FadeTheButcher
11-16-2004, 05:34 AM
Posted 5/13/2004
By John Glad
http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3719
The September 12, 2003 issue of The Jewish Press carried an article by Edwin Black tarring the American eugenics movement with the brush of National Socialism and genocide.
In Israel itself many eugenic measures have become widely accepted. There are now more fertility clinics per capita there than in any other country in the world. Surrogacy was legalized in 1996. In vitro fertilization and embryo transfer are preferred by some rabbis as a form of fertility treatment that does not violate the literal halachic precepts against adultery. And, although human reproductive cloning is currently not permitted because the technology is not yet considered safe, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel sees no inherent religious interdiction in reproductive cloning as a form of treatment for infertility.
Eugenics is popularly presented as the ideology of the Holocaust and is an object of intense vilification, leading the Jewish philosopher and Zionist Leo Strauss to coin the maxim "reductio ad Hitlerum": Hitler believed in eugenics, X believes in eugenics, therefore X is a Nazi.
The central argument of the eugenics movement is that there is a negative correlation between IQ and fertility. That is, intelligent people are not having enough children to replace themselves. In all surveys this trend has continued to this very day, notably among the Jews, a high-IQ group whose "Total Fertility Rate" is below replacement.
According to the National Jewish Population Survey, Jews in America entered into a precipitous decline in numbers in the decade 1990-2000, reflecting a pattern typical of high-IQ groups. Half of Jewish women age 30-34 have no children, and nearly half of American Jews are 45 or older. The current Jewish rejection of the eugenics movement is actually a denial of what is empirically evident in modern human populations. For the Jews — and not just the Jews — such a position is no less than suicidal.
While the eugenics movement in the early 20th century was indeed a largely WASP phenomenon, Jews played a modest but active role in the movement. In 1916 Rabbi Max Reichler published an article entitled "Jewish Eugenics," in which he attempted to demonstrate that Jewish religious customs were eugenic in thrust. A decade and a half later Ellsworth Huntington, in his book Tomorrow`s Children, which was published in conjunction with the directors of the American Eugenics Society, echoed Reichler`s arguments, praising the Jews as being of uniquely superior stock and explaining their achievements by a systematic adherence to the basic principles of Jewish religious law, which he also viewed as being fundamentally eugenic in nature.
In the Weimar Republic, many Jewish socialists actively campaigned for eugenics, using the Socialist newspaper Vorwarts as their chief tribune. Max Levien, head of the first Munich Soviet, and Julius Moses, a member of the German Socialist Party, believed strongly in eugenics. A partial list of prominent German-Jewish eugenicists would include the geneticists Richard Goldschmidt, Heinrich Poll, and Curt Stern, the statistician Wilhelm Weinberg (coauthor of the Hardy-Weinberg Law), the mathematician Felix Bernstein, and the physicians Alfred Blaschko, Benno Chajes, Magnus Hirschfeld, Georg Lowenstein, Max Marcuse, Max Hirsch, and Albert Moll.
The German League for Improvement of the People and the Study of Heriditary was even attacked by the Nazi publisher Julius F. Lehmann as targeted subversion on the part of Berlin Jews. Lowenstein was a member of an underground resisting the National Socialist government, and Chajes, Goldschmidt, Hirschfeld, and Poll emigrated.
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.
b) The September 1939 national euthanasia program. The debate over euthanasia was launched by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche`s 1920 book Legalizing the Destruction of Life Not Worth Living. The authors, a lawyer and a physician, made a strictly economic argument. While there may have been some peripheral eugenic argument to be made with regard to the sterilization legislation, the euthanasia question had nothing whatsoever to do with eugenics, since persons who were already institutionally segregated and in many cases sterilized could not possibly have had any procreation.
To their credit, German eugenicists vehemently attacked euthanasia proposals. In 1926 the eugenicist Karl H. Bauer, for example, stated that if selection were used as a principle for killing people, "then we all have to die"; the eugenicist Hans Luxenburger in 1931 called for "the unconditional respect of the life of a human individual"; and in 1933 the eugenicist Lothar Loeffler argued not only against euthanasia, but also against eugenically indicated pregnancies. Hitler, however, regarded the institutionalized as "useless eaters." When, in September 1939, he issued a secret order initiating a national euthanasia program he did so strictly to free up as many as 800,000 hospital beds for expected war casualties.
c) The persecution of Jews and gypsies and their mass murder toward the end of the war.
It is true that Hitler, partly under the influence of a manual on human heredity written by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, supported eugenics, but he did not hate the Jews because he had been taught by eugenicists to classify them as intellectually inferior. On the contrary, he regarded them as powerful competitors of the Aryan race he proposed to champion. The Jews were blamed for Germany`s defeat in World War I and for the humiliations of the Versailles treaty.
It is not accurate to regard the eugenics movement as the ideological engine of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it is equally undeniable that there were German eugenicists who allowed themselves to be co-opted by the regime and that they created a climate of legitimization of policies of hatred for other ethnic groups. But this was not the driving force behind National Socialism that it is popularly made out to be. Rather, it was an argument that could be conveniently twisted by the Nazi government over the explicit objections of the movement`s leaders.
An enormous, albeit fully understandable, confusion has taken place. Meanwhile the Jews are disappearing.
John Glad, a retired professor of the University of Maryland, is the former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is the chief translator of The Black Book on the German Slaughter of Jews (Holocaust Library, 1980).
By John Glad
http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3719
The September 12, 2003 issue of The Jewish Press carried an article by Edwin Black tarring the American eugenics movement with the brush of National Socialism and genocide.
In Israel itself many eugenic measures have become widely accepted. There are now more fertility clinics per capita there than in any other country in the world. Surrogacy was legalized in 1996. In vitro fertilization and embryo transfer are preferred by some rabbis as a form of fertility treatment that does not violate the literal halachic precepts against adultery. And, although human reproductive cloning is currently not permitted because the technology is not yet considered safe, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel sees no inherent religious interdiction in reproductive cloning as a form of treatment for infertility.
Eugenics is popularly presented as the ideology of the Holocaust and is an object of intense vilification, leading the Jewish philosopher and Zionist Leo Strauss to coin the maxim "reductio ad Hitlerum": Hitler believed in eugenics, X believes in eugenics, therefore X is a Nazi.
The central argument of the eugenics movement is that there is a negative correlation between IQ and fertility. That is, intelligent people are not having enough children to replace themselves. In all surveys this trend has continued to this very day, notably among the Jews, a high-IQ group whose "Total Fertility Rate" is below replacement.
According to the National Jewish Population Survey, Jews in America entered into a precipitous decline in numbers in the decade 1990-2000, reflecting a pattern typical of high-IQ groups. Half of Jewish women age 30-34 have no children, and nearly half of American Jews are 45 or older. The current Jewish rejection of the eugenics movement is actually a denial of what is empirically evident in modern human populations. For the Jews — and not just the Jews — such a position is no less than suicidal.
While the eugenics movement in the early 20th century was indeed a largely WASP phenomenon, Jews played a modest but active role in the movement. In 1916 Rabbi Max Reichler published an article entitled "Jewish Eugenics," in which he attempted to demonstrate that Jewish religious customs were eugenic in thrust. A decade and a half later Ellsworth Huntington, in his book Tomorrow`s Children, which was published in conjunction with the directors of the American Eugenics Society, echoed Reichler`s arguments, praising the Jews as being of uniquely superior stock and explaining their achievements by a systematic adherence to the basic principles of Jewish religious law, which he also viewed as being fundamentally eugenic in nature.
In the Weimar Republic, many Jewish socialists actively campaigned for eugenics, using the Socialist newspaper Vorwarts as their chief tribune. Max Levien, head of the first Munich Soviet, and Julius Moses, a member of the German Socialist Party, believed strongly in eugenics. A partial list of prominent German-Jewish eugenicists would include the geneticists Richard Goldschmidt, Heinrich Poll, and Curt Stern, the statistician Wilhelm Weinberg (coauthor of the Hardy-Weinberg Law), the mathematician Felix Bernstein, and the physicians Alfred Blaschko, Benno Chajes, Magnus Hirschfeld, Georg Lowenstein, Max Marcuse, Max Hirsch, and Albert Moll.
The German League for Improvement of the People and the Study of Heriditary was even attacked by the Nazi publisher Julius F. Lehmann as targeted subversion on the part of Berlin Jews. Lowenstein was a member of an underground resisting the National Socialist government, and Chajes, Goldschmidt, Hirschfeld, and Poll emigrated.
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.
b) The September 1939 national euthanasia program. The debate over euthanasia was launched by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche`s 1920 book Legalizing the Destruction of Life Not Worth Living. The authors, a lawyer and a physician, made a strictly economic argument. While there may have been some peripheral eugenic argument to be made with regard to the sterilization legislation, the euthanasia question had nothing whatsoever to do with eugenics, since persons who were already institutionally segregated and in many cases sterilized could not possibly have had any procreation.
To their credit, German eugenicists vehemently attacked euthanasia proposals. In 1926 the eugenicist Karl H. Bauer, for example, stated that if selection were used as a principle for killing people, "then we all have to die"; the eugenicist Hans Luxenburger in 1931 called for "the unconditional respect of the life of a human individual"; and in 1933 the eugenicist Lothar Loeffler argued not only against euthanasia, but also against eugenically indicated pregnancies. Hitler, however, regarded the institutionalized as "useless eaters." When, in September 1939, he issued a secret order initiating a national euthanasia program he did so strictly to free up as many as 800,000 hospital beds for expected war casualties.
c) The persecution of Jews and gypsies and their mass murder toward the end of the war.
It is true that Hitler, partly under the influence of a manual on human heredity written by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, supported eugenics, but he did not hate the Jews because he had been taught by eugenicists to classify them as intellectually inferior. On the contrary, he regarded them as powerful competitors of the Aryan race he proposed to champion. The Jews were blamed for Germany`s defeat in World War I and for the humiliations of the Versailles treaty.
It is not accurate to regard the eugenics movement as the ideological engine of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it is equally undeniable that there were German eugenicists who allowed themselves to be co-opted by the regime and that they created a climate of legitimization of policies of hatred for other ethnic groups. But this was not the driving force behind National Socialism that it is popularly made out to be. Rather, it was an argument that could be conveniently twisted by the Nazi government over the explicit objections of the movement`s leaders.
An enormous, albeit fully understandable, confusion has taken place. Meanwhile the Jews are disappearing.
John Glad, a retired professor of the University of Maryland, is the former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is the chief translator of The Black Book on the German Slaughter of Jews (Holocaust Library, 1980).