Eugenics in the United States and the Third Reich.
Latest hand-picked WWII news. See also: WW2 Posters, Footage, Films, WWII Documentaries, Gestapo - RSHA.
Film installation highlighting Nazis' murder of disabled at Bristol's M shed museum
Although it is well known the Nazis killed millions of Jews, they also targeted a number of other minority groups including people with disabilities, gay people, gypsies and others. "Resistance: which way the future?" uses two screens to show drama and documentary films about their killing of disabled people. It begins in September 1939 when Hitler authorised Aktion-T4, the programme of mass murder which focused on minorities. The display explores the marginalisation of a group of people. The installation debuted in Liverpool two years ago. Resistance is the latest project from writer/director Liz Crow, above.
(thisisbristol.co.uk)
North Carolina considers compensating pre-WWII victims of forced sterilization
Having a baby is an anticipated milestone for many adults, so it's easy to imagine the shock endured by thousands of people who were forcibly sterilized by the government beginning before WW2. Now, North Carolina has become the first state to consider compensating the victims. It was hardly unusual for states to be in the business of deciding who was entitled to become a parent. Many enacted eugenics laws, which called for the sterilization of people deemed feeble-minded or "unfit." Of the more than 7,000 people North Carolina sterilized between 1929 and the 1970s, most were poor and uneducated.
(healthland.time.com)
Photos reveal how U.S. experimented on its own citizens just like the Nazi doctors
Pictures have emerged providing the proof that U.S. government doctors experimented on Americans from the 1940s to the 1960s. Studies, which often involved making healthy people sick, were at worst curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.
For example in the mid-1940s American researchers studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men at the New York State Vocational Institution swallow unfiltered fecal matter.
(dailymail.co.uk)
Killing 'undesirables' in gas chambers was the most popular American idea for master race in the 1930s
The idea of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master race was created in the United States decades before Adolf Hitler came to power. The eugenicists were enshrined as U.S. national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, enacted in 27 states - plus many institutions and doctors practised medical lethality and passive euthanasia. The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally ran gas chambers. In 1927 the Supreme Court wrote: "Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind..."
(infowars.com)
No apology for Germany`s own Nazi victims: casualties of Hitler's sterilisation programme feel ignored
After his mother passed away, Hans Heissenberg's father gave him to the local orphanage from where, aged 14, he was sent to hospital. "The head of the department told me that I was to be sterilised." The teenager did not understand: "Children? I do not want children. I just want to marry one day." It was in 1934 that the Nazis made effective the "law for the prevention of genetic ill procreation". For Adolf Hitler the sterilisation of "genetically ill" people was a "humane deed". Today victims of Nazi eugenics are still fighting against being labelled "lebensunwert" (unworthy to live). Unbelievably, the eugenic Nazi law still exists.
(timesonline.co.uk)
American corporate complicity and Adolf Hitler's Final Solution
Who gave Adolf Hitler the basis for turning centuries of hatred into a new twentieth century political anti-Semitism? It was Henry Ford, who bought a failed newspaper, which serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for 91 weeks. Then he published the series as a book, The International Jew. Adolf Hitler read his work at least two years before Mein Kampf was written. No wonder Ford got Hitler's German Eagle medal. Who gave Hitler the principles to justify a war to achieve a master race with the duty to kill all inferior races? It was the American Carnegie Institution, which set up science programs in post-WW1 Germany, to teach the deadly race science of eugenics.
(jewishtimes.com)
Book review: "In Reckless Hands" looks at Oklahoma's eugenics history
The state of Oklahoma shares a dark past with Adolf Hitler and Third Reich. Eugenics, the science hailed by academics worldwide as a means to improve a race by sterilizing those who had heredity defects, was also embraced by Governor Alfalfa Bill Murray. "In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics," by Victoria F. Nourse, probes how a scientific theory transformed into the basis of social policy ordained by the power of the state of Oklahoma. The nazi programs were eventually forcefully stopped, but in U.S. over 100,000 people had been sterilized under federal programs - even as late as the 1960s.
(newsok.com)
German genetics society condemns Nazi-era medical abuses
German Society of Human Genetics condemned the practices of geneticists who helped the Nazi regime murder handicapped people. In a statement marking the 75th anniversary of the "Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases Act", the Society said scientists had acted with the Nazis to implement the law. Eugenics, the belief that one could improve the human race by selective breeding, was a popular idea around the globe in the first half of the 20th century. About 400,000 people were sterilized without their consent, and from 1933 the Nazis killed over 200,000 physically and mentally disabled people part of the Third Reich's "euthanasia" programme.
(thelocal.de)
U.S. experiments on Blacks served as groundwork for Nazis
Bioethicist Harriet Washington outlined an awful era in American history, which has rarely been studied or written about: a long line of abusive medical experimentation on Black people, which she talked about during a recent lecture. She has recorded these events in her best-selling book "Medical Apartheid": The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. She and other scholars point out that while Americans shunned the Nazis for their horrifying deeds, much of the Third Reich`s rationale was adopted from U.S. science.
(tcdailyplanet.net)
Re-examining the Darwin-Hitler Link
In the struggle over the teaching of evolution in Florida, some have hinted that Darwinism is dangerous, making ideologies like Nazism. Michael Ruse has castigated those trying to connect Darwinism and Nazism in "Darwin and Hitler: A Not-Very-Intelligent Link." Hitler`s ideology was not built only on Darwinism, but it was a key principle of Nazi ideology and Hitler`s own world view. Historian Richard Evans: "The real core of Nazi beliefs ... Hitler proclaimed in his speech of Sept. 1938 in science as the basis for action. Science demanded the furtherance of the ... German race ... by ineluctable laws of Darwinian competition between races..."
(Richard Weikart)
18,000 involuntary sterilizations in America 1907-1940
On Jan. 20, 1932, white doctors at the North Carolina State Hospital for the Colored Insane carried out a medical procedure that "asexualized" a 24-year-old black male patient. The castration of Junius Wilson was one of over 18,000 sterilizations that took place in American mental institutions 1907-1940. Though less well known than a similar program in Nazi Germany, the involuntary sterilization of individuals deemed "defective" by the government was legal in 30 US states by the early 1930s. And in the Deep South blacks were especially vulnerable to the irreversible procedure.
(washingtonpost)
Nazi abortion: Parallels with the ideas of Margaret Sanger in America
Tessa Chelouche has published an account of the Nazi use of euthanasia, and sterilization to eliminate groups deemed "inferior stock". "Abortion was used as a weapon of mass destruction in Eastern Europe," where "it has been estimated that tens of thousands ... were compelled to abort not because of health reasons, but because of Nazi dogma." Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, expressed a similar objective about eliminating US colored people: "We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
(lifesite)
Nazi racial purity exhibit with swastika-stamped posters in Germany
The exhibit on Nazi policies of racial purity was created for the U.S. Museum, but its journey to the 1930s-era German Museum has particular resonance. Many of the exhibit¡¯s swastika-stamped posters trumpeting the Nazi theories were produced in the high-ceilinged rooms of the Dresden museum after it fell under Nazi control in 1933. In the first of 3 sections, the exhibit shows how eugenics became a global movement in the scientific world in 1919. The second part picks up in 1933, when the Nazis began using eugenic theories to justify forced sterilization to establish a "master race."
(msnbc)
A Better Breed of American
In America and elsewhere, enthusiasm for eugenics was broadly supported by elites. Theodore Roosevelt, the leaders of the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw embraced its goals. American compulsory sterilization policy, which had officially begun in 1907 when Indiana passed a law allowing scientists to use surgical methods to eradicate the unfit — "the first law in human history, allowing doctors to operate on otherwise healthy citizens against their will." Hitler modeled Germany's sterilization policies on California's 1909 sterilization law.
(nytimes)
When Scientific Ideology Was a Mask for Racism
When Americans talk about racism, we are mostly referring to white discrimination against blacks. But racism, in its early-20th-century heyday, was about more than simple hatred. As the word itself suggests, racism, like communism, originally purported to be a science. Facts, as they emerged in the writings of 19th-century racial theorists, seemed to fit perfectly into the world picture advanced by Charles Darwin, who revealed the merciless truth about the survival of the fittest. As with species, so too with human races, thought the founder of eugenics, Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, and the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler.
(nysun)
Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement
For many if not most people, the term "eugenics" gives rise to one of two images; Nazi Germany's attempts at "purification" and creating an Aryan master race. Fewer are aware that there was a powerful eugenics movement in the US during the first half of the 20th century. Given the ongoing genetics revolution, the Dolan DNA Learning Center has decided it is time we were reminded of that history, and has gathered an impressive - and sobering - look at this lamentable crusade, at the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement.
(csmonitor)
The USA: A Birthplace of Nazi Genocide
On Monday I had the honor of giving the opening talk for Holocaust Remembrance week. It was titled "American Complacency and the Holocaust", I though my preferred title might have been, "The USA: Birthplace of Nazi Genocide." Essentially, in it, I explore American ideological culpability for the Holocaust vis-à-vis eugenics and scientific racism. I assert that Hitler looked towards America as the model for enacting his Aryan master race plan, and I thoroughly substantiate the same.
(Archive)
Hitler's debt to work of American eugenicists
American raceologists were proud to have inspired the strictly eugenic state the Nazis were constructing. In those early years of the Third Reich, Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modelled on laws already introduced across America and upheld by the supreme court. Nazi doctors, and even Hitler himself, regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the US. American eugenicists were eager to assist.
(guardian)
See also:
WW2 Posters
Footage, Films
WWII Documentaries
Gestapo - RSHA.