The most prominent American eugenicist of Jewish extraction was the Nobel Prize laureate Herman Muller. When Moses Harman, the revolutionary anarchist editor of the American Journal of Eugenics, died in 1910, Emma Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth took over distribution. In 1933 the eugenicist and University of California professor of zoology Samuel Jackson Holmes noted the significant number of Jews in the eugenics movement and praised their “native endowment of brains,” while at the same time lamenting the racial bias suffered by the Jews, which caused many of their intellectuals to be wary of non-egalitarian worldviews. The American Eugenics Society itself counted Rabbi Louis Mann as one of its directors in 1935.
In September 1939 the most prominent American and British eugenicists published “Social Biology and Population Improvement” in the journal Nature. In the document which came to be popularly known as The Eugenics Manifesto, the authors firmly denounced Hitler’s racism, decrying “economic and political conditions which foster antagonism between different peoples, nations and ‘races,'” and calling for “a removal of race prejudices and of the unscientific doctrine that good or bad genes are the monopoly of particular peoples or of persons with features.”
I wanted to verify claims such as those made by Edwin Black, and so I performed a random search of 100 books dealing with German history during the Weimar and Nazi periods and which contained subject indexes; 96 of them do not show any mention of eugenics, and the mentions in the four that do are cursory. Clearly eugenics was not the ideological driving force behind National Socialism, but rather an afterthought.
In Germany, the National Socialist government took control of scientific institutions and funded a number of chairs of “Racial Hygiene” in the universities, so that eugenicists abruptly found themselves face to face with the temptation to leave behind the pack of daydreaming social reformers and begin to implement eugenic reform.
One geneticist who became an ideologue of Nazi crimes was Otto von Verschuer. His essay, “The Racial Biology of Jews,” appeared in 1938. The article purports to treat physical differences between Central-European Jews and Germans. Verschuer points out the astonishing phenomenon that an ethnic group could preserve itself for two thousand years without a territory. He then goes on, quite correctly, to point out that the differences he describes are not absolutely applicable to either group, but are a matter of relative frequency within the two groups. Taking a great deal of trouble to impart a scientific tone to the text, including such characteristics as, for example, fingerprints, blood types, or vulnerability to specific diseases, all of which pose fully legitimate questions for the physical anthropologist, he nevertheless presents a pathological document of ethnic hatred disguised as science. The Jews, we learn from Verschuer, have hooked noses, fleshy lips, ruddy light yellow, dull-colored skin, and kinky hair. They have a slinking gait and a “racial scent.”
There are three basic charges associated in public opinion with eugenics under National Socialism. Let us examine them in order:
a) The July 1933 sterilization law. A bill was drafted in 1932 by the Prussian Governmental Council – before Hitler’s accession to power – to lay the groundwork for selective sterilization in cases of heritable diseases. Although sterilization had been discussed for 20 years, the legislation took the leading German eugenicists by surprise, who were critical of it as counterproductive and inefficient with regard to genetic improvement. In addition, they feared a loosening of sexual mores.
On July 14, 1933, the legislation was passed by the German parliament, entering into force in 1934, but now it permitted sterilization against the wishes of the individual concerned, specifically for the surgical sterilization of persons whose offspring would have a high probability of suffering from physical or mental illness, of hereditary feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive syndrome, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, deafness, or severe physical defects, as well as severe alcoholism. No mention was made of race. Eugenic considerations did not play a significant role in the debate. Rather, German legislators misguidedly saw sterilization as a cheap alternative to welfare.
