Eugenics and Scientific Racism in the Jim Crow Deep South and Nazi Germany

Eugenics Under Jim Crow America and Nazi Germany: Sterilization, Euthanasia, Lynchings, and Holocaust

Did American eugenics inspire Nazi eugenics? Did the Nazis view the American Jim Crow laws as precedent for their laws on sterilization and discrimination?

What is the dark history behind compulsory sterilization? Should the mentally deficient patient be sterilized? Are there states where compulsory sterilization is legal under certain circumstances?

Can we compare the lynching of over ten thousand blacks over many decades to the Nazi Holocaust, the deadly gassing of millions of Jews?

YouTube video for this blog: https://youtu.be/y7xvGu3L6oA

DISCUSSION OF THE SOURCES

Usually, we discuss our sources at the end of our video, but on rare occasions, we instead discuss them at the beginning of the video. In this case, our main source, The Nazi Connection, Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, was published by Stefan Kuhl in 1994. The author is primarily interested in the history of Eugenics in Nazi Germany, and its roots in American academia, particularly California. Despite the book’s title, the eugenic links to American racism is a secondary concern. We skipped over his history of the various schools of eugenics as this is irrelevant today, and this account of eugenics may not be complete, and certainly does not discuss the history of eugenics since 1994, which is why we consulted Dr Wikipedia so extensively. So, if you are a graduate student looking for a paper, do further research, and share it in the comments. My gut tells me that Dr Wikipedia’s information on this topic is incomplete.

Eugenics is basically selective breeding to improve the human stock, either through passive means, such as sterilization and contraception, or through more repulsive active means, such as culling of undesirables, or selective breeding, such as when the Nazis encouraged their purebred SS Stormtroopers to pair with acceptable German maidens in the Lebensborn, or Fountain of Life Association. Sometimes children with Aryan traits were simply kidnapped from Poles or others to be raised as pure blood Germans, whose parents were either murdered or thrown in concentration work camps.[1] The most extreme culling was the Nazi Holocaust, where millions of Jews and other undesirables were murdered in gas chambers, or were shot by SS troops, often on the Eastern front, which really gave Eugenics a bad reputation.

The first chapter of our book warns of the current proponents of racism, and we asked Dr Wikipedia what happened to them, and most of these characters have either passed or faded into irrelevance. We know that Tucker Carlson and others on the right have shouted screeds about the Great Replacement Theory which proclaims that the white bloodline of America is being diluted by dark-skinned people, but I am not going to do a research project on tracking down their pseudo-scientific sources.

There is an abhorrent history of medical abuse on poor and primarily black patients in this country. Dr Wikipedia summarized these in its book review on: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, a 2007 book by Harriet A. Washington.[2] Dr Wikipedia also informs us that there is constant litigation surrounding sterilization, and in particular, whether mentally incompetent patients should be sterilized,[3] which means that sterilization is an issue ripe for abuse from bad actors.

We have reflected on how, soon after Hitler became Fuhrer of Germany, the Nazi lawyers looked to the Jim Crow segregation and discrimination laws as precedents when drafting the Nuremberg Race Laws discriminating against the Jews.

How the Racist Jim Crow Laws Served as Precedent for the Nazi Nuremberg Race Laws
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/how-the-racist-jim-crow-laws-served-as-precedent-for-the-nazi-nuremberg-race-laws/
https://youtu.be/_td3jPGD5TI

Was there a similar Final Solution in America comparable to the Nazi Holocaust? True, there were no gas chambers in the Deep South, nor was there a similar system of systematic mass murder, but there were race riots such as the Tulsa Riots where the homes, businesses, and churches of thousands of blacks were torched and looted, and many blacks were injured and murdered. In these riots, mostly occurring in many cities during the interwar years, on rare occasions when there were police arrests, they arrested the black victims who fought back. The major difference is that the Nazis murdered far more people much quicker, and their regime lasted only a decade, as opposed to the seventy-year reign of Jim Crow racism in America.

In addition, there were over ten thousand documented cases where blacks were lynched, with no due process or justice served to the black victims whatsoever, in the seven decades before the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties. This video intersperses accounts of various lynchings with more general discussions of past discrimination of blacks.

Ida B Wells, Journalist, Brave Woman, and Anti-Lynching Activist
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ida-b-wells-journalist-brave-woman-and-anti-lynching-crusader/
https://youtu.be/sLDHs0AigvY

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King specifically compared the historic lynching of blacks to the Nazi Holocaust. We reflected on the similarities between King’s letter and Hannah Arendt’s essay on the Banality of Evil, her account of the trial of Adolph Eichmann, and his role as the bureaucrat ensuring the smooth efficiency of the Final Solution in the ovens of the death camps.

Comparing MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil in Nazi Germany
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/comparing-martin-luther-kings-letter-from-the-birmingham-jail-with-hannah-arendts-the-banality-of-evil/
https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a life-changing book, our good doctor teaches us how you can find meaning and purpose in your life regardless of your life circumstances, even when you are struggling to survive in the deadly Auschwitz work camps.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning, His Life in a Nazi Concentration Camp in WWII
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/viktor-frankl-mans-search-for-meaning-his-life-in-a-nazi-concentration-camp-in-wwii/
https://youtu.be/O-YtC9qGWPI

We have a series of reflections on how Christians survived under the various fascist and Nazi regimes before and during World War II, and how the Catholic experience battling Naziism deeply influenced the decrees of the Second Vatican Council.

How the Catholic Church and the Confessing Church Survived Under Hitler’s Pagan Nazi Regime
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/christians-under-hitlers-german-nazi-regime/
https://youtu.be/QP9UR8fqfvs

Mussolini’s Fascist Regime and the Catholic Church
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/mussolinis-fascist-regime-and-the-catholic-church/
https://youtu.be/LvNynEdZFuM

Christians Surviving Fascism in World War II: What are the Dangers of Single-Issue Politics in Vichy France?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/christians-surviving-fascism-in-world-war-ii-what-are-the-dangers-of-single-issue-politics-in-vichy-france/
https://youtu.be/VRQG_uQSZiw

How Did the Experiences of World War II Influence the Second Vatican Council?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/how-did-the-experiences-of-world-war-ii-influence-the-second-vatican-council/
https://youtu.be/QQEd9LDzV1U

We have reflections on how Christians reacted to the Civil Rights movement and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on school desegregation in America, plus many other reflections on the history of the civil rights struggle in America, including biographies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, WEB DuBois, and Martin Luther King.

American Evangelicals, Civil Rights, and Republican Politics
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/american-evangelicals-civil-rights-and-republican-politics/
https://youtu.be/XekOz29oWL0

Hannah Arendt Questions Whether School Desegregation Was Wise: Little Rock and Civil Rights
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/hannah-arendt-questions-whether-school-desegregation-was-wise-little-rock-and-civil-rights/
https://youtu.be/nsqngH2gbNc

Three Generations of Leading Black Leaders, Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and WEB Du Bois
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/three-generations-of-leading-black-leaders-frederick-douglass-booker-t-washington-and-web-du-bois/
https://youtu.be/DAEg463i-Tc

Martin Luther King, Summary of Biography by David Levering Lewis
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-summary-of-biography-by-david-levering-lewis/
https://youtu.be/XtdVGx2C3Cc

REFLECTING ON DEFINITION OF EUGENICS

What is a more complete definition of eugenics? Although some influential doctors and politicians promoted eugenics before World War II, today few are proponents of eugenics. The National Human Genome Research Institute, which is under the NIH or National Institute of Health, offers this definition:
“Eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of ‘racial improvement’ and ‘planned breeding,’ which gained popularity during the early 20th century. Eugenicists worldwide believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity. They believed the use of methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation, and social exclusion would rid society of individuals deemed by them to be unfit.”[4]

When we study the history of eugenics, we must keep in mind that nobody in the Roaring Twenties could have anticipated the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, this was in the unknowable future. This definition of eugenics could be couched in more positive tones, though in hindsight we are justified in seeing eugenics as morally reprehensible. But before World War II, it was mainstream science.

The predecessors of the NIH, or National Institute of Health, and the US Public Health Service were founded in the 1880s, as were the American Eugenics organizations.[5] The First International Congress of Eugenics was held in Dresden, Germany, in 1912, chaired by Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, who had passed away in 1882. Eugenics was mainstream, supporters included Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Eliot, who was Harvard President, Winston Churchill, and the progressives Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.[6]

Likewise, the American Eugenics Society was organized in 1922 but changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology after the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, since Eugenics was a bad name. The society finally disbanded in 2019. In its early days, it sponsored many fittest baby contests.[7]

There remains support for far-right wingnut fringe groups that support something called “Scientific Racism,” which means that there are fringe academics that support eugenic policies in far-right wingnut journals. Our author mentions Roger Pearson, a British academic who taught at USM, or University of Southern Mississippi, who today is 97, and J Philippe Rushton and Robert Gordon of John Hopkins University, both deceased.[8] Perhaps the Pioneer Fund that was a major funder of eugenic research today is somewhat diminished, much of the “research” is undertaken by its board members.[9] Some of the “scholarly” journals mentioned are still being published, so a new generation of eugenicists are likely keeping the movement alive. Pearson was lauded by President Reagan, and quite likely they influenced Tucker Carlson and the Great Replacement Theory discussed in the right-wingnut media, which claims that the white race is being bastardized in intermarriage with dark-skinned peoples and Jews.

SUPREME COURT RULES ON COMPULSORY STERILIZATION IN BUCK V BELL

Long before the Nazis rose to power in Germany, American physicians were performing compulsory sterilizations on the feeble-minded. In an early 1927 Supreme Court case, Buck v Bell, the justices ruled that a state statute requiring compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, did not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The infamous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v Bell ruled that:
“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives.” “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Unlike Roe v Wade, where the woman’s identity was protected with a pseudonym, the Supreme Court had no problem using Carrie Buck’s real name in this landmark case. After all, Carrie Buck was committed to an institution for the feeble-minded and wasn’t considered a real person anyway. In the early part of the century, institutionalized patients lacked agency, the ruling doctors could do as they wished, which is not true today. The doctor in this case was aggressive in performing sterilizations, sometimes performing them on girls who mistakenly talked to the boys for far too long. In this case, the eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck was deemed to have a mental age of nine, which was more than the mental age of eight they assigned to her mother, who had a history of prostitution and immorality. Carrie became pregnant, and her daughter was raised by someone else. But her daughter attended school and earned good grades before she passed away from complications from measles when she was actually eight.

Although you could argue that sterilization should be encouraged for feeble-minded women who are subject to abuse, this flagship case reveals the problems of this mindset.

The most pressing questions are:

Who will determine who will be sufficiently feeble-minded to undergo sterilization?
What would be the criteria?
And, most importantly, who will champion the cause of these helpless and ignorant charges?

Indeed, society has progressed since these days, as there are far fewer institutions like this, and today most mental health patients have legal agency by default.

Curiously, Buck v Bell has never been overturned and was even cited in the Roe v Wade Supreme Court abortion case.[10]

Does the Dobbs Abortion Decision Endanger Lives? Obstetricians Facing Moral and Legal Dilemmas
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/does-the-dobbs-abortion-decision-endanger-lives-obstetricians-facing-moral-and-legal-dilemmas/
https://youtu.be/YiVrFcmiyOE

A Democrat Christian Ponders Abortion and Morality
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/a-democrat-christian-ponders-abortion-and-morality/
https://youtu.be/C4rH6qhhw70

Supreme Court Dobbs Case Overruling Roe v Wade: Should Christians be Pro-Compassion? Pro-Doctors?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/supreme-court-dobbs-case-overruling-roe-v-wade-should-christians-be-pro-compassion-pro-doctors/
https://youtu.be/Jb_vUFnAf3g

Regarding Abortion, Should Christians Be Pro-Compassion? Answering Questions, Further Reflections
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/regarding-abortion-should-christians-be-pro-compassion-answering-questions-further-reflections/
https://youtu.be/ll9wOR0t2yQ

We know that some in Germany were aware of this precedent, a Nazi doctor being prosecuted in the Doctor Trial at Nuremberg after Nazi Germany was defeated argued that Buck v Bell was a precedent for his horrific crimes.[11]

STERILIZATION AND EUTHANASIA IN AMERICA AND NAZI GERMANY

Early in the twentieth century, many states enacted laws to sterilize the mentally handicapped, including Indiana, California, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, and Oregon,[12] and there were sterilizations in other states. The push for sterilization influenced eugenics in Germany, and similar legislation was passed in Prussia.

More extreme legislation was enacted when the Nazis took power in 1933, as Hitler had a personal interest in American eugenics. The Nazi sterilization law was patterned after the California sterilization law, demanding sterilization “in cases of mental retardation, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, deafness, malformation,” and alcoholics. Criminals could also be sterilized and castrated. In 1935, the Nazis forbade marriage between healthy and mentally retarded persons.[13] Hereditary health courts were established to administer the sterilization laws in Nazi Germany.[14] Hitler planned to sterilize 400,000 Germans, or about one percent of the population.[15]

In September 1939 Hitler issued an order to euthanize all patients with incurable diseases, and the disabled and retarded patients, to eliminate “useless eaters.” At first, the victims were shot, but as the program expanded the Nazis experimented with gassing patients in rooms disguised as showers.

Most Americans, and many Germans, including many eugenicists, were horrified when the Nazi doctors took the next step, seeking to rid the German society of the expense of caring for the hopelessly retarded and mentally ill to protect the purity of the German race. But the Nazis encountered stiff resistance from both Catholics and Protestants against their euthanasia initiatives. Sometimes pastors and bishops publicly criticized the killings, more often they appealed directly to high Nazi officials.

For once the Nazis backed down: less than a month later Hitler signed an order ending the euthanasia program that had killed over 70,000 patients. [16] A more complete description of these events is described in our reflection on how the Catholic Church and the Confessing Church Survived Under Hitler’s Pagan Nazi Regime.

The most extreme Nazi eugenic notion was that to purify the German race, they needed the Final Solution, to exterminate the inferior Jewish race in the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps. Larger versions of the gas chambers developed to cull the useless eaters in the mental institutions were built in Poland to murder Jews on an industrial scale.

While the Final Solution of the Holocaust reflected the Nazi belief that Jews were an inferior race, so the lynchings in the American South and Midwest reflected the belief that the Negro race was inferior to the white race. The Nazis also considered blacks and Eastern Europeans to belong to inferior races.

RACISM AND EUGENICS

Our author, Stefan Kuhl, divided the 1930’s eugenicists into:

Mainline Eugenicists who “favored the elimination of degenerate elements within the white race,” discouraging miscegenation, or intermarriage, between races.
Reform Eugenicists who tried to distance themselves from Nazis by “advocating selection on an individual rather than an ethnic basis.”
Racial anthropologists who believed that the “races are innately unequal,” believing that the Nordic race was superior. They were strongly anti-Semitic and supported the eugenic racism of Nazi Germany.

Kuhl states that “mainline eugenicists dominated the eugenics movements in the US, Scandinavia, and Germany until the early 1930s. They believed in white superiority yet argued that the white race also needed further improvement.” “Whites were viewed as more advanced than others in the evolutionary process.” “Although most mainline eugenicists were anti-Semitic themselves, they were careful not to be too blatant in supporting Nazi discrimination against the Jews.” As Nazi policies became more extreme, the Reform Eugenicists distanced themselves from them as well.[17]

Kuhl states that in the late 1930s, there was a “gradual recognition” “that anti-Semitism was at the core of Nazi race policy.” There was “a power shift inside the American scientific community towards more progressive liberal eugenicists;” “with a rapid decline of the reputation of Nazi Germany in the United States.”

In 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg laws, one of which “stipulated that only persons of German or related blood could be citizens of the Reich: Jews were explicitly excluded.” Another law “forbade marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood.” “Jews were forbidden to participate in public life, and Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend public schools. In 1939, further decrees limited the districts in which Jews could rent apartments, mandated forced labor, and compelled them to wear the yellow star of David.”

In response to criticism by Americans, one Nazi “newspaper informed its readers that in thirty US states, marriage between blacks and whites was forbidden.” Also, “there was strict separation between whites and blacks and pointed out that lynching of ethnic minorities was not practiced in Germany.”[18] The Supreme Court ruled in Loving v Virginia in 1967 that statutes prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional. The related movie was released in 2016.[19]

After the outbreak of World War II, contact between eugenicists in America and Nazi Germany largely ceased. Of course, after a doctor has studied and practiced for years to develop a specialty, they will be very reluctant to abandon their field of expertise. After the war ended, the eugenics institutes did not disappear, they simply denied their prewar support of Nazi Eugenic ideology.[20]

Today the former science of eugenics is largely discredited, though there is growing support for the prejudice of the Great Replacement Theory, that evil Democrats seek to overwhelm America with dark-skinned immigrants. However, controversies over the sterilization of mentally incompetent patients remain, Dr Wikipedia mentions laws and court cases in many states up to the current day.[21]

The NIH, or National Institute of Health, has an excellent website summarizing the discredited history of Eugenics, and the fear that this ideology may resurge, in part due to the advances made in genetics and gene therapy that make genetic engineering and selection possible.[22]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Apartheid

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_law_in_the_United_States

[4] https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Public_Health_Service and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Health

[6] Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, German American Relations, pp. 14-16.

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eugenics_Society

[8] Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, The New Scientific Racism, pp. 3-7 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Gordon and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Pearson_(anthropologist)

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

[11] Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, p. 101.

[12] Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, German American Relations, p. 17.