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WAR AGAINST THE WEAK: EUGENICS AND AMERICA'S CAMPAIGN TO CREATE A MASTER RACE
CHAPTER 14: Rasse und Blut
 
Negative eugenic solutions appeared in Germany at the end of the nineteenth
century.
 
From 1895 to 1900, German physician Gustav Boeters worked as a
ship's doctor in the United States and traveled throughout the country. He
learned of America's castrations, sterilizations and numerous marriage
restriction laws. When Boeters returned to Germany, he spent the next
three decades writing newspaper articles, drafting proposed legislation and
clamoring to anyone who would listen to inaugurate eugenic sterilization.
Constantly citing American precedents, from its state marriage restriction
statutes to sterilization laws from Iowa to Oregon, Boeters passionately
argued for Germany to follow suit. "In a cultured nation of the first
order-the United States of America-that which we strive toward [sterilization
legislation], was introduced and tested long ago. It is all so clear and
simple." Eventually, Boeters became so fixated on the topic that he was
considered delusional and was forced to retire from his post as a medical
officer in Saxony-but not before prompting German authorities to seriously
consider eugenic laws. 1

While Boeters was touring America, so was German physician Alfred
Ploetz. A socialist thinker, Ploetz had traveled to America in the mid-1880s
to investigate utopian societies. He became caught up in the post-Civil
War American quest to breed better human beings. In Chicago, in 1884, he
studied the writings of leading American utopians. He also spent several
months working at the Icarian Colony, an obscure utopian community in
Iowa. Ploetz was disappointed to find the Icarians socially disorganized,
and he began to believe that racial makeup was the key to social success.2

Ploetz also opened a medical practice in Springfield, Massachusetts,
and began to breed chickens. Later, he moved to Meriden, Connecticut,
where he graduated to human breeding projects. By 1892, Ploetz had
already compiled 325 genealogies of local families and hoped to gather
even more from a nearby secret German lodge. A colleague recalled that
Ploetz was convinced "the Anglo-Saxons of America would be left behind,
unless they adopted a policy that would change the relative proportions of
the population."3

Like his medical and utopian colleagues, Ploetz was undoubtedly a
devotee of the late nineteenth century's hygiene and sanitary movement
that sought to eradicate germs and disease. One of the leading exponents of
this movement was Benjamin Ward Richardson, inventor of the lethal
chamber and author of Hygeia, A City of Health. The same conflicts that
perplexed late-nineteenth-century British and American social Darwinists,
from Spencer to New York's human breeding advocates, also confronted
German hereditarians. By the mid-1880s, Ploetz had propounded a
eugenic racial theory. Galton's term eugenics had not yet been translated,
and Ploetz coined the term Rossenhygiene (racial hygiene). He articulated his
notions of racial and social health in a multivolume 1895 work, The
Foundations of Rocial Hygiene. Volume one was entitled Fitness of Our Roce
and the Protection of the U7eak. His colleagues later argued that the term
Rassenhygiene should not be translated into English as race hygiene, but as
eugenics. The two were one and the same.4

Ploetz believed that a better understanding of heredity could help the
state identify and encourage the best specimens of the German race.
Ironically, while Ploetz believed in German national eugenics and harbored
strong anti-Semitic sentiments,S he included the Jews among
Germany's most valuable biological assets. After returning to Germany,
Ploetz in 1904 helped found the journal A rchiv fUr Rossen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie
(Archives of Race Science and Social Biology), and the next year he
organized the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fUr Rossenhygiene) to
promote eugenic research. Both entities functioned as the principal clearinghouses
for German eugenics for years to come. Understandably, Ploetz
emerged as Germany's leading race theorist and was often described as "the
founder of eugenics as a science in Germany."6

Even as Boeters and Ploetz were formulating their American-influenced
ideas, German social theorist Alfred J ost argued in his 1895 booklet, The
Right to Death, that the state possessed the inherent right to kill the unfit and
useless. The individual's "right to die" was not at issue; rather, Jost postulated,
it was the state's inherent "rights to [inflict] death [that are] the key to
the fitness oflife."7 The seeds of German negative eugenics were planted.

With Nordic superiority as the centerpiece of American eugenics,
Davenport quickly established good personal and professional relations
with German race hygienists. As director of the Carnegie Institution's
Station for Experimental Evolution, Davenport was more than happy to
correspond frequently with German eugenic thinkers on matters major
and mundane. In the first decade of the twentieth century, typed and handwritten
letters sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, encompassing
requests for copies of the latest German research to replies to German
appeals for Carnegie donations for a memorial to Mendel.8

Quickly, Davenport and the Carnegie Institution became the center of
the eugenic world for German researchers. America was enacting a growing
body of eugenic laws and governmental practices, and the movement
enjoyed wealthy backers and the active support of u.S. officials. While a
small group of German social thinkers merely expounded theory, America
was taking action. At the same time, by virtue of their blond and blue-eyed
Nordic nature as well as their stellar scientific reputation, Germany's budding
eugenicists became desirable allies for the Americans. A clear partnership
emerged in the years before World War 1. In this relationship,
however, America was far and away the senior partner. In eugenics, the
United States led and Germany followed.

One of Davenport's earliest German allies was the anthropologist and
eugenicist Eugen Fischer. Fischer was among the first "corresponding scientists"
recruited by Davenport when the Cold Spring Harbor facility opened
in 1904. Before long Davenport and Fischer were exchanging their latest
research, including studies on eye color and hair quality. In 1908, Fischer
expanded into research on race mixing between whites and Hottentots in
Africa, focusing on the children known as "Rehoboth bastards." Miscegenation
fascinated Davenport. He and his colleagues, both German and
American, jointly pursued studies on race mixing for years to come.9

When Davenport elevated eugenics into a global movement, he chose
German eugenicists for a major role, and British leaders went along.
Indeed, the First International Congress of Eugenics in London was scheduled
for July of 1912 to coincide with summer visits to Great Britain by
leading German and American eugenicists. At the time, these two groups
were seen as the giants of eugenic science. 10 But in fact there was only room
for one giant in the post-Galtonian world-and that would be America.
When Ploetz founded the Society for Racial Hygiene in Berlin in 1905,
it was little more than an outgrowth of his own social circle and his publication,
Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie. By the end of 1905, the
Society for Racial Hygiene had just eighteen German and two non-
German members. Even when so-called "branches" opened in other
German cities, these chapters usually claimed only a handful of members.
The society was less a national organization devoted to Germany's territorial
borders than it was a Germanic society devoted to the ordic roots and
Germanic language innervating much of northwestern Europe. Ploetz
himself maintained Swiss citizenship, as did some of his key colleagues.
Thinking beyond Germany's borders, Ploetz expanded the group within a
few years into the International Society for Race Hygiene. So-called
branches were established in Norway and Sweden, but again, these
branches were comprised of just a handful of eugenic compatriots. II

AI>society members traveled through other traditionally Germanic and
Nordic lands, however, they recruited more fellow travelers. By 1909,
Ploetz's growing international organization numbered more than 120 members,
although most were German nationals. In the summer of that year, the
organization gained prestige when Galton agreed to become its honorary
president, just as he had for the budding Eugenics Education Society. 12

Two years later, in 1911, Ploetz raised his group's profile again, this
time by participating in the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden.
But the Anglo-American bloc was clearly reluctant to see the German wing
rise on the world eugenic stage. After a series of negotiations, the Anglo-
American group for all intents and purposes absorbed Ploetz's budding
international network into their larger and better-financed movement. 13

Ploetz was brought in as a lead vice president of the First International
Congress of Eugenics in London in 1912. He was one of about fifteen individuals
invited back to Paris the next year to create the Permanent
International Eugenics Committee. This new and elite panel evolved into
the International Eugenics Commission and later became the International
Federation of Eugenic Organizations, which governed the entire worldwide
movement. Mter some failed attempts to regain leadership, Ploetz
and his societies finally bowed to American eugenicists and their international
eugenics agencies. 14

After 1913, the United States continued to dominate by virtue of its
widespread legislative and bureaucratic progress as well as its diverse
research programs. These American developments were closely followed
and popularized within the German scientific and eugenic establishment
by Geza von Hoffmann, an Austro-Hungarian vice consul who traveled
throughout the United States studying eugenic practices. Von Hoffmann's
1913 book, Racial Hygiene in the United States (Die Rassenhygiene in den
Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika), exhaustively detailed American laws
on sterilization and marriage restrictions, as well as methods of field inves
tigation and data collection. With equal thoroughness, he delineated
America's eugenic organizational structure-from the Rockefeller
Foundation to the institutions at Cold Spring Harbor. Then, in alphabetical
order, he summarized each state's eugenic legislation. A comprehensive
eighty-four-page bibliography was appended, with special subsections for
such topics as "euthanasia" and "sterilization." 1 5

Most importantly, von Hoffmann's comprehensive volume held up
American eugenic theory and practice as the ideal for Germany to emulate.
"Galton's dream," he wrote, "that racial hygiene should become the religion
of the future, is being realized in America .... America wants to breed
a new superior race." Von Hoffmann repeatedly chided Germany for
allowing mental defectives to roam freely when in America such people
were safely in institutions. Moreover, he urged Germany to follow
America's example in erecting race-based immigration barriers. For years
after Racial Hygiene in the United States was published, leading German
eugenicists would credit von Hoffmann's book on America's race science as
a seminal reference for German biology students. 16

Laughlin and the Eugenics Record Office were the leading conduits of
information for von Hoffmann. The ERO sent von Hoffmann its special
bulletins and other informational summaries. In turn, von Hoffmann
hoped to impress Laughlin with updates of his own. He faithfully reported
the latest developments in Germany and Austria, such as the formation of a
new eugenic research society in Leipzig, a nascent eugenic sexology study
group in Vienna, and genetic conference planning in Berlin.l?

But it was the American developments that captivated von Hoffmann.
Continually impressed with Laughlin's ideas, he frequently reported the
latest American news in German medical and eugenic literature. "I thank
you sincerely," von Hoffmann wrote Laughlin in a typical letter dated May
26, 1914, "for the transmission of your exhaustive and interesting reports.
The far-reaching proposal of sterilizing one tenth of the population
impressed me very much. I wrote a review of [the] report ... in the Archiv
fUr Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie [Ploetz's journal]."18

Eager to be a voice for German eugenics in America, von Hoffmann
also contributed articles about German developments to leading U.S. publications.
In October of 1914, his article "Eugenics in Germany" appeared
in the Journal of Heredity, explaining that while sterilization was being
debated, "the time has not yet come for such a measure in Germany." In
the same issue, the Journal of Heredity published an extensive review of
Fischer's book about race crossing between Dutch and Hottentots in
Africa, and the resulting "Rehoboth bastard" hybrids. Indeed, German
eugenic philosophy and progress were popular in the Journal of Heredity. In
1914, for example, they published an article tracing the heredity of
Bismarck, an article outlining plans for a new experimental genetics lab in
Berlin, an announcement for the next international genetics conference in
Berlin, and reviews of the latest German books.19

In the fall of 1914, the Great War erupted. During the war, "the eugenics
movement in Germany stood entirely still," as one of Germany's top
eugenic leaders later remembered in Journal of Heredity. Ploetz withdrew to
his estate. Sensational headlines in American newspapers reported and
denounced German atrocities against civilians, such as bayoneting babies
and mutilating women's breasts. Many of these stories were later found to
be utterly unfounded. But despite the headlines, the American eugenics
movement strengthened ties with its German scientific counterparts. In
1916, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race declared that the white
Nordic race was destined to rule the world, and confirmed the Aryan people's
role in it. German nationalists were heartened by America's recognition
of Nordic and Aryan racial superiority. Reviews of the book inspired a
spectrum of German scientists and nationalists to think eugenically even
before the work was translated into German.20

American fascination with the struggling German eugenics movement
continued right up until the United States entered the war in April of 1917.
In fact, the April issue of Eugenical News summarized in detail von Hoffmann's
latest article in Journal of Heredity. It outlined Germany's broad
plans to breed its own eugenically superior race after the war to replace
German men lost on the battlefield. The article proposed special apartment
buildings for desirable single Aryan women and cash payments for
having babies.21

America entered the war on April 6, 1917. Millions died in battle. At the
eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, a defeated
Germany finally agreed to an armistice, ending the bloody conflict. The
Weimar Republic was created. A peace treaty was signed in June of 1919.
American eugenics' partnership with the German movement resumed. 22

Laughlin prepared a detailed pro-German speech for the Ninth Annual
Meeting of the Eugenics Research Association, held at Cold Spring Harbor
in June of 1920. In the text, Laughlin analyzed Germany's newly imposed
democratic constitution point by point, identifying the clauses that authorized
eugenic and racial laws. These included a range of state powers, from
"Article 7 ... [allowing] protection of plants from disease and pests" to
"Articles 119 to 134 inclusive [which] prescribe the fundamental law of
Germany in reference to the social life." Declaring that "modern civilization"
itself depended on German and Teutonic conquest, Laughlin closed
by assuring his colleagues, "From what the world knows of Germanic traits,
we logically concede that she will live up to her instincts of race conservation
.... " Laughlin never actually delivered the speech, probably because of
time constraints, so Eugenical News published it in their next issue, as did a
subsequent edition of the official British organ, Eugenics Review. Reprints of
the Eugenics Review version were then circula ted by the ER 0.23

Scientific correspondence also resumed. Shortly after Laughlin's
enthusiastic appraisal, a eugenicist at the Institute for Heredity Research in
Potsdam requested ERO documentation for his advisory committee's presentation
to the local government. Davenport dispatched materials and supporting
statements "that will be of use to you in your capacity as advisor to
the Government in matters of race hygiene." ERO staffers had missed their
exchanges with German colleagues, and Davenport assured his Potsdam
friend, "I read your letter to our staff at its meeting on Monday and they
were interested to hear from you." Information about the new advisory
committee was published in the very next issue of Eugenical News. German
race scientists reciprocated by sending their own research papers for
Davenport's review, covering a gamut of topics from inherited human traits
to mammalian attributes.24

But efforts by German eugenicists to join America's international
movement were still hampered by the aftershocks of the war. Under the
Treaty of Versailles, Germany agreed to pay the Allies massive war reparations,
132 billion marks or 33 billion dollars. This crippled the finances of
all of Germany, including its raceologists. Meanwhile, German nationalists
were enraged because France and Belgium now occupied the Rhineland.
France's army had long included African soldiers from its colonies-such as
Senegal, Mali and North Africa-who were now mingling with German
women and would ultimately father several hundred children of mixed race
in Germany.25

Infuriated Germans refused to cooperate with international committees
that included Belgian or French scientists. Nor did they have the
money to travel, even within Europe. The International Congress of
Hygiene, for instance, originally scheduled for May of 1921 in Geneva, was
cancelled because "the low value of the currency of many countries and the
high value of the Swiss franc make it impossible for many countries to send
delegates," as one published notice explained.26

Hence German scientists were unable and unwilling to attend the
Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York in September of
1921. Instead, they sent bitter protest letters to Cold Spring Harbor,
denouncing the French and Belgian occupation of their land and seeking
moral support from colleagues in America. Indeed, even though invitations
to the congress were mailed to eugenicists around the world by the State
Department, the Germans were excluded due to escalating postwar diplomatic
and military tensions. Three weeks before the Second Congress,
Davenport wrote to one prominent Berlin colleague, Agnes Bluhm, "profound
regrets that international complications have prevented formal invitations
to the International Eugenics Congress in ew York City." He
added his "hope that by the time of the following Congress such complications
will have been long removed." So once again American science took
center stage in international eugenics. Alienated from much of the
European movement, Germany's involvement in the field was now mainly
limited to correspondence with Cold Spring Harbor.27

In 1922, Germany defaulted on its second annual reparations payment.
France and Belgium invaded Germany's rich industrial Ruhr region on
January 11, 192 3, to seize coal and other assets. During the height of the
harsh Ruhr occupation, the Weimar government began printing money
day and night to support striking German workers. This shortsighted move
made Germany's currency worthless nearly overnight, leading to unprecedented
hyperinflation.28

All of these factors contributed to Germany's isolation from organized
eugenics. Efforts by Davenport in 1920 and 1921 to include German scientists
in the International Eugenics Commission were rebuffed. None of the
players wanted to sit together. Determined to bring German eugenicists
back into the worldwide movement, Davenport traveled to Europe in
1922. He selected Lund, Sweden, as the site of the 1923 conference,
because, as he confided to a German colleague, "it would be convenient to
Berlin." It also circumvented Allied nations such as Belgium, England and
France. Davenport then arranged for his colleagues on the IEC to take the
first step and formally invite German representatives to join the commission.
But tensions over the Rhineland and reparations were still too explosive
for the Germans to agree. By the spring of 192 3, Davenport had to
concede in frustration, "German delegates would not meet in intimate
association with the French."29

Davenport wrote to one key German eugenicist, "I implore you, that
you will use your influence to prevent such a backward step. The only way
we can heal the wounds caused by the late war is to repress these sad memories
from our scientific activities. It will do a lot to restore international
science and to set an example for other scientific organizations to follow if
a delegate is sent to the meeting of the Commission to be held in Lund
next autumn. "30

But the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian forces further
inflamed angry German eugenicists. "Cooperative work between Germans
and French seems to be impossible so long as the Ruhr invasion lasts," one
embittered German eugenic leader wrote Davenport. "If in America a foreign
power had entered and held in its grasp the chief industrial area surely
no American man of science would sit with a representative of that other
nation at a table. Therefore, one should correspondingly not expect
Germans to do this."31

Weimar continued to print money around the clock, creating hour-tohour
hyperinflation. Fabulous stories abounded of money being carted
around in wheelbarrows and being used to stoke furnaces. One famous
story centered on a Freiburg University student who ordered a cup of coffee
listed on the menu for 5,000 marks; by the time he ordered a refill, the
second cup cost 9,000 marks. Another told of an insurance policy redeemed
to buy a single loaf of bread. The American dollar, which had traded for
1,500 marks in 1922, was worth 4.2 trillion marks by the end of 1923.32

German extremists tried to exploit the hyperinflation crisis to start a
political revolution to abrogate the Treaty of Versailles. Among the agitators
was Adolf Hitler. In November of 192 3, Hitler organized the Beer
Hall Putsch in Munich. He hoped to seize power in Bavaria and march all
the way to Berlin. His rebellion was quickly put down. Hitler was sentenced
to five years in prison, to be served at Landsberg Fortress. Referring
to his jail cell as his "university," Hitler read voraciously. It was during
these prison years that Hitler solidified his fanatical eugenic views and
learned to shape that fanaticism into a eugenic mold.33

Where did Hitler develop his racist and anti-Semitic views? Certainly
not from anything he read or heard from America. Hitler became a mad
racist dictator based solely on his own inner monstrosity, with no assistance
from anything written or spoken in English. But like many rabid
racists, from Plecker in Virginia to Rentoul in England, Hitler preferred
to legitimize his race hatred by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in a more
palatable pseudoscientific facade-eugenics. Indeed, Hitler was able to
recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science
was on his side.

The intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were
strictly American. He merely compounded all the virulence of long-established
American race science with his fanatic anti-Jewish rage. Hitler's
extremist eugenic science, which in many ways seemed like the logical
extension of America's own entrenched programs and advocacy, eventually
helped shape the institutions and even the machinery of the Third Reich's
genocide. By the time Hitler's concept of Aryan superiority emerged, his
politics had completely fused into a biological and eugenic mindset.
 
When Hitler used the term master race, he meant just that, a biological
"master race." America crusaded for a biologically superior race, which
would gradually wipe away the existence of all inferior strains. Hitler would
crusade for a master race to quickly dominate all others. In Hitler's view,
eugenically inferior groups, such as Poles and Russians, would be permitted
to exist but were destined to serve Germany's master race. Hitler demonized
the Jewish community as social, political and racial poison, that is, a
biological menace. He vowed that the Jewish community would be neutralized,
dismantled and removed from Europe.34

Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted, how
people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become
the unseen generals in Hitler's war against the Jews and other Europeans
deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas,
write the legislation, and even hand-select the victims for sterilization,
euthanasia and mass extermination.

Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, coined a popular adage in the Reich,
"National Socialism is nothing but applied biology."35

While in prison, at his "university," Hitler codified his madness in the
book Mein Kampf, which he dictated to Hess. He also read the second edition
of the first great German eugenic text, Foundation of Human Heredity
and Race Hygiene (Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene),
which had been published in 1921. Germany's three leading race
eugenicists, Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, authored the twovolume
set. 36All three of the book's authors were closely allied to American
eugenic science and Davenport personally. Their eugenics originated at
Cold Spring Harbor.

Baur, an intense racist, closely studied American eugenic science and
formulated his ideas accordingly. He was comfortable confiding to his dear
friend Davenport just how those ideas fused with nationalism. For example,
in November of 1920, about a year before Foundation of Human
Heredity and Race Hygiene went to press, Baur wrote to Davenport in almost
perfect English, "The Medical Division of the Prussian Government has
asked me to prepare a review of the eugenical laws and Vorsch1'iften [regulations]
which have already been introduced into the differed States of your
country." He emphasized, "Of especial interest are the marriage certificates
(Ehebestimmung)-eertificates of health required for marriage, laws forbidding
marriage of hereditarily burdened persons among others-land] further
the experiments made in different states with castration of criminals
and insane.37

"It is at present extraordinarily difficult [here in Germany] to gather
together the desired material [about u.S. legislation]''' Baur continued. "I
am thinking, however, that perhaps in your institute [Carnegie Institution]
all this material has been already gathered. That, perhaps, there may
be some recent printed report on the matter. If my idea is correct I would
be exceedingly thankful to you if you could help me with a collection of
the material."38

Baur then bitterly complained about confiscatory war reparations
under the Treaty of Versailles, and the presence of French and Belgian-
Mrican troops as enforcers. "The entire work of eugenics is very difficult
with us," Baur reported, "all children in the cities are entirely insufficiently
nourished. Everywhere milk and fat are lacking, and this matter will
become yet greater if we now shall give up to France and Belgium the milch
[milk] cows which they have requisitioned [for war reparations]. The
entirely unnecessary huge army of occupation eats us poor, but eugenically
the worst is what we call the Black Shame, the French negro regiments,
which are placed all over Germany and which in the most shameful fashion
give free rein to their impulses toward women and children. By force and
by money they secure their victims-each French negro soldier has, at our
expense, a greater income than a German professor-and the consequence
is a frightful increase of syphilis and a mass of mulatto children. Even if all
French-Belgian tales of mishandling by German soldiers were true, they
have been ten times exceeded by what now-in peace!-happens on
German soil. 39

"But I have wandered far from my theme," Baur continued. "We have
under the new government an advisory commission for race hygiene ...
[which] will in the future pass upon all new bills from the eugenical standpoint.
It is for this commission that I wish to prepare the Referate [reports]
on American eugenic laws." Baur added that the Carnegie researcher
Alfred Blakeslee's "paper is in press [for publication in Germany], the plate
is at the lithographers."40

Baur was one of the principal German scientists Davenport had
implored to join the International Eugenics Commission.41

Baur's coauthor, Fritz Lenz, like many German eugenicists, was long
an aficionado of American sterilization. He lectured German audiences
that they were lagging far behind America. Like Baur, Lenz was among
the German eugenic leaders Davenport beckoned to join him at the helm
of world eugenics. Lenz reluctantly refused Davenport's entreaties to
attend either an international commission or congress, and in 1923 candidly
declared to Davenport, "Europe goes with rapid steps toward a new
frightful war, in which Germany will chiefly participate .... That is the
position in Europe and, therefore, I do not believe the time for international
congresses has arrived so long as France occupies the Ruhr, that is,
not before the second World War. I do not wish this certainly; I know that
our race in it would suffer more heavily than in the past World War but it
cannot be avoided. "42

Lenz suggested to Davenport that while he could not participate in
international gatherings, German and American eugenics could and should
continue to advance eugenic science between them, mainly by corresponding.
California eugenic leader Popenoe had already established a vigorous
exchange with Lenz. Lenz wanted such bilateral contact extended to the
ERO as well. "I would be thankful," he wrote Davenport, "if I also could
secure the publications of the Eugenics Record Office in order to notice
them [report on them] in the Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie
[Archives of Race Science and Social Biology]. I have much missed the bulletins
of these last years." Lenz closed his letter with "the hope of a work of mutual
service."43 Lenz later predicted, "The next round in the thousand year fight
for the life of the Nordic race will probably be fought in America."44

The third coauthor of Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene
was Eugen Fischer, a Carnegie Institution "corresponding scientist" since
1904. Fischer was a close colleague of Davenport's, and they would form an
international eugenic partnership that would last years.45

The two-volume Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene that
Hitler studied focused heavily on American eugenic principles and examples.
The book's short bibliography and footnotes listed an abundance of
American writers and publications, including the Journal of Heredity, various
Bulletins of the Eugenics Record Office, Popenoe's Applied Eugenics,
Dugdale's The Jukes, Goddard's The Kallikak Family and Davenport's own
three books, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, The Hill Folk and The Nams. Of
course, the Baur-Fischer-Lenz work also featured themes and references
from von Hoffmann's Racial Hygiene in the United States and Hitler's
favorite, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race.46

The Baur-Fischer-Lenz volumes also included repeated explorations
and reiterations of American eugenic issues. World War I U.S. Army testing
had revealed that "the high percentage of blue eyes [among recruits] is
remarkable." The authors then noted the decline of blue-eyed men since
the trait was measured in Civil War recruits. The anthropological fine
points of American immigration were probed. For example, Fischer wrote,
"In the children of Jews who have emigrated from eastern or central
Europe to the United States, the skulls are narrower than those of their
broad-skulled parents, and this comparative narrowness is more marked in
proportion to the number of years that have elapsed since the migration
.... Sicilians acquire somewhat broader heads in the United States."
Repeated references to American Indian, Negro, and Jewish characteristics
were liberally sprinkled throughout the volumes. They also included information
on the Eugenics Record Office and Indiana's pioneering sterilization
doctor, Harry Clay SharpY

The Baur-Fischer-Lenz volumes were well received in Cold Spring
Harbor. Davenport promised he would write a review for Eugenical News.
Both Eugenical News and Journal of Heredity ran favorable reviews of each
subsequent revised edition. One ofPopenoe's reviews in Journal of Heredity,
this one in 1923, lauded the work as "worthy of the best traditions of
German scholarship, and ... to be warmly recommended." Popenoe especially
praised Lenz's sixteen-point program, which outlined plans to cut off
defective lines of descent and the "protection of the Nordic race."48

It was no accident that Hitler read Foundation of Human Heredity and
Race Hygiene. It was published by Julius Lehmann of Lehmanns Verlag,
Germany's foremost eugenic publishing house. Someone at Lehmanns
happily reported to Lenz that Hitler had read his book. Lehmanns Verlag
also published Ploetz's Archiv fUr Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, the
Monatsschrift fUr Kriminalbiologie (Monthly Journal of Criminal Biology), and
von Hoffmann's Racial Hygiene in the United States. The year after Hitler
was imprisoned, Lehmanns published the German translation of Grant's
The Passing of the Great Race.49

Julius Lehmann was not just a publisher with a proclivity for race biology.
He was a shoulder-to-shoulder coconspirator with Hitler during the
1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and was at Hitler's side on November 8, 1923,
when the National Socialists launched their abortive coup against the
Bavarian government. After the beer hall ruckus, Bavarian officials were
held hostage at Lehmann's ornate villa until the uprising was suppressed.
As the revolt collapsed, Lehmann, a financial supporter as well as a friend,
convinced the Nazi guards to allow their captives to escape rather than execute
them. Lehmann was the connection between the theory of the Society
for Racial Hygiene and the action of militants such as the Nazis.50

Hitler openly displayed his eugenic orientation and thorough knowledge
of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. For
example, in Mein lVtmpfhe declared: "The demand that defective people be
prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the
clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane
act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings,
and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole. "51

Hitler mandated in Mein lVtmpfthat "The Peoples' State must set race
in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure .... It must see to it
that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite
one's own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world .... It
must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.
It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or
who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into
actual practice."52

Hitler railed against "this ... bourgeois-national society [to whom] the
prevention of the procreative faculty in sufferers from syphilis, tuberculosis,
hereditary diseases, cripples, and cretins is a crime .... A prevention of
the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically
degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only six hundred years,
would not only free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune, but
would lead to a recovery which today seems scarcely conceivable .... The
result will be a race which at least will have eliminated the germs of our
present physical and hence spiritual decay."53

Repeating standard American eugenic notions on hybridization, Hitler
observed, "Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces
a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring
will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as
high as the higher one .... Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for
a higher breeding of alllife."54

In some cases, Hitler's eugenic writings resembled passages from
Grant's The Passing of the Great Race. Grant wrote, "Speaking English,
wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a
egro into a white man. or was a Syrian or Egyptian freedman trans
formed into a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator
in the amphitheater."55

In a similar vein, Hitler wrote, "But it is a scarcely conceivable fallacy of
thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a
German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language
in the future and perhaps even give his vote to a German political
party." He also noted, "Surely no one will call the purely external fact that
most of this lice-ridden [Jewish] migration from the East speaks German a
proof of their German origin and nationality."56

Grant wrote, "What the Melting Pot actually does in practice can be
seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish
conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture
which we call Mexican and which is now engaged in demonstrating its
incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures
and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood
at its true value."57

In a similar vein, Hitler wrote, "North America, whose population consists
in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little
with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture
from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants
often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale."58

Mein Kampf also displayed a keen familiarity with the recently-passed
u.S. National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is
today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception
[of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German
Republic, but the [United States], in which an effort is made to consult reason
at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in
poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes
in slow beginnings a view which is peculiar to the Peoples' State."59

In page after page of Mein Kampfs rantings, Hitler recited social
Darwinian imperatives, condemned the concept of charity, and praised the
policies of the United States and its quest for Nordic purity. Perhaps no
passage better summarized Hitler's views than this from chapter 11: "The
Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially
pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the
master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood. "60

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed American
eugenic legislation. "Now that we know the laws of heredity," he told a fellow
azi, "it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely
handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with great
interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of
reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no
value or be injurious to the racial stock .... But the possibility of excess and
error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws. It only exhorts us to
the greatest possible conscientiousness .... It seems to me the ultimate in
hypocrisy and inner untruth if these same people [social critics]-and it is
them, in the main-eall the sterilization of those who are severely handicapped
physically and morally and of those who are genuinely criminal a
sin against God. I despise this sanctimoniousness .... "61

Reflecting upon the race mixing caused by occupying French-African
troops and his hope for Nordic supremacy, Hitler later told one reporter,
"One eventually reaches the conclusions that masses of men are mere biological
plasticine [clay]. We will not allow ourselves to be turned into niggers,
as the French tried to do after 1918. The nordic blood available in
England, northern France and North America will eventually go with us to
reorganize the world."62

Moreover, as Hitler's knowledge of American pedigree techniques
broadened, he came to realize that even he might have been eugenically
excluded. In later years, he conceded at a dinner engagement, "I was shown
a questionnaire drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, which it was proposed
to put to people whom it was deemed desirable to sterilize. At least
three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated my own good
mother. If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty
sure I should never have been born at all!"63

Nor did Hitler fail to grasp the eugenic potential of gas and the lethal
chamber. Four years before Mein Kampf was written, a psychiatrist and a
judge published their treatise, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life,
which insisted that the medical killing of the unfit, such as the feebleminded,
was society's duty; but the extermination had to be overseen by
doctors. Several subsequent publications endorsed the same view, making
the topic au courant in German eugenic circles. Hitler, who had himself
been hospitalized for battlefield gas injuries, wrote about gas in Mein Kampf
"If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand
of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison
gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our best German workers in
the field, the sacrifices of millions at the front would not have been in vain.
On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have
saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future."64

On January 30,1933, Adolf Hitler seized power following an inconclusive
election. During the twelve-year Reich, he never varied from the
eugenic doctrines of identification, segregation, sterilization, euthanasia,
eugenic courts and eventually mass termination of germ plasm in lethal
chambers. During the Reich's first ten years, eugenicists across America
welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of
research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilizing
hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans
from German society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia
passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of
Virginia's Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-
Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."65

Most of all, American raceologists were intensely proud to have inspired
the purely eugenic state the Nazis were constructing. In those early years of
the Third Reich, Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic
legislation modeled on laws already introduced across America, upheld by
the Supreme Court and routinely enforced. Nazi doctors and even Hitler
himself regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York
to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path
blazed by the United States.66 American eugenicists were eager to assist. As
they followed the day-to-day progress of the Third Reich, American
eugenicists clearly understood their continuing role. This was particularly
true of California's eugenicists, who led the nation in sterilization and provided
the most scientific support for Hitler's regime.67

In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond five thousand
per month, the California eugenic leader and immigration activist
C. M. Goethe was ebullient in congratulating E. S. Gosney of the San Diegobased
Human Betterment Foundation for his impact on Hitler's work. Upon
his return in 1934 from a eugenic fact-finding mission in Germany, Goethe
wrote Gosney a letter of praise. The Human Betterment Foundation was so
proud of Goethe's letter that they reprinted it in their 1935 Annual Report.68

"You will be interested to know," Goethe's letter proclaimed, "that your
work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of
intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program.
Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated
by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human
Betterment Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought
with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a
great government of 60 million people."69