In Germany, the American [eugenics] programs were frequently invoked as models. As early as 1913, a member of the Berlin eugenics society published a glowing report on the American eugenics movement. Geza von Hoffmann's Racial Hygiene in the United States of North America made many Germans...envious of their American counterparts, who apparently enjoyed much greater popular and legislative support as well as success in attracting financial patrons.
Before the Nazis came to power, German eugenicsÐlike its American and European counterparts elsewhereÐwas both ethnically and politically diverse. The German Society for Race Hygiene, founded in 1905, was originally dominated by technocratic elitists alarmed by the declining fertility of the professional classes rather than by anti-Semites and ultra nationalists. Although the Society included racial purists, who formed a secret "Nordic Ring," they had to struggle against those who sought to purge eugenics of "unscientific" racism. A number of Jewish geneticists, such as Richard Goldschmidt, Franz Kallmann, and Curt Stern, were active eugenicists. As with eugenics movements elsewhere, so too in Germany; support came from political liberals and socialists as well as conservatives. But given its diverse supporters, the movement was inevitably riven with internal conflicts over both means and ends. What its members shared was a vision of the nation's health as a public resource and a belief that its problems could be solved through the breeding of a fit and healthy population or Volk.
The appeal of this technocratic vision had been greatly strengthened by the First World War. The nation's biological fitness now seemed crucial to its collective survival and thus a legitimate matter of state concern. In the war's devastating aftermath, that concern came increasingly to focus on cost- cutting. As elsewhere, hospitals and asylums were expensive to run and vulnerable to charges of excessive expenditures. In the context of these concerns, liberal and humanitarian values were increasingly swept aside.
In the aftermath of the First World War, close links were forged between German and American eugenicists. In the early 1920s, Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, began to report on German developments in the bulletin of the American Eugenics Society. In the late 1920s, he also began to report on American eugenics in German journals. The influential German geneticist Fritz Lenz established good relations with Laughlin, Charles Davenport, and Paul Popenoe (editor of the Journal of Heredity and coauthor with Roswell Johnson of the textbook Applied Eugenics). Popenoe in turn reported on American developments in the journal of the German eugenics movement.
These relationships were not disturbed by the Nazi seizure of power. Popenoe continued to report favorably on German events. So did Laughlin, who used his position to organize the dissemination of Nazi propaganda. In 1935, the International Congress for Population Science met in Berlin. Two AmericansÐLaughlin and Clarence Campbell, president of the Eugenics Research AssociationÐserved as vice-presidents. (Marie Stopes, leader of the British birth control movement, also participated.) In their later reporting of events in Germany, they stressed that the law's intent was eugenic rather than racist, that it was carefully conceived, and that it included safeguards against abuse. Those themes were stressed by many other observers as well.
The Nazis regularly quoted American geneticists who expressed support for their sterilization policies. They also frequently invoked the large scale California experience with sterilization. An analysis of that program by Ezra Gosney (the wealthy banker and citrus grower who founded the Human Betterment Foundation) and Paul Popenoe was published in 1929 as Sterilization for Human Betterment. Laughlin was a collaborator. The book lauded the California program as beneficial to those sterilized and cost-effective to the state. A German translation appeared the following year and was widely cited by leaders of the sterilization movement.
Before 1933, most German eugenicists had actually been dubious about proposals for compulsory sterilization, regarding them as politically unrealistic and scientifically premature. However, a draft law permitting sterilization with the consent of the person concerned or that person's guardian had been prepared in 1932, during the last days of the Weimar Republic. Before it could be approved, the government was in the hands of Adolf Hitler. In his manifesto, Mein Kampf, Hitler had proclaimed that the state "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.... Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children."
The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Progeny, issued two months after the Nazis came to power, allowed for compulsory sterilization, extended the range of "hereditarily determined" conditions, and required doctors to register cases of genetic disease (except in women past reproductive age). Sterilization was mandated, whether or not the person was institutionalized, in cases of congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depression, severe physical deformity, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness and deafness, and severe alcoholism. (Intelligence tests designed to determine feeblemindedness included such questions as "Why is there day and night?" and "Why does one build houses higher in towns than in the countryside?) Genetic health courts were established to evaluate cases, which were usually referred to the courts by physicians. In 1935, the law was amended to allow for abortion within the first six months of pregnancy in the case of "hereditarily ill" women. Although not expressly permitted by the law, many ostensibly "asocial" persons were also sterilized. The genetic health courts found that deviation from the "healthy instincts of the yolk" constituted disguised or "social feeblemindedness" and that sterilization of deviants was thus legal. Nazis also instituted a number of "positive" eugenics programs, such as loans and subsidies, to encourage breeding among favored groups. The best-known of these efforts was the "Well-of-Life" or Lebensborn program, which allowed single and married women who passed a racial test to give birth in special maternity homes run by the SS. . . . In Germany, the sterilization law proved to be a first step on the road to murder. . . .
The German sterilization program was followed in 1939 by a euthanasia program designed to rid the nation of its mental patients, now characterized as "useless eaters. (The technology of the gas chamber was first developed in connection with this program.) Racist measures had been imposed shortly after Hitler came to power. In April 1933, Jewish and half-Jewish state employees and civil servants were dismissed from their jobs. In 1935, the first of the Nuremberg laws, defining who was a Jew, stripping them of citizenship, and forbidding their marriage with "citizens of German or related blood," was adopted. Other laws and extralegal actions directed against Jews, Gypsies, the offspring of German mothers and black French soldiers, homosexuals, and other social and political "deviants" followed, culminating in the program of mass extermination known as the Holocaust. What was the attitude of German geneticists as their science was invoked on behalf of ever more extreme measures of racial purification? After the war, nearly all would claim that they too had been victims and suffered greatly under the regime. They knew nothing of the mass murders of mental patients and Jews. Even if they had joined the party, none had been Nazis "at heart." They found Nazi racism abhorrent. There were no traces of anti-Semitism in their work. Some of their best friends were Jews.
Recent historiography tells a different story. Most of Germany's leading geneticists--including those who prior to 1933 had criticized anti Semitism--actively helped construct the racial state. They served on important commissions, provided opinions on individuals' racial ancestry, gave courses on genetics for SS doctors, participated in the drafting of racial laws. More than half of all academic biologists joined the Nazi Party, the highest membership rate of any professional group. That so many joined the Party (and also the SS and SA) is not explained by pressure; in fact, there was remarkably little. For example, party members and nonmembers had equal success in obtaining grants for their research. It rather reflects their enthusiasm for a regime that finally gave biologists, and geneticists in particular, the support they thought was their due. Far from being repressed, genetics--which was considered to be of great ideological, military, and economic importance to the regime--flourished in the Third Reich. Basic research was generously funded, career chances were expanded, and restrictions on experimental work were minimized.