Never Again?

The practice of eugenics, so condemned by scientists after the collapse of Nazism, lives on today. Only the victims have changed.
By Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

For most people in the West it is possibly the case that the only absolutely unambiguous icon of evil is the Third Reich and the Holocaust. One may argue that there are other instances of evil that should have that status in the popular consciousness, but they don't. It is therefore understandable that we continue to make moral discernments by employing Nazism as an absolute test line separating the discussable from the unspeakable. A new book from Oxford represents such an exercise in discernment, Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism . It is a short (160 pp.), assiduously documented, and devastating account of the way in which American scientists admired and abetted Nazi schemes of racial eugenics in the 1930s, and how they changed their stories and tried to cover their tracks after 1945 when the full dimensions of the Nazi horror became more widely known.

Kuhl's is a necessary reminder of how very liberal and progressive the advocacy of eugenics was thought to be in the first half of this century. Negative eugenics, the elimination of the "unfit," and positive eugenics, the breeding of "superior stock," were both greatly favored by the enlightened of the day. Even before the Nazis came to power, German scientists and politicians declared their indebtedness to the inspiring example of America 's pioneering programs of sterilizing the mentally deficient and criminally prone. The American example is favorably cited in Hitler's Mein Kampf , and in the 1930s he wrote admiring letters to prominent American scientists who fully reciprocated his sentiments.

As useful as Kuhl's study is, there is no attention paid the campaign for birth and population control during the period studied. Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Planned Parenthood, is not mentioned even once, although her views (often explicitly racial) closely paralleled those of the eugenicists, and the organizations pressing this common agenda had overlapping leadership and coordinated programs. One might leave the Kuhl book with the impression that the story he relates has little to do with today, except for some fringe racists and some generalized cautions about the moral obtuseness of scientific expertise. In fact, today's disputes over abortion, euthanasia, fetal experimentation, and population control are on a continuum with the scientific culture of death examined by Stefan Kuhl. He does, almost in passing, note the extraordinary role of the Rockefeller Foundation in pushing the eugenics agenda from the start. Rockefeller funded numerous conferences and research projects that were a great boost to Nazi-American collaboration, and the role of the foundation was generously appreciated by the Germans for giving their efforts international respectability.

Today, Rockefeller is joined by Ford, MacArthur, and other megaphilanthropies that, together with a number of Western governments, pour hundreds of millions of dollars per year into promoting sterilization, abortion, and other measures aimed at limiting the fecundity of the poor and disadvantaged. All of this is done under the rubric of "population control," but it is in fact a massive exercise in negative eugenics. The racial, cultural, and economic presuppositions undergirding it are usually thinly disguised, and sometimes openly admitted. As Nicholas Eberstadt's thorough examination demonstrates ("First Things," January 1994), population control is ideology disguised as science. There is no scientific measure of "overpopulation," but there is a powerful and ideologically driven dread of lesser breeds that threaten our advantaged way of life and, presumably, the planetary balance.

We Americans are given to smugly assuring ourselves that "It can't happen here." And of course the full horror of something like the Third Reich has not happened here and, God willing, will not. What has happened here, as Stefan Kuhl so trenchantly demonstrates, is that many of the "brightest and best" of the American scientific and public policy community warmly endorsed the ideas, and some of the practices, that gave the world the Holocaust. After 1945, they drew back in repugnance from the consequences of their ideas but, with slight semantic changes, they continued and they continue to advance the same ideas.

One of the prosecutors at Nuremberg explained how people could act so savagely: "There is only one step to take. You may not think it possible to take it; but I assure you that men I thought decent men did take it. You have only to decide that one group of human beings have lost their human rights." As a polity, the United States has long since taken that step with respect to unborn children. The proponents of euthanasia urge upon us further steps in deciding that those who cannot effectively assert their rights have no rights. At Nuremberg , the prosecution argued that the killing programs unfolded quite predictably from one thing to another, that the killing of the six-millionth Jew was set in motion by the morphine overdose given the first harelipped child.

Most of us rebel against the drawing of any analogies between ourselves and the Nazis. That is understandable. The rebellion is rooted in part in our conceit that we are not capable of such great evil. It is rooted also in an entirely reasonable appreciation of the differences between our circumstance -culturally, politically, economically - and that of Germany in the 1930s. But our perception of reality is distorted by making Nazism the test of evil. It is as though we can comfort ourselves that "it" is not happening here because there is no American Auschwitz and nobody is proposing the extermination of millions of Jews, gypsies, and others officially classified as subhuman.

So we allow, and even provide government subsidy for, the killing of 1.6 million unborn children each year. That, we are told, is no analogy with the Nazis because they prohibited abortion, at least for the socially desirable. So, moreover, it is open season for fetal experimentation, fetal farming, and the use of aborted corpses for transplants. That, we are told, is not comparable to doing the same thing with born children and grown-ups - and of course it both is and is not the same thing. It is not the same thing chiefly because we have decided that a group of human beings have no rights. So, yet further, the incidence of involuntary euthanasia (killing people who do not want to be killed) may one day reach the level that it is today in the Netherlands . That would be many thousands of killings per year. Even then, we will be told, that is nowhere near the scale of the Holocaust and, anyway, many of those people might want to be killed if they only knew what was best for them.

By making the Holocaust the measure of evil, we set an unreasonably high standard, so to speak. Whatever we have done and now do and may do in the future, it is certainly not that bad. It is as though we were to take a somewhat relaxed view of murderers who operate on a scale that falls short of Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer. But then we remember the rabbinic wisdom that to save one life is to save the world; and its obverse, to kill one life is to kill the world. Not literally, of course, but morally, which is much more important. Genocide began with the first morphine overdose given a harelipped baby. Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection documents much more than its author knows, or at least much more than he says. It makes disturbingly clear that many of the most respectable, most influential, and most progressive scientific minds of this century laid the intellectual and moral groundwork on which the Nazis built, and cheered them on as they were building.

Later, most of these Nazi sympathizers would adamantly insist that that is not what they had meant, that is not what they meant at all. But the ideas are what matter, and in many cases they did not and have not disowned the ideas. The word "eugenics" does not appear in the annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation, but it does not take a cryptologist to recognize the euphemisms. "It" assumes many forms. While we work ourselves up into a fine heat shouting "Never again!" it is happening again.

A longer version of this article appeared in the Aug/Sept'94 issue of "First Things" (www.firstthings.com ). Reprinted with permission.