Borrowed Bias
Hitler made eugenics famous, but he took the ideas — and funding—from United States.
In the early twentieth century, America was reeling
from
the upheaval of massive immigration and torn
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
by post-Reconstruction chaos, and race conflict was
everywhere. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progres-
Washin on
sives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias
itler victimized an entire continent and
with their desire to make a better world, reinventing
exterminated millions in his quest for a
Galton's eugenics as a repressive and racist ideology.
*
so-called "Master Race."
Their
intent was to populate the earth with blond,
The world thought Hitler
blue-eyed Nordic types who were tall, strong and tal-
was mad and barely understood his
ented.
rationales.
In the process, the movement intended to subtract
But the concept of a white, blond-
blacks, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews,
haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race
dark-haired hill folk, poor people and the infirm.
was not Hitler's: The idea was created in
How would they do it? By identifying so-called
the United States two to three decades
"defective" family trees and subjecting them to life-
earlier, the product of the American
long segregation and sterilization programs to kill
eugenics movement.
their bloodlines.
Eugenics was the racist American
The grand plan was literally to wipe away the
pseudoscience determined to wipe away
reproductive capability of the "unfit," those deemed
all human beings except those who con-
weak and inferior.
formed to a Nordic stereotype. The phi-
During the 1920s, Carnegie Institution eugenic sci-
losophy was enshrined into national
entists
cultivated deep personal and professional rela-
policy by forced sterilization and segre-
tionships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In 1924,
gation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in
when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf; he frequently quoted
27 states.
American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a
Ultimately, eugenics coercively sterilized 60,000
thorough knowledge of American eugenics and its
Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly
phraseology.
segregated thousands in "colonies" and
Hitler proudly told his comrades just
persecuted untold numbers in ways we
how
closely he followed American
are just learning.
eugenic legislation. Hitler's struggle for
Hitler studied American eugenic laws
a superior race became a mad crusade
and rationales and sought to legitimize
for a Master Race, exchanging the
his innate race hatred and anti-Semitism
American
term "Nordic" for
by "medicalizing" it, wrapping it in a
"Germanic"
or "Aryan."
pseudoscientific facade.
Race
science,
racial purity and racial
Eugenics would have been little more
dominance
became
the driving force
than bizarre parlor talk had it not been
behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi doctors
for massive financing by corporate phi-
would become the unseen generals in
lanthropies, specifically the Carnegie
Hitler's war against the Jews and other
Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation
Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors
and the Harriman railroad fortune.
would
create the science, devise the
They were in league with America's sci-
eugenic
formulas and even hand-select
entists from universities such as
the
victims
for sterilization, euthanasia
Harvard, Yale and Princeton, who faked
and mass extermination.
and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist
During the Reich's first decade,
aims.
eugenicists across America welcomed
The Carnegie Institution literally
Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment
invented the American movement when
of their own decades of research and
it established a laboratory complex at
effort. Beyond the scientific roadmap,
Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island.
America
used its money to fund and
His
assistant,
Nazi
eugenicist
Dr.
Otmar
Freiherr
von
Verschuer
examines
twins.
This complex stockpiled millions of
help
found
Germany's eugenic institu-
Josef
Mengele,
would
continue
these
experiments
at
Auschwitz.
index cards on ordinary Americans as
tions.
the movement carefully plotted the
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000
At the turn of the last century, Galton's ideas were
removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples.
— almost $4 million in today's dollars — to hun-
imported into the United States just as Gregor
From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agi-
dreds of German researchers. In May 1926, for exam-
Mendel's principles of heredity were rediscovered.
tated in the legislatures of America, as well as the
ple, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German
American eugenic advocates believed that Mendelian
Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
concepts explaining the color and size of peas, corn
Edwin Black is author of "IBM and the Holocaust" and
Among its leading psychiatrists was Ernst Rudin, who
and cattle also governed the social and intellectual
the just released "War Against the Weak," from which
BORROWED BIAS on page 23
character of man.
this article is adapted.
EDWIN BLACK
nation's social service agencies and associations. The
Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as
the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration,
to seek out Jewish and other immigrants and subject
them to deportation, confinement or forced steriliza-
tion.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found and
fund the German eugenics program, and
even funded the program that ultimately
sent Josef Mengele into Auschwitz. The
Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie
Institution, the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory, and the Max Planck
Institute — the successor to the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute — all gave unlimited
access and unstinting assistance in the
course of this investigation.
These organizations all have worked
_ hard to help the world discover their
pasts and have set an example of philan-
thropic openness.
Long before the advent of America's
leading philanthropies, eugenics was born as a scien-
tific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir
Francis Galton theorized that if talented people mar-
ried only other talented people, the result would be
measurably better offspring.