The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism

"This is a very important book, because it’s not just about what the Nazis were doing. I think it’s important just to say here that, again, this is where eugenics gets misread. There’s no question that the Nazis were practising eugenics, but that’s not what happens specifically during the Holocaust. Most of the eugenics stuff was actually happening in the 1930s. What happened in the camps—horrific experiments and the rest of it— was not eugenics. To say that that was eugenics, as a lot of anti-eugenicists say today, is a misunderstanding of what eugenics is and what the Holocaust was. “The Nazis got a lot of their ideas from the United States” In the 1930s the Germans passed a series of laws, starting almost immediately when Hitler took power in 1933, that made it possible to sterilise people who were, they thought, unfit in one way or another; prevent marriages between Jews and Aryans; all of those kinds of things. Those were obviously intended to affect the outcome of reproduction or to stop reproduction. Those are the eugenic bits of Nazism. What’s really important about Kühl’s book is that it shows that the Nazis didn’t invent this. In fact, the Nazis got a lot of their ideas—I teach this to my students, and it’s an amazing teaching moment—from the United States. Sterilisation, the bit that you brought up earlier, the thing that everybody if they know anything about eugenics knows, began in the United States. The first legislation permitting co-erced sterilisation in the United States was in 1907. It was a state law in Indiana, the first state to allow forced sterilisation. For the next 20 years, different states in the Union were fiddling with this, playing with it. Sometimes they would find themselves accosted with legal challenges and other forms of protest. Finally, in the late 1920s, Virginia, which was one of the most active of these sterilising states, decided that they were going to take a case to the Supreme Court because they were tired of not being sure if they could do this legally. “He used a now very, very famous phrase: ‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough’” So they finagled a case. It was completely fixed, no question about it. Buck vs. Bell went to the Supreme Court in 1927, and the Supreme Court ruled—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was the major writer of the decision—that it was okay to sterilise people. He used a now very, very famous phrase: ‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ What that case did is that it said: you can go ahead and do this. So by the early 1930s, 33 or 34 states in the Union had sterilisation rules on the books. Most of them didn’t disappear until the late 1970s. Absolutely. The Immigration Law of 1924, and the sterilisation laws that began in 1907 were well in place by the time he came to power. In fact Harry Laughlin, one of the promoters of sterilisation and eugenics in the United States, got an an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg, a very famous German university, sometime in the 1930s, and there was a lot of swapping of ideas between the Germans and the Americans in the 20s and 30s. There were lots of eugenicists in Germany in the 1920s, but you didn’t see this kind of full-scale, head-on stuff until the 1930s. But you did in the States. More than 60,000 people were sterilised in the States under those laws. Well, the defence lawyers for the Germans at the Nazi Doctors’ Trial, in the late 1940s, tried to argue that Americans were doing a lot of this. So there were big attempts to say, ‘No, no, no, what we were doing was different,’ just like the Scandinavians were saying their sterilisation programmes were also different. Everybody wanted to distance themselves from what the Nazis were doing. And that’s when the term ‘eugenics’ disappears from the literature. We actually have conversations, written notes and memos, from the late 1940s and the 1950s in which eugenicists say, ‘We have to find a way to make this palatable after the Nazis.’ Well, yes and no. Obviously, if you are in Latin America and you are doing what we call positive eugenics, that’s very different, although Hitler was doing that too. The Germans gave Aryan women who had more than a certain number of babies medals. There are aspects where it is similar and aspects where it isn’t. But if you’re a pro-natalist eugenicist who doesn’t distinguish on the basis of race, that’s a very different kind of eugenics, obviously. There is a difference, but you know, it is a slippery slope on some levels. If you do one, it doesn’t really take that much to go on to the next one. It’s a very slippery slope."