|
"Can we have any doubts that the Americans will reach their aim--the stabilization and improvement of the strength of the people?"1
-- Flier for the Society for Racial Hygiene, Berlin branch
Overview
Eugenics provided people in the United States not only with a scientific rationale for long-standing prejudices but also someone to blame for society's ills. The same was true in other countries, including Germany. There, too, the idea of "breeding the best with best" had enormous appeal. Many Germans at the turn of the 20th century also looked to science to confirm who was "in" and "out." Thousands read The Riddle of the Universe by biologist Ernst Haeckel--a book that claimed Germans belonged to a superior race threatened by "hundreds and thousands of incurables" "artificially kept alive" "without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body."2 It convinced many of the need to "protect the race."
Before World War I
In 1905, physician Alfred Ploetz founded Germany's first eugenic organization--the Society for Racial Hygiene. Modeled after similar groups in the United States, it was inspired by the successes of American eugenicists. Many wondered, Would Germans "protect the race" in similar ways?
After World War I
In the 1920s that question took on new urgency. Nearly 10 percent of Germany's people were killed or wounded during the war and the nation's economy was near collapse. Many Germans came to believe that only through eugenics could they save German civilization. American eugenicists encouraged those beliefs and promoted joint research projects. By the 1930s, Germans were challenging Americans for leadership of the eugenics movement.
 |
 |
Eugenics: An International Movement
In 1912, over 300 Europeans and Americans attended the First International Congress of Eugenics in London. At the Second Congress in New York City in 1921, the event included Latin American delegates from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, San Salvador, and Uruguay, and Asian delegates from Japan, India, and Siam (now Thailand), as well as those from Europe and the United States.
By the time the Third International Congress met in New York in 1932, eugenicists could point to a string of successes. The United States now had laws that limited immigration along racial lines and over half of the states in the nation had involuntary sterilization laws. In 1928, Vaud, a Swiss canton passed voluntary sterilization legislation. A year later, Denmark passed a similar statute. And there were campaigns for voluntary sterilization laws in Britain, Sweden, Norway, and Germany.
|
|
 |
|
Facing History Resources
• Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 8, "The Nazi Connection."
|
|
|
Print and Video Resources
• Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene by Gotz Aly (Johns Hopkins University Press) 1994.
• The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann (Cambridge University Press) 1991.
• The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl (Oxford University Press, New York) Chapter 2, 1994.
• Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 1988.
|
|
1 The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl (Oxford University Press, New York) 1994, pp. 15-16.
2 Quoted in By Trust Betrayed by Hugh Gregory Gallagher (Henry Holt) 1990, p. 87.
|