About the Author
Don Canaan
Don Canaan, a former network TV film editor, is the publisher, editor and chief bottle washer for
Israel News Faxx, a daily publication that brings you the latest news from Israel and the Middle East.
Since the early 20th century, two countries, primarily, have been in the forefront of human genetic experimentation--the United States and Germany.
Nazi Germany considered their subjects sub-human--Jews, gypsies, mentally defectives and alcoholics.
American geneticists were also interested in human genetic makeup, but their data was obtained through the use of questionnaires and genealogical records. The information was analyzed to determine which human traits were inherited and which were not.
However, early American results were tainted by the scientists' own sociological backgrounds. They concluded that "good human stock" was similar to attributes possessed by members of the white, Protestant middle class--characteristics that the researchers possessed, rather than attributes possessed by new American immigrants.
This is the "pseudoscience of eugenics," said Betty Klapper, a professor of biological and physical sciences at Columbus State Community College. She explained the relationship of "positive and negative" eugenics to the Holocaust. "The basic premises of the eugenicists were that behavioral or physiological traits were inherited. "
"Positive" experimentation attempted to determine the origin of "fits" within the population, while other researchers' programs investigated ways to prevent "the proliferation of unfits, or unworthy individuals."
Positive eugenics is summarized by Klapper's paraphrasing of a statement by American eugenicist Charles Davenport who said: "Of all female occupations that of servant shows the greatest proclivity toward consumption (tuberculosis). The occupation does not contribute to the servant catching the disease, but that, because the employee is primarily Irish, (who as a nation lack resistance to tuberculosis and are below the average in mental and physical development), they lack a resistance to TB."
The American Eugenics Society was founded in 1923 as a committee of the American Breeders Association. Many scientists of the day supported the group's three aims--"to promote research, to popularize the idea of eugenics and to influence legislation in this country"--Klapper said.
"They were very fearful for the well-being of this country, so they started their programs in negative eugenics," she continued. This led to many states legislating sterilization for certain individuals.
"Heredity plays a role in the transmission of idiocy, and therefore inmates at state institutions who are deemed hopeless by the opinion of two physicians could be involuntarily sterilized," was a statement contained in this legislation.
By the 1930s, 20-30,000 involuntary sterilizations were being performed. In addition, the group promoted restricted marriage laws--forbidding marriage between "unfit individuals, people who were deemed feeble-minded or perhaps had venereal disease," Klapper said. She quoted a 1934 statement by a Lynchburg, Va. official: "The Germans are beating us at our own game."
In the same year in Germany, Fritz Lenz, a Nazi scientist said, "We're way ehind the Americans." Hitler's 1933 sterilization law "very closely resembled a model law similar to one proposed" by an American negative eugenicist, a protégé of Davenport's, Klapper said.
The law provided for sterilization of people with "congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy and severe alcoholism."
Between 1934 and 1939, 350,000-400,000 people were sterilized. "That's about tenfold more than here," she said.
Davenport, in a letter to a friend, wrote: "Our ancestors drove (non-rotestants) from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews...They burned the witches, but it seems to be against the mores to burn anyone else."
Many prominent American and German scientists objected to the suggestions made by the negative eugenicists, she said.
Former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was criticized because as a congressman he had represented "a group of a people that weren't very American." In a newspaper column, LaGuardia responded with his opinion of eugenics: "I have no family tree. The only member of my family is my dog, Ned, who is the son of Doughboy, who was the son of Siegfried, who was the son of Tannhauser, who was the son of Wotan--a distinguished family tree to be sure--but after all he's just a son of a bitch."
German interest in eugenics was "more enthusiastic and more excessive" than America's--"more evil as well," Klapper said.
One pre-Nazi era German scientist, Ernst Haeckel (died 1919) was an advocate of "racial hygiene." He believed that "each of the races of human beings was a separate species," she said, "and that the lower races--it's not too hard to identify which one he considered lower races--are psychologically nearer to mammals than to civilized Europeans. We must therefore assign a totally different value to their lives."
Destruction of groups of people was not purely Hitler's idea. German eugenicists had been promoting the idea for many years. Hitler absorbed what many people were already thinking about.
Some Jewish scientists supported these theories because "it never occurred to them that they might be considered part of the unfit," Klapper said.
The Nazi sterilization laws of 1933 led to 1935's Nuremberg racial laws. Marriages were restricted between "Germans and any non-German-type."
In 1936, courses in "racial hygiene" were required to be taken by all medical students. In 1939, euthanasia laws were enacted and in 1942 the Wannsee Conference decided to implement Hitler's "final solution to the Jewish problem."
Beside the negative eugenics programs, Germany implemented one "positive" one, the Lebensborn program. Heinrich Himmler was distraught, she said, because Germany, after World War I, had been decimated by the loss of many young men.
He wanted to promote "the births of more Aryan individuals (and) what was involved were some pretty nasty activities. They kidnapped what they called Aryan-looking children from occupied countries, brought them back to Germany and put them into SS homes and these children never did find out about their natural parents.
"They established homes for unwed mothers. They promoted the idea that being an unwed mother was OK and then they would take these children into good German homes.
"They had R&R retreats for SS officers and selected women. If the officers fathered children in places like Norway, the babies would be brought back to be raised by these guys' wives," Klapper said, to "raise a baby for Hitler."
German women who gave birth to many children were awarded "The Order of the Rabbit."
German psychiatrists were allowed to "kill their own patients." Lenz, in his proposal for the law, stated: "The life of a patient who would otherwise need lifelong care may be ended by medical measures." This program was legalized by Hitler effective Sept. 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.
Psychiatrists were sent official questionnaires about their patients and they received five pfennigs for processing each questionnaire. "The price for one
questionnaire was about the price of a single cigarette," Klapper said. The questionnaires were evaluated "for final determination by a panel of two psychiatrists and you only really needed one positive vote for the killing to take effect.
"Buses took the victims to a central location. They were sometimes given a quick physical exam and in a day or two were killed, at first by lethal injection and later by gas. The bodies were cremated and ashes were divided into equal portions and sent to family members," Klapper said.
"People knew about this because kids were talking about it in the street...that if you weren't good or not too smart, that's where you were going to end up (pointing to the smokestacks of the crematoria).
These murders were the precursor of deaths and medical experiments perpetrated upon Jews during World War II. "For opportunistic scientists there was the possibility of an unlimited availability of human tissue" and there were many who came to the camps with "shopping lists for what they needed."
Published by Don Canaan on May 5, 2006 04:47 PM
