, in another 1933 issue, continued its tradition of repeating Nazi
]udeophobia and National Socialist doctrine as ordinary medical news. For
example, in its coverage of the German Congress of Internal Medicine in
Wiesbaden, JAMA reported that the congress chairman "brought out the
following significant ideas: ... A foreign invasion, more particularly from
the East, constitutes a menace to the German race. It is an imperative
necessity that this menace be now suppressed and eliminated .... Racial
problems and questions dealing with hereditary biology must receive spe
cial consideration." The article continued, "Eugenics and the influences of
heredity must be the preferred topics [at future medical meetings]," and
then warned of "the severity of the measures to be adopted for the preservation
of the German race and German culture."86

Eugenical News spoke in similar terms. In a September-October 1933
review of yet another Lehmann-published anti-Semitic epistle, Race
Culture in the Nationalistic State (Rassenflege in Volkischenstaat), Eugenical
News insisted in italics, "There is no equal right for all .... Nature is not democratic,
but aristocratic .... [German racial] demands appear harsh,
but ... the very existence of the race is at stake."87

Rockefeller money continued to stream across the Atlantic. The 1933
financial books of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and
Eugenics reflected the foundation's continuing impact. Page four of the
balance sheet: Rockefeller paid for a research assistant, a statistician, two
secretaries and a gardener. Page six of the balance sheet: Rockefeller paid
clerical costs associated with research on twins. Ironically, while Fischer
remained in charge at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity
and Eugenics, he was being replaced at the Society for Racial Hygiene. He
had taken over the society for Ploetz, but in 1933 Nazis overran the society
and Fischer was considered too moderate. He was replaced by Rudin, then
president of the IFEO.88

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.89 On June 7, 1933, H.]. 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-Germans, as well as Germans 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."90

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."91

Oskar Vogt was not removed. He remained at his post until well after
his Rockefeller funding had run its course.92

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
German 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 Germany, 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."93

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.94

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. 95

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.96 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 .YorkTimes 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
eugenICIsts. 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
Reichsminister 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."97

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.98

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."99 In a salute to the Fiihrer,
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
one man, Adolf Hitler, and to follow him on the way towards a biological
salvation of humanity." 100

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). 101

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 ofJewish doctors "were but slightly reduced." 102

Rockefeller funding continued even as anti-Nazi protest groups complained
directly to foundation executives. For example, shortly after Hitler
attained power, Rudin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes became known as
mere scientific fronts for Nazi ideology. The foundation's own best contact
within Rudin's institute, Dr. Walther Spielmeyer, confirmed in a November
3, 1933, letter, "Prof. Rudin ... also holds the post of Reichskomissar for
Race Investigation." Once word surfaced in late 1933 of the foundation's
ties to Rudin 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 $9,0003 for 3yrs." Under that, someone
wrote, "Inst for Anthro." Under that: "Sexuality & Genetics."103

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 [Rudin'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."104

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 ational 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."105

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. Rudin 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. Rudin'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."106

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 Rudin ... [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 Rudin 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 Rudin ....
$125,000 over a period of five years." The sum of $125,000 equals more
than a million dollars in twenty-first-century money. 107

Despite anti-Nazi protests, Rockefeller continued its subventions to
Germany. Indeed, the foundation made periodic increases to account for
the fluctuating exchange rate. Moreover, it quickly learned that while its
grants specified that money go to one project, Nazi science administrators
were quite willing to divert it to another department with a greater
ideological priority. For example, in October of 1934, Alan Gregg, director
of the foundation's Division of Medical Sciences received a blunt letter
from the foundation's most reliable contact in Rudin's institute, Dr.
Spielmeyer. "In the field of medicine," Spielmeyer unhappily conceded,
"both practice and scientific research is concerned primarily with genetics
and race hygiene, as you know. You convinced yourself of that this summer,
during your visit." He went on to explain that the space and
resources that the foundation financed for his blood chemistry research
had been appropriated by Rudin's race investigations. Rudin, reported
Spielmeyer, simply required more space, more stenographers and more
race investigators. "For this reason, it was unfortunately not possible to
maintain the chemical division properly .... The Rockefeller Foundation
has, for the past four years, provided funds for the maintenance of the
chemical division," said Spielmeyer, but those funds were now being used
for "racial research."108

At about the same time, an internal note was circulated to Rockefeller
Foundation officials informing them that a Jewish doctor at the Institute
for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics had made clear to the
foundation that, "In his lifetime, the Jews will not be permitted to return to
Germany." Nonetheless, the foundation found additional recipients for its
German research funding. 109

The foundation began financing biologist Alfred Kuhn's hormone
studies on meal moths. German race hygienists had been actively researching
moths for years, claiming they exhibited what Lenz in the A rch iv fUr
Rossen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie called "Mendelian segregation in later generations."
As such, moths were an ideal species to study for "carriers" of
defective genes. Rockefeller official Wilbur Tisdale commented on Kuhn's
1934 grant, "However uncertain the political situation might make a large
or longtime project, [we are] safe in dealing with sound men as Kuhn on a
year-to-year basis." Tisdale added, "Nowhere in the continent or England
[does one] find chemists, embryologists, and geneticists willing to cooperate
among themselves as are these German scientists."1 10

For Rockefeller, it was just eugenics. But for Hitler, science and technology
were magical weapons to wield against the Jews and all other non-
Aryan undesirables. Just after Hitler rose to power, IBM initiated an
aggressive commercial compact with Nazi Germany, generating windfall
profits as it organized and systemized the Reich's anti-Jewish and eugenic
programs. As the Hitler regime took each step in its war against the Jews
and all of Europe, IBM custom-designed the punch cards and other data
processing solutions to streamline those campaigns into what the company
described as "blitzkrieg efficiency."111

It began in 1933, when the company designed and executed Hitler's first
census. From there, IBM's involvement with the Reich mushroomed. On
January 8, 1934, IBM opened a million-dollar factory in Berlin to manufacture
Hollerith machines and coordinate data processing functions. At the
factory opening, the manager oHBM's German subsidiary, Willi Heidinger,
spoke vividly about what IBM technology would do for Germany's biological
destiny. Standing next to the personal representative ofIBM president
Thomas]. Watson, and with numerous Nazi Party officials in attendance at
a ceremony bedecked by swastika flags and Storm Trooper honor guards,
Heidinger emotionally declared that population statistics were key to eradicating
the unhealthy, inferior segments of German society. 112

"The physician examines the human body and determines whether ...
all organs are working to the benefit of the entire organism," asserted
Heidinger to the crowd of Nazi officials. "We [IBM] are very much like the
physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body. We
report every individual characteristic ... on a little card. These are not dead
cards, quite to the contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when
the cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000 per hour according to certain characteristics.
These characteristics are grouped like the organs of our cultural
body, and they will be calculated and determined with the help of our tabulating
machine. I13

"We are proud that we may assist in such task, a task that provides our
nation's Physician [Adolf Hitler] with the material he needs for his examinations.
Our Physician can then determine whether the calculated values
are in harmony with the health of our people. It also means that if such is
not the case, our Physician can take corrective procedures to correct the
sick circumstances .... Our characteristics are deeply rooted jn our race.
Therefore, we must cherish them like a holy shrine, which we will-and
must-keep pure. We have the deepest trust in our Physician and will follow
his instructions in blind faith, because we know that he will lead our
people to a great future. Hail to our German people and der Fuhrer! "114

Most of Heidinger's speech, along with a list of the invited Nazi Party
officials, was rushed to Manhattan and immediately translated for Watson.
The IBM leader cabled Heidinger a prompt note of congratulations for a
job well done and sentiments well expressed. I15

Following up, an August 1934 article in IBM's German customer
newsletter, Hollerith Nachrichten, extolled the benefits of advanced data
processing for eugenics. The article, entitled "An Improved Analysis of
Statistical Interdependencies via Hollerith Punch Card Process," illustrated
how complex data calculations could be better interpreted and predict
probabilities. As a prime example, the journal cited "the field of
medicine, and the science of genetics and race." Complex tabulations could
be rendered, the article suggested, regarding "the size of fathers and their
children, number of children and parents. Diphtheria and age, and the different
racial characteristics." I16

Medical questionnaires to be filled out by hand were jointly designed
by IBM engineers and Nazi disability or welfare experts for compatibility
with Hollerith cards. For example, diseases were coded: influenza was 3,
lupus was 7, syphilis was 9, diabetes was 15; these were entered into field 9.
As a notice from IBM's German subsidiary advised, the questionnaires
would have to be adapted to the technical demands ofIBM's Hollerith system,
not the other way around. A vertical notice printed along the bottom
left of typical welfare forms often indicated the information was to be
processed "by the punch card office," generally an in-house bureau. I 17

Raceology in Nazi Germany was enabled as never before. Statistical
official Friedrich Zahn extolled the fact that "registered persons can be
observed continually, [through] the cooperation of statistical central
offices ... [so] other statistical population matters can be settled and regulated."
Zahn proposed "a single file for the entire population to make possible
an ethnic biological diagnosis [to] turn today's theory into tomorrow's
practice. Such a file would serve both practical considerations as well as science."
He added, "Clarified pictures of the volume of genetic diseases
within the population ... now gives science a new impetus to conduct
research ... which should promote good instead of bad genetic stoCk."118

Mathematic formulas and high-speed data processing of population
and medical records would indeed become the key to Jewish persecution in
Nazi Germany. In November of 1935, Germany took the next step.

Defining just who was a Jew was problematic, since so many of Jewish
ancestry were practicing Christians or unaffiliated. Throughout 1935,
German race specialists, bolstered by population computations and endless
tabular printouts, proffered their favorite definitions of Jewishness. Some
proposals were so sweeping as to include even those with the faintest
Jewish ancestry-similar to the familiar "one drop" race purity laws in
Virginia. But many tried to create complex pseudoscientific castes, com
prised of "full Jews," who professed the religion or possessed four Jewish
grandparents, as well as the so-called "three-quarter," "half," and "onequarter"
Jews with fewer Jewish ancestors. I 19

Adolf Hitler was personally aware of preliminary findings showing that
while only about a half million Germans had registered as Jews in the census,
the veins of many more coursed with traces of Jewish blood. About a
million more, he thought. 120 The Jews Hitler feared most were the ones
not apparent-what eugenicists called the "carriers."

Suddenly, on September 13, 1935, der Fiihrer demanded that a decree
defining Jewishness be hammered out in time for his appearance two days
later before the Reichstag (Parliament) at the culmination of Party Day festivities.
Top eugenic experts of the Interior Ministry flew in for the assignment.
Working with drafts shuttled between Hitler's abode and police
headquarters, they finally patched together twin decrees of disenfranchisement
and marriage restriction. The Law for the Protection of German
Blood and a companion statute, the Reich Citizenship Law, deprived Jews
of their German citizenship. These laws-the Nuremberg Laws-would
apply not only to full Jews, but also to half and quarter Jews, all defined
according to complex eugenic mathematics. Jewish hybrids were called
Mischling, or mixed-breeds.121 High-speed Hollerith systems offered the
Reich the speed and scope that only an automated system could deliver to
identify not only half and quarter Jews, but even eighth and sixteenth Jews.
It was a new, automated system, yet applied to the well-developed, decadesold
Cold Spring Harbor procedure of developing family pedigrees. 122

The new formulaic approach to Jewish persecution exploded into world
headlines. Under a page one banner story, the New York Times's lead was
typical: "National Socialist Germany definitely flung down the gauntlet
before the feet of Western liberal opinion tonight ... [and] decreed a series
of laws that put Jews beyond the legal and social pale of the German
nation." The newspaper went on to detail the legal import of the new
ancestral fractions.123

The news was everywhere and inescapable. Centuries of religious prejudice
had now been quantified into science. Even if Germans of Jewish
ancestry had been practicing Christianity for generations-as many hadhenceforth,
they would all be legally defined as a race, without regard to
religion. That was in 1935.

Eleven years earlier, Harry H. Laughlin's memo to Representative
Albert Johnson's House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization
regarding Jewish racial quotas read: "For this purpose, it would be neces
sary to define a Jew. Tentatively, such a definition might read, 'A Jew is a
person fifty percent or more of whose ancestry are generally recognized as
being Jewish in race. The definition applies entirely to race and in no manner
to religion."'124

Shortly after the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935, and in
view of the negative publicity race laws were receiving, Nazi eugenicist
Ernst Rodenwaldt thought it might be helpful to give Laughlin special
recognition for his contribution to Reich policy. Rodenwaldt suggested an
honorary degree for Laughlin. In a December 1935 letter to Carl
Schneider, dean of the University of Heidelberg's medical school,
Rodenwaldt wrote, "Every race hygienist knows Laughlin as a champion
of the eugenic sterilization. Thanks to his indefatigable studies and his
indefatigable propaganda activity in America, there exist, since the end of
the twenties, in several states of America, sterilization laws and we can
report about 15,000 sterilizations until 1930, mainly in California.
Professor Laughlin is one of the most important pioneers on the field of
racial hygiene. I got to know him in 1927 in Cold Spring Harbor. ...
Heidelberg University honoring professor Laughlin's pioneer work would,
in my opinion, make a very good and compensating impression in
America, where racial hygienic questions are propagated in the same way
as here, but where many questions of the German racial hygienic laws are
mistrusted. "125

Schneider gladly approved the honor. Laughlin could not travel to
Heidelberg to accept, but he expressed his gratitude in a letter to
Schneider. "I was greatly honored," Laughlin wrote, "to accept this degree
from the University of Heidelberg which stands for the highest ideals of
scholarship and research achieved by those racial stocks which have contributed
so much to the foundation blood of the American people .... I consider
the conferring of this high degree upon me not only as a personal
honor, but also as evidence of a common understanding of German and
American scientists of the nature of eugenics as research in and the practical
application of those fundamental biological and social principles."126

Some three years after Laughlin's award, shortly after World War II
broke out in September of 1939, the same Carl Schneider helped organize
the gassing of thousands of adults adjudged mentally handicapped. The
project was code named T-4 after the address of the staff, located at
Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. Mass gassings with carbon monoxide, which
began in January 1940 at locations across Germany, proved most efficient.
Victims were told to undress and to enter a room resembling a shower
complete with tiled surfaces, benches and a drain. Crematoria were erected
nearby to dispose of the bodies. 127

From 1936 to early 1939, Nazi Germany was considered a threat to the
other countries of Europe, and indeed to all humanity. Refugees flooded
the world. The Third Reich continued arming for war and demanded territorial
concessions from its neighbors. In 1938 the Nazis annexed Austria,
and then in early 1939 the Reich overran Czechoslovakia in prewar aggression
and consolidation. Concentration camps of gruesome notoriety, from
Dachau to Buchenwald, were established across Germany; the horror stories
they inspired became common talk of the day. Nazi subversion was a
new fear in American society. 128

Certainly, there were many vocal Nazi sympathizers in America. But
those who supported any aspect of the Hitler regime, from economic contacts
to scientific exchanges, did so at a substantial moral risk. Genuine
revulsion with Nazified eugenics was beginning to sweep over the ranks of
previously staunch hereditarians who could no longer identify with a movement
so intertwined with the race policies of the Third Reich. A group of
longtime eugenicists and geneticists spoke of a resolution to disassociate
eugenics from issues of race. Letters to Davenport calling for his support
were unsuccessful. Institutions such as the Eugenics Research Association,
the American Eugenics Society, the Eugenics Record Office and a labyrinth
of related entities all remained intact in their support of Germany. 129

Monthly coverage inJAMA became more skeptical and detached starting
about 1936, with headlines such as "Strangulation of Intellectualism"
placing the Nazi takeover of medical science into clearer perspective. One
JAMA article unambiguously explained, "The president of the new [medical]
society is no distinguished clinician; he is the Nazi district governor of
Vienna, that is to say a politician who is also an official of the Nazi bureau
of national health." JAMA also began inserting quotation marks around
Nazi medical expressions and statements to differentiate them from ordinary
medical discourse.130

After Raymond Fosdick assumed the presidency of the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1936, the charitable trust became increasingly unwilling to
fund any projects associated with the term eugenics, even Fischer's
genealogical studies. The idea of investigating family trees was just too
emblematic of repressive Nazi persecution. Funding was also curtailed for
some of the foundation's traditional programs at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institutes. Money continued to flow for eugenic projects, but only when
they were packaged as genetics, brain research, serology or social biology.
For example, Rockefeller fellowships and scholarships from 1936 through
1939 allowed German genetic researchers to travel to Cold Spring Harbor
and California for further study. But the fact that Rockefeller executives
became exceedingly cautious about their continued sponsorship of Nazi
medicine was a testament to the controversial nature of any contact with
the Third Reich. 131

Indeed, on June 6, 1939, Fosdick circulated a pointed memo to
Rockefeller Foundation executives. "I have read with a good deal of interest
your Letter no. 40 of May 25th about our general relation with totalitarian
countries, and particularly about the fellowship situation. The
rumor which Mr. Kittridge brought back from Geneva to the effect that
the Foundation was boycotting all requests from Germany is of course
hardly correct .... I am frank in saying that at the present moment it would
be not only embarrassing, but probably impossible, to make any major
grants in Germany. There is a matter of public policy involved here which
has to be taken into consideration, and I do not believe that this is the
moment to consider any sizable requests for assistance from German
sources." Fosdick added that individual fellowships to German scientists
would still be possible, but only if "sifted with rigid scrutiny to make sure
that we are not being used for ulterior purposes." He added, "I earnestJy
hope that this evil hour will soon pass."132

Despite Nazi Germany's descent into pariah status, core eugenic leaders
were steadfast in their defense of, fascination with, and general admiration
for Hitler's program. In late 1935, ERA president Clarence Campbell
traveled to Berlin for the World Population Congress, an event staged
under the patronage of Nazi Interior Minister Frick. Fischer was president
of the congress. Campbell created a scandal back home when he loudly and
passionately proclaimed his admiration for Hitler's policy. "The leader of
the German nation, Adolf Hitler," declared Campbell, "ably supported by
Frick and guided by this nation's anthropologists, eugenists and social
philosophers, has been able to construct a comprehensive racial policy of
population development and improvement that promises to be epochal in
racial history. It sets a pattern which other nations and other racial groups
must follow if they do not wish to fall behind in their racial quality, in their
racial accomplishments and in their prospects for survival." 133

Campbell's speech made headlines in the next morning's New rork
Times: "US EUGENIST HAILS NAZI RACIAL POLICY." When
Campbell returned to America, he hit back at his critics in the lead article
of the March-April 1936 issue of Eugenical News. "It is unfortunate that the
anti-Nazi propaganda with which all countries have been flooded has gone
far to obscure the correct understanding and the great importance of the
German racial policy."J34

Throughout 1936, the American eugenic leadership continued its
praise for Hitler's anti-Jewish and racial policies. "The last twenty years
witnessed two stupendous forward movements, one in our United States,
the other in Germany," declared California raceologist C. M. Goethe in his
presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association. He added with a
degree of satisfaction, "California had led all the world in sterilization
operations. Today, even California's quarter century record has, in two
years, been outdistanced by Germany."l35

Eugenicist Marie Kopp toured 15,000 miles across Nazi Germany, and
with the assistance of one of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, was able to
undertake extensive research on the Nazi program in cities and towns.
Kopp was even permitted access to the secret Nazi Heredity Courts.
Throughout 1936, Kopp wrote articles for eugenic publications, participated
in promotional roundtables with such luminaries as Margaret
Sanger, and presented position papers praising the azi program as one of
"fairness." Kopp was able to assure all that "religious belief does not enter
into the matter," because Jews were defined not by tlleir religious practices,
but by their bloodlines. J36

At one American Eugenics Society luncheon, Kopp emphasized,
"Justice Holmes, when handling down the decision in the Buck versus Bell
case, expressed the guiding spirit .... 'It is better for all the world, if instead
of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or let them starve for
their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from
continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."'137

In 1937, Laughlin and his Cold Spring Harbor office became the U.S.
distributor of a two-reel Nazi eugenic propaganda film entitled E1'bkrank
(The Hereditarily Diseased). Erbkrank began with scenes of squalid German
slums where superior Nordic families were forced to live because so much
public money was spent on bright, well-constructed institutions to house
the feebleminded. Laughlin loaned the film to high schools in New York
and New Jersey, to welfare workers in Connecticut, and to the Society for
the Prevention of Blindness. Although he acquired the film from the Race
Policy Office of the Nazi Party (Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP), he
assured, "There is no racial propaganda of any sort in the picture; it is [simply]
recognized that every race has its own superior family-stocks and its
own degenerate strains."138

Yet in fact the film declared, "Jewish liberal thinking forced millions of
healthy volk-nationals into need and squalor-while the unfit were overly
coddled." In another frame the movie explained, "The Jewish people has a
particularly high percentage of mentally ill." Indeed, one archetypal defective
citizen was a mental patient described as a "fifty-five year old Jewdeceitful-
rabble-rouser." 139

No matter how dismal the plight of the Jews in Germany, no matter
how horrifying the headlines, no matter how close Europe came to all-out
war, no matter how often German troops poured across another border,
American eugenicists stood fast by their eugenic hero, Adolf Hitler.

In 1938, Germany accelerated the humiliation of the Jews, as well as the
Aryanization and confiscation of their property. On November 10, 1938,
the world was shocked by the German national anti-Jewish riots and
pogroms known as Kristallnacht. Over one hundred synagogues were
burned across the Reich, and thousands of Jews were marched off to concentration
camps. The Gestapo and SS had by now subsumed the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institutes, the Society for Racial Hygiene and indeed all of
German medicine. 140

Fischer, Lenz, Rudin and the other stalwarts became the medical generals
of Hitler's campaign against humanity. In 1936, Rudin assumed leadership
of the Institute for Racial Hygiene in Munich, one of the main
centers tasked with deciding which German citizens possessed Jewish
blood, and how much. In 1937, Lenz and Rudin, in a joint operation with
the Gestapo, orchestrated the identification and rounding-up of some five
hundred to six hundred "Rhineland bastards," the offspring of Black
French colonial soldiers; they were all secretly sterilized. Some 200,000
Germans of all backgrounds had been sterilized by 1937. After that the
records were not published. 141

Fischer was increasingly accompanied by SS officer Wolfgang Abel,
who was usually dressed in a typical black Nazi uniform. The two could be
seen in each other's company even when visited by American eugenicists at
the Kaiser Wilhelm Instirute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and
Eugenics. Together, Fischer and Abel manufacrured fictitious eugenic profiles
ofJews, Gypsies and other non-Aryan undesirables, accusing them of
numerous hereditary afflictions. In order to justify their eugenic persecution,
the Reich falsely ascribed flat feet, mental illness and an assortment of
other maladies to those the Reich wanted to eliminate. 142

In one lecrure, Fischer declared, "When a people wants, somehow or
other, to preserve its own narure, it must reject alien racial elements, and
when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and
eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to
insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying
this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not
underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I reject
Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve
the hereditary endowment of my people."143

The concept of describing people as leading a "life unworthy of life,"
sometimes known as "worthless eaters," rose to the fore. 144Eugenic terminology
and conceptualizations such as subhuman and bacterium were
becoming more than jargon. They were becoming policy guidelines. Leon
Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared,
"While we were pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade
a spade." Goddard expressed his frustration another way: "If Hitler succeeds
in his wholesale sterilization, it will be a demonstration that will carry
eugenics farther than a hundred Eugenics Societies could. If he makes a
fiasco of it, it will set the movement back where a hundred eugenics societies
can never resurrect it."145

On September 1, 1939, Germany launched its blitzkrieg against Poland,
beginning Word War II. The Reich needed hospital beds, and had to ration
its wartime resources. Now the medical men of German eugenics would
graduate from sterilization to organized euthanasia. Lenz helped draft
euthanasia guidelines whereby a patient could be killed "by medical measures
of which he remains unaware." The continued existence of those
classed defective could no longer be justified in Hitler's war-strapped
Reich. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age
homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically
gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed. Psychiatrists,
steeped in eugenics, selected the victims after a momentary review of their
records, jotted their destinies with a pen stroke, and then personally supervised
the exterminations. 146

With the war raging, Lothrop Stoddard, a leader of the Eugenics
Research Association, traveled to Nazi Germany. His 1940 book, Into the
Darkness, celebrated Hitler and Nazi eugenics. "Nothing is so distinctive in
Nazi Germany as its ideas about race," wrote Stoddard. "Its concept of
racial matters underlies the whole National Socialist philosophy oflife and
profoundly influences both its policies and practices. We cannot intelligently
evaluate the Third Reich unless we understand this basic attitude of
mind. 147

"As is well known, the Nazi viewpoint on race and the resultant policies
are set forth by Adolf Hitler himself in the pages of Mein Kampf, the Bible
of National Socialism. The future Fuehrer therein wrote: 'It will be the
duty of the People's State to consider the race as the basis of the community's
existence. It must make sure that the purity of the racial strain will be
preserved .... In order to achieve this end the State will have to avail itself
of modern advances in medical science. It must proclaim that all those people
are unfit for procreation who are afflicted with some visible hereditary
disease, or are the carriers of it ... having such people rendered sterile."148

Focusing on Hitler's Jewish policy, Stoddard observed, "The relative
emphasis which Hitler gave racialism and eugenics many years ago foreshadows
the respective interest toward the two subjects in Germany today.
Outside Germany, the reverse is true, due chiefly to Nazi treatment of its
Jewish minority. Inside Germany, the Jewish problem is regarded as a passing
phenomenon, already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by
the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich." 149

Stoddard was so favored by Hitler that der Fiihrer granted him a rare,
exclusive audience. In a chapter entitled "I See Hitler," Stoddard wrote of
the moment of his encounter in these words, "At that moment I was bidden
to the Presence."150

Goebbels's ministry escorted Stoddard around Berlin and arranged access
to other senior Reich officials, especially those concerned with race policy.
The Eugenics Courts, normally conducted in secret, granted Stoddard
extraordinary permission to sit on the bench next to the judges and observe
their racial judgments ofJews and non-Jews alike. His courtroom experiences
were recounted in a chapter entitled "In a Eugenics Court," in which
he bemoaned the race tribunals for being "almost too conservative."l;l

As Hitler's divisions smashed through Europe, his eugenic ideal would
be enforced not only against those in Germany, but also against those in
conquered or dominated countries. In country after country, Hitler
rounded up the defective Jews and other subhumans, systematically making
one region after another judenrein-Jew free. As Hess insisted, "National
Socialism is nothing but applied biology."1;2

For decades, Hitler's bloody regime, the Holocaust and the Second
World War would be perceived as merely the outgrowth of the unfathomable
madness and blind hatred of one man and his movement. But in fact
Hitler's hatred was not blind; it was sharply focused on an obsessive eugenic
vision. The war against the weak had graduated from America's slogans,
index cards and surgical blades to Nazi decrees, ghettos and gas chambers.

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