Historian Niall Ferguson has identified four factors that contributed to anti-Semitism, particularly in Russia: Jews were a substantially urbanized group (Kiev’s Jewish population had grown by 500 percent over a ten-year period in the late 1800s); the Jewish population on the whole was wealthier than the native population, making them an easy target for class envy; involvement in revolutionary movements by Jews was extraordinarily high (although accounting for only 1.8 percent of the Russian population in 1939, they made up 11 percent of the Bolsheviks, 23 percent of the Mensheviks in 1907, and constituted the majority of Lenin’s Central Committee in 1918); and the modern Sangerite version of racial anti-Semitism had started to take root by 1900.84 The 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in the Russian newspaper The Banner, exemplified the high pitch of anti-Semitism that rose in Europe. The “Protocols” were reproductions of an early fictitious French work by Maurice Joly about Napoléon III whose fictional plotters to overthrow the emperor were Jesuits. Over time, the ideas were blended with the work of Hermann Goedsche, who introduced a “Jewish conspiracy” in his novel To Sedan (1868). Although the definitive author of the Protocols remains unknown, many suspect that Pyotr Rachkovsky, the head of the Russian secret police office in Paris, acquired the novel, gave it a Russian twist, and published it as evidence of an anti-czarist plot. The Protocols outlined a world takeover by Jews that would include destruction of the Christian religion by materialism, fomenting international unrest and war, undoing the Western educational systems, and controlling international finances. Copies of the Protocols were disseminated throughout the Russian army as “The Root of Our Misfortunes.” Collectively, their urbanization, wealth, radicalization, and characterization as a conspiratorial group of questionable genetic breeding produced a perfect storm of Jew hatred that bred pogroms in early twentieth-century Russia, while festering in Poland and Germany as well.
The relative political power Jews and other minorities held became even more contentious as Europe faced a decline in births. Even before the Great War, Giuseppe Sergi, an Italian eugenicist, prophesied that Europe’s “superior races” were in decline; another Italian noted that “The present fall in the European birth rate is an evil against which it is necessary to react in the name of Western civilization.” In the midst of World War I, British books such as Cradles or Coffins? Our Greatest National Need saw great circulation.85 After the war, the pro-natal pressures escalated. France lost one tenth of its male population, and Germany had to deal with a half million wartime widows, making the conflict the “greatest sexual catastrophe ever suffered by civilized man.”86 Of those who returned, thousands were “destroyed men,” incapable of normal sexual or social relations, leading to the rise of a generation of fatherless boys who turned to the streets. Divorce rates rose, and both the Left and Right looked upon the developments with horror. The French government issued a gold medal for productive mothers who bore ten children; Belgium had a “League of Large Families”; British papers warned of declining birth rates; and Hungarians faced a “battle without hope…[against] folk-death.”87 Mussolini decried the decline of the Italian family—the population grew by only 1 percent in the interwar period—warning that his country would become a colony to other nations.88 Another Italian claimed “most biologists, economists and politicians fully endorse the view that numbers are the strength of the Nation.”89 “The attention of many European governments,” he noted, “has been called to the decreasing birth rate of the white races during the last decades.”90
There was more to these movements than nationalism, however: a strong element of race permeated all of the early eugenics/birth-rate debates. In 1928, the Eugenical News announced a contest with a $5,000 prize for the best paper researching demographics of the “Nordic peoples.” A paper called “Comparative Birth-Rate Movements Among European Nations” won the first place prize and again emphasized the falling European birth and marriage rates.91 In many respects, the apex of Caucasian power, certainly that of Europe, was realized in 1940 and has declined ever since to the point that by 2010, whites made up only 16 percent of the earth’s population, while Asians and south Asians reached 46 percent. European colonies began to disappear at a remarkable rate, and it was only the Cold War between the two polyglot superpowers, the United States and USSR, that obscured the decline in Caucasian hegemony.
In an effort to bolster the birth rate, abortion was outlawed in France in 1920; Britain followed in 1929. Fascist Italy saw Mussolini admonish its female citizens, “Go back home and tell the women I need births, many births.”92 Even in Soviet Russia the concern with birth rates led to yet another of Marx’s predictions being ditched in favor of a new Soviet commitment to the traditional family.93 In Weimar Germany, the Reichstag outlawed contraception, noting, “The general welfare of the state has to have precedence over women’s feelings.”94
Germany, in particular, appreciated its delicate situation, sandwiched as it was between the vast USSR and France, prompting German demographers to sound the clarion call about dwindling populations and diminishing family size, as well as family destruction. One of the leading criticisms of the Versailles Treaty was that it stripped Germany of 10 percent of its population due to the creation of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Bavarian statistician Friedrich Burgdörfer warned of another dangerous trend, an aging population. The Weimar Republic had become so concerned with a potentially smaller population that the constitution offered housing and economic incentives for the “child rich” (defined as families with more than four children), and organizations such as the Local League for the Child Rich of Frankfurt sprang up.95 Across Europe, however, the population bust troubled observers, irrespective of ideology. The 1937 Irish constitution stated that the “family was the natural, primary, and fundamental unit of society,” and “Red Vienna,” arguably the most socialist city outside of the USSR (with the exception of Hamburg), saw its Marxist council members developing a “social contract” with families that included financial assistance for baby clothing.96 The city built sixty thousand new family residences in fifteen years—a state-financed 1930s version of Levittown. France, Spain, and Italy even banned the advertising and sale of contraceptives.
Declining birth rates and population issues took on greater significance not only because of the military value of a large population, but also because the new Progressive social-welfare approach to children permeating the United States and Europe turned what were once units of production into units of consumption. Well-meaning legislation forced children out of the workplace and into schools, while at the same time moralists demanded that parents properly house, clothe, and feed families, placing new (and, once the Depression started, often unbearable) burdens on families in industrialized nations. British busybodies visited housing run by the London metropolitan government to report on cleanliness and to encourage tenants to shape their family behavior in line with government wishes.97
Medicine, Eugenics, and Social Engineering
Concerns about population and social hygiene allowed eugenicists to worm their way into various health and welfare groups, where they insisted on a heavier state investment in public health programs. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and one Swiss canton all had eugenic sterilization measures for the retarded or feeble-minded. Supporters of state sterilization in England included Lord Horder, the physician to King George VI, and in America, H. L. Mencken. Ireland and Italy both established incentives to keep people from moving to the cities without work; Britain tried the opposite approach, establishing lures for people to move back to the country. It was widely accepted among the elites that overcrowding led to poor hygiene, which in turn produced mental deficiency. The new fascination with sterilization as a means of “improving national health” occurred while a sexual revolution of sorts was simultaneously taking place, pitting pro-contraception/abortion groups against the “big family” advocates.98 Overcrowding in cities was therefore only part of the tension in the war over natal policies that inclu
ded a new abortion offensive.
For example, by the late 1920s in Germany the sexual reformers appeared to be gaining the upper hand, and it is estimated there were over 800,000 abortions in 1930 alone.99 As early as 1920, lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche called for the “destruction of life that is no longer worth living.”100 Hoche even cited a “national duty” for doctors to prevent the nation’s collapse by eliminating a half million “idiots” and “valueless” lives. (Hitler would use similar language at the Nuremberg rally in 1929, saying the nation’s welfare policies were breeding the weak and that Germany needed to rid itself of “burdensome lives.”) These ideas were not isolated, even in the 1920s. Quite the contrary, another lawyer published a draft law for killing the mentally ill, and a popular novelist argued for murdering crippled children at birth. During the decade, thousands of forced sterilizations took place in Weimar, but in Austria, England, and Denmark, sterilization legislation was also proposed.
While sterilization and euthanasia were never supported by most Europeans, even most Germans—indeed, many of the advocates of sterilization and eugenics writers provoked powerful reactions—the apparatus of the state using the cover of public hygiene and general welfare made substantial inroads across Europe and throughout America. A Soviet Eugenics Office was created in 1921; the United States had its Eugenic Record Office; the British Social Hygiene Council wanted to institutionalize all mentally ill and offer sex education in schools; France created a Superior Council for Social Hygiene. Voluntary sterilization laws were passed in Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Estonia. Britain’s Wood Report on Mental Deficiency identified those with mental disorders as a “social problem group” of four million, for which British eugenicists championed forced sterilization as the answer. Even more astounding was an event that occurred in 1936 when King George V, extremely ill and completely bedridden, was euthanized by his private doctor with the family’s blessing with a mixture of cocaine and morphine as a way to circumvent the problem of having a nonfunctioning monarch. When even kings were susceptible to the law, what chance had commoners?
Race, disease, and social control all could be enforced through marriage laws, which usually required a tuberculosis and venereal disease test. In Germany, the Reich Health Council concluded that education alone was insufficient, and that mandatory medical exams would be necessary, supervised by specialized “Marriage Examiners.” Sweden’s marriage law had been extended in its scope to include a requirement for disease testing in 1919. Weimar Germany rejected mandatory exams, but taxation and financial assistance to families deemed fit were considered a means of racial purification and social cleansing. Alarmed by the success of the sexual reformers and the sudden rise in abortions “of choice” and unrelated to eugenic causes (but also out of a need to replace the massive population losses of the war), the medical establishment and the government sought to rejuvenate births within traditional families. Copying the United States, an official German “Mother’s Day” was proposed in 1922. (After World War II, foreign women desiring to marry American servicemen were obliged to undergo thorough medical examinations to determine their fitness and gain the approval of military commanders.) Almost all states adopted the requirement for blood tests to obtain a marriage license in the 1930s, and by 2010 eight states still required them. Various explanations have been offered to explain such requirements, but they all developed out of the eugenics movement to control breeding.
The early battlefield for the sexual reformers and the large family forces were the marriage clinics (first established by the Weimar Republic in 1924), which tried to encourage the destruction of “unfit” babies. Soon, Berlin and all other major cities had marriage advice clinics, which, combined with new benefits for maternity leave and prenatal care, attracted the support of the eugenicists. These clinics marked a critical transition point from which population planning, once the domain of a few educated professionals, became a state-supported policy.101 By virtue of their presence at the municipal level, and their aura of medical authority—sanctioned by studies from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—the clinics became the precursors to the Nazis’ own racial and welfare clinics.
A second battlefield involved biological concepts of “blood,” which drew on wartime research in heredity. By the late 1920s, German anthropologists were convinced that different races were defined by blood groups. The Rockefeller Foundation provided funds for much of this research, particularly that of Eugen Fischer, whose work would later become a point of embarrassment for the Foundation after it was used to support Nazi theories. Fischer was not alone, and indeed labored within a milieu of several competitors, including anthropologist Otto Reche, as well as colleagues such as Munich’s Ernst Rüdin and Erwin Baur, a German who coined the phrase “Nordic Ideal.”102 Baur coauthored with Fischer a text on eugenics that Hitler studied while in jail, and which was later cited as a primary source for the Nazi racial laws. Fischer, Rüdin, and others conducted a massive 1932 survey that collected material on a quarter million people, focusing on genetically inherited talent and degeneracy. The survey enlisted medical professionals, schoolteachers, doctors, welfare administrators, and even priests in reporting abnormalities or criminal tendencies, rewarding them with money for their cooperation. By 1934, Germany, Poland, and Austria had more than forty university institutes dedicated to studying eugenics.103 In less than a decade, those who had seen themselves as virtuous saviors of public health discovered they had been perilously co-opted, to the point that some technocrats could no longer back out (and to the point where many others did not want to relinquish their power). Reinterpreting medical and social welfare in terms of biological costs and benefits allowed the state to intervene in every fabric of society.
Under a thorough reformulation of concepts of racial hygiene, health professionals were mobilized to identify the problems of the underclasses, in the process using science to tag and police undesirable groups. Weimar’s eugenics movement found itself melded into Nazism with surprising ease, co-opting the doctors and scientists. As Paul Weindling, the historian of the German eugenics movement, observed, a Faustian pact was signed between the scientists and the Nazis. The more “scientific their outlook, the more politically naive they were. The more scientists tried to maintain authority and status, the more concessions had to be made to Nazism.”104
By 1933, compulsory sterilization was formalized with the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny, which over the next twelve years would sterilize a third of a million people on the basis of schizophrenia, deafness, epilepsy, and a host of other disabilities. (Two years later, castration for homosexuals was added under the legislation.) This law not only cemented the relationship between the state’s authority and the machinery of the medical profession, but enjoyed a massive publicity campaign about heredity and race. Doctors set up more than 250 tribunals to administer the sterilization drive, sucking in many of the eugenicists of the 1920s who had championed public health measures, all wrapped in yet more surveys and studies. Subsumed under the Reich Office for Family Research, which issued official certificates of Aryan ancestry, the Nazi Party had essentially corralled all authority over race by 1934. Within five years, compulsory registration and identification cards were instituted—all carefully sorted to determine who was permitted to settle in occupied territories (when Germany obtained them). The reaction of the American Eugenics Society was to praise Hitler’s courage and statesmanship by tackling such an important issue.105 Supporters of the California eugenics law, including the head of Riverside’s Bureau of Welfare and Relief, cited sterilization as a weapon to halt the “menace to the race at large.”106 Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, a leading supporter of eugenics in the state, noted in 1936 that the United States and Germany were the leaders in eugenics (“two stupendous forward movements”) but that despite having a quarter-century head start, California was passed quickly by the Germans. That same year, Paul Popenoe, a partner with
Gosney in the Human Betterment Foundation, actively corresponded with Nazi officials so as to make certain that “conditions in Germany are not misunderstood or misrepresented.”107 California eugenicists knew that the Nazis were targeting the Jews in particular and still approved of Germany’s approach to “race hygiene,” and, given the law’s passage, few can doubt the politicians’ support of the programs.
Underclass and Empire
Long before the Third Reich would employ eugenics for its own purposes, the new thinking about race and population control throughout Europe was already intertwined with the issue of the colonies. Race and citizenship, population and childbirth policies all became different facets of the same dilemma—whether to liberate people of other ethnicities or incorporate them into the motherland and “civilize” them. The surprising loyalty of the colonies to Britain and France during the Great War only complicated matters. India and the African territories had sent waves of troops, most of whom were mistreated and poorly used at the fronts. France especially came to view the colonies as a source of manpower, and hence emancipation or liberation was unthinkable. Algeria and French-occupied Arab lands, especially, received massive investment after the war due to the ease of extracting profits from countries just across the Mediterranean. French-controlled North Africa and the Middle East received four times as much investment as other French provinces in Africa.108 In theory, French citizenship eventually awaited Algerians. Realistically, France never intended to grant equal status to Arab Africans, and when the first test came in 1936, under a Popular Front bill to grant citizenship to a handful of Muslim veterans, it was scuttled in Parliament by the deputies of French settlers in Algeria.
In the colonies themselves, a ruling class emerged among the Europeans. France’s resident-general of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, who had served there since 1912, however, despised the Algerian French colonists. Many who settled in Algeria and Morocco ended up in administration, where their numbers exceeded those of British officials in India. England’s colonial administrators, in comparison, came from a particular social class that stood apart from the French or Belgians. Its landed groups dominated the army, the bureaucracy, and the judicial system, and its young men were all trained at elite schools in public leadership, steeped in heroism, sacrifice, and disdain for physical comforts on behalf of the empire. Rudyard Kipling’s line about sending “forth the best ye breed” typified the British colonial administrators: they were prepared educationally and psychologically for foreign service. But the extensive demands of foreign service also opened the doors for people from other classes to advance through assignments overseas. At the same time, a small but growing chorus urged Britain to divest itself of foreign territories. These voices included John Ruskin, a professor of fine arts at Oxford, Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Glazebrook, and Albert (Lord) Grey, heads of what was known as the “Little Englanders.” Most of those in government or with influence, however, shared the imperialistic views of Cecil Rhodes. An undergraduate when Ruskin delivered his inaugural address (Rhodes copied it longhand and kept it for more than two decades), Rhodes advanced through the ranks to become prime minister of Cape Colony in 1890. He controlled the South African diamond mines and made a fortune from them.109
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