War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (55 page)

In the 1920s, German raceologists became even more sought after as authors and topics for the
Journal of Heredity
and
Eugenical News,
thus increasing their influence in American eugenic circles. For instance, in May of 1924 Fritz Lenz authored a long article for the
Journal of Heredity
simply titled “Eugenics in Germany,” with the latest news and historical reminiscences. California eugenicist Paul Popenoe, head of the Human Betterment Foundation, functioned as Lenz’s principal translator in the United States. Similar articles were published from time to time as updates, thus keeping the American movement’s attention riveted on the vicissitudes of the German school. A typically enthralled review of the latest German booklet on race hygiene ran in the October 1924
Eugenical News
with the lead sentence: “It was a happy thought that led Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, a leading eugenicist as well as a physician, to translate the little book of Dr. H.W. Siemens, of Munich, into English.”
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Such fawning editorial treatment appeared in virtually every edition of American eugenic journals.

Nor was coverage of German race hygienists and their work limited to the eugenic press. They were reported as legitimate medical news in almost every issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
chiefly by the journal’s German correspondent. For example, in May of 1924, Erwin Baur’s latest lecture to Berlin’s local eugenics society was covered in great detail in a two-column story.
JAMA
repeated, without comment or qualification, Baur’s race politics. “A person of moderate gifts may be educated to be very efficient,” the article read, “but he will never transmit other than moderate gifts to his own offspring. The attempts to elevate the negroes of the United States by giving them the same educational advantages the white population receives have necessarily failed.” The article also regurgitated Baur’s contention that the Jukes family was proof positive of eugenically damaged ancestry. “Race suicide,”
JAMA
continued from Baur’s speech, “brought about the downfall of Greece and Rome, and Germany is confronted by the same peril.”
JAMA
used no quotation marks and presented the statements as unredacted medical knowledge.
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Nor did the rise of Hitler in Weimar race politics, after 1924, diminish the frequency or prominence of German raceologists’ exposure in the American eugenic press. The January 1926 issue of
Eugenical News
featured a long article, written by Lenz, entitled “Are the Gifted Families in America Maintaining Themselves?” Dense with statistics and formulas, Lenz’s article analyzed recent California eugenic research with a German mindset, warning “the dying out of the gifted families … of the North American Union [United States] proceeds not less rapidly; and also among us in Europe…. I think one ought not to look at the collapse of the best elements of the race without action.”
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When Lehmann’s fascist publishing house released a series of race cards, that is, popular trading cards depicting racial profiles-from the Tamils of India to the primitive Baskirs of the Ural Mountains-their availability was fondly reported in
Eugenical News.
Fascinated with the novelty,
Eugenical News
suggested, however, that the cards could be improved if the pictures would reveal more body features. German race cards, just like many baseball cards, came ten to a package.
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In May of 1927,
Eugenical News
reported the introduction of a German “race biological index,” to eugenically rate different ethnic groups. The article repeated German warnings “of the danger of an eruption of colored races over Europe, through the French colonies and colonial troops.”
In
the article, German researchers urged “further studies in America, both of Indians and American negroes, as compared with those still living in Africa.”
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German race analyses of American society were always well received.

Unqualified German racial references to Jews gradually became commonplace in American publications as well. For example, in the April 1924 issue of
Eugenical News,
an article reviewing a new German “racial pride” book published by Lehmanns mentioned, “In an appendix the Jews are considered, their history and their role in Germany.” A German article on consanguineous marriages summarized in the November 1925 issue of
Eugenical News
stated, “Their evil consequences … are pointed out [and] … are commoner among Jews and royalty than elsewhere in the population.” A December 1927 summary of a German article reported, “The social biology and social hygiene of the Jew is treated by the distinguished anthropologist, Wissenberg of Ukrania. This has largely to do with the vital statistics of the Jews in Odessa and Elizabethgrad, with special relation of the Jews to acute infection.” In April of 1929, a
Eugenical News
book review entitled “Noses and Ears” informed readers, “The straight nose of Gentiles seems to dominate over the convex nose of Jews.”
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No explanation was necessary or offered for these out-of-context references to Jews. That Jews were eugenically undesirable was a given in German eugenics, and many American eugenicists adopted that view as well.

By the mid-twenties, Germany had achieved preeminence in both legitimate genetic research and racial biology. Germany’s new status arose, in large measure, from its distinguished Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. An outgrowth of the esteemed Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes would over time develop a network of research institutions devoted to the highest pursuits of science. These included the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, boasting a shelf of Nobel Prizes, a sister institute for chemistry, another for biology, another for pathology, and many more. The twenty-plus Kaiser Wilhelm organizations were easily confused and bore related names. But while they were related, they were independent and often located in different cities. In fact, at one point Davenport confessed to a London colleague, “There are so many Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, that it is necessary to specify.”
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Also among the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were several that would soon make their mark in the history of medical murder. The first was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. The second was the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. The third was the Institute for Brain Research. All received funding and administrative support from Americans, especially the Rockefeller Foundation.

James Loeb, an American banker and art lover of German-Jewish descent who lived in Europe, was among the first to subsidize the organizations that evolved into the Kaiser Wilhelm group. In early 1916, Loeb granted 500,000 marks to the German Psychiatric Institute in Munich.
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Loeb’s money, however, was quickly overshadowed by the Rockefeller Foundation’s.

Rockefeller’s connection to German biomedicine traced back to the early years of the twentieth century, when Germany’s scientific preeminence was first challenged by America and its new system of corporate phil-anthropic funding begun by Carnegie, Rockefeller and Harriman. Medical educator Abraham Flexner was among the first to establish significant corporate philanthropic financial links with Germany. Flexner completed his monumental Carnegie Institution survey,
Medical Education in the United States and Canada,
in 1910. The prodigious report compared North America’s medical inadequacy to Germany’s excellence. Flexner next turned to Europe, creating the 1912 report,
Medical Education in Europe.
Soon Flexner was renowned for his pioneering reports and was invited to help lead medical efforts at Rockefeller’s powerful new foundation.
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One of Flexner’s first Rockefeller efforts yielded the 1914 study,
Prostitution in Europe,
which featured an introduction by John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself. Prostitution was a topic of recurring interest to both Rockefeller and his foundation. At about this time, 1914, German academicians began to realize that generous American-style philanthropy was a springboard to higher scientific achievement. Several esteemed German academicians and industrialists organized the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in this vein, with Kaiser Wilhelm II as its chief patron. The society sponsored the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, dedicated to a spectrum of new scientific disciplines. But the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, and the crippling inflation of the early twenties paralyzed the KWI and German scientific progress.
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To literally save German science, Rockefeller money-guided by Flexner’s recommendations-came to the rescue in November of 1922. Because anti-German feeling engendered by the war still roiled in America, and because Rockefeller, like many, distrusted German universities, viewing them as hotbeds of political agitation and warmongering academics, the Rockefeller Foundation circumvented the universities, the traditional channels of scientific funding. Instead, the foundation inaugurated its own special funding committee. Flexner selected his longtime Berlin friend Heinrich Poll to lead the committee. Poll had assisted Flexner during his earlier survey of German medical schools. Poll, also a leading eugenicist, advised the Prussian Ministry of Health and lectured extensively on hereditary traits and feeblemindedness. Since relations between Germany and the United States were still uneasy late into 1922, the foundation in large part administered the massive donations through its Paris office.
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Rockefeller Foundation money began to flow immediately. During the final weeks of 1922, 194 fellowships were awarded, totaling $65,000. The next year, 262 fellowships were awarded for a total of $135,000. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000-almost $4 million in twenty-first-century money-to hundreds of German researchers, either directly or indirectly through international programs that passed funds through to German recipients.
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Quickly, Rockefeller’s freely flowing money, distributed by Poll, became a forceful and intrusive factor in German research. Scientists across Germany eagerly sent in reports of their worthiness, each hoping to be the next recipient. By March of 1923, leading German researchers, such as Fritz Haber, were grumbling to each other about “King Poll,” whom they said exercised an intolerable control over Rockefeller grants and therefore German science itself.
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Ignoring any criticism, the Rockefeller Foundation only increased its extravagant spending. Loeb was instrumental in convincing Flexner to marshal Rockefeller millions for Loeb’s favorite, the German Psychiatry Institute. Rockefeller officials were fascinated with the promise of psychiatry, and they began aligning themselves with German psychiatrists of all stripes. The German Psychiatry Institute was the first to receive big money. In May of 1926, Rockefeller awarded the institute $250,000 shortly after it amalgamated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. The following November, Rockefeller trustees allocated the new institute an additional $75,000.
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Among the leading psychiatrists at the institute was Ernst Rüdin, who headed the genealogical and demographic department. Rüdin would soon become director of the institute. Later, he would become an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression.
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Who was Rüdin? A founding father of German eugenics in the Weimar days, Rüdin was considered by American circles as among the most promising raceologists in Germany. In the 1890s, Rüdin joined Alfred Ploetz in a quest for utopian socialism. The two men became fast friends after Ploetz married Rüdin’s sister. From the beginning, Rüdin’s impulse was to stop dangerous human breeding. At the 1903 International Congress Against Alcoholism, Rüdin declared that the condition was an inherited trait. Alcoholics, he argued, should be segregated and allowed to marry only if they were first sterilized. In 1905, Rüdin cofounded the Society for Racial Hygiene
(Gesellschaft for Rassenbygiene)
with Ploetz. During the next several years, Rüdin pontificated against the unfit in articles and in his travels.
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After World War
I,
as the chief of the German Psychiatry Institute’s genealogical and demographic department, Rüdin began assembling a massive catalog of family profiles from the records of prisons, churches, insane asylums, hospitals, and from family interviews. By 1926, Rüdin was granted special permission by the Reich Ministry of the Interior to consult criminal and institutional records and report back with his own findings. In other words, Rüdin’s operation began forming the same types of discreet governmental relationships that the Eugenics Record Office had structured in the United States during the previous fifteen years.
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Rüdin, of course, was quite visible in America. Articles by and about him had run in the national eugenic press for years. In May of 1922, the
Journal of Heredity
published a brief about a discussion by Rüdin on the inheritance of mental defects. In June of 1924,
Eugenical News
informed its readership that Rüdin was building an extensive collection of family histories, and assured “a vast quantity of data has been obtained.” Later that year, in the September issue,
Eugenical News
published a follow-up report, asserting that Rüdin’s studies of the “inheritance of mental disorders are the most thorough that are being undertaken anywhere. It is hoped that they will be long continued and expanded.” A 1925
Eugenical News
article praising the family tree archives of the German Psychiatric Institute celebrated Rüdin, “whose dynamic personality infuses itself throughout the entire establishment.” By this time Rüdin was the star of German eugenics. Later, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
also published a long report about Rüdin’s work on heredity and mental disease.
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