War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  The Eugenical News report on the 1927 grand opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics pointed out, “In the section on human genetics, twins and the blood groups were specially considered.” On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Paris office dispatched a radiogram to its New York headquarters asking for funds to support Verschuer’s research while he was at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. The foundation approved a three-year grant totaling $9,000 to “KWG Institute [for] Anthropology for research [on] twins and effects on later generations of substances toxic for germ plasm.”104

  At the same time, the foundation was already funding an array of vocal German anti-Semites in a five-year $125,000 study. Internal foundation reports described the study as “the racial or biological composition of the German people and of the interaction of biological and social factors in determining the character of the present population.” Twin research was repeatedly cited as a key facet of the research. Among the scientists listed on the foundation’s roster was Rüdin in project items 9 and 10; project item 16 was Verschuer. This $125,000 grant was not made directly, but channeled through the Emergency Fund for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaften), which evolved into the German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).105

  When Hitler came to power the next year, Rockefeller did not cease its funding of race biology in Germany. However, unlike many American eugenic leaders, Rockefeller officials were more circumspect. Rockefeller executives did not propagandize for Nazism, nor did they approve of the Reich’s virulent repression. The foundation’s agenda was strictly biological to the exclusion of politics. It wanted to discover the specific genetic components of the blood of the unfit-even if that meant funding Nazi-controlled institutions.

  Rockefeller’s seed money was not wasted. In 1935, Eugenical Nnvs published a notice entitled “Blood Groups of Twins,” which summarized a Nazi medical journal article based on Verschuer’s research. “The Koiser-Wilhelm Institute fur Anthropologie Menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik, at Dahlem-Berlin,” reported Eugenical Nnvs, “is conducting, through Dr. O. v. Verschuer, studies on twins. Of 202 one-egg twins on whom the blood group was determined, in every case the serologic findings were the same; that is, both fell into the same blood group, just as both are of the same sex. On the other hand, in the case of two-egg twins the blood groups of the twins, whether of same or opposite sex, were frequently unlike.”106

  After attorney Raymond Fosdick assumed the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1936, the charitable trust became increasingly reluctant to fund any projects associated with the term eugenics. Rockefeller money continued to flow into prewar Nazi Germany to fund eugenic projects, but only when the proposals were packaged as genetics, brain research, or serology investigations attempting to locate the specific substances in the blood. However, Rockefeller financing was often too slow for Verschuer, who now sought faster and closer funding through the Reich Research Fund in Berlin, which in the thirties continued to enjoy annual Rockefeller monies. In June of 1939, when the Rockefeller Foundation tried to convince protestors that it was not financing Nazi science, Fosdick was forced to remind his colleagues that such denials were “of course hardly correct.” Rockefeller money was still flowing through the Emergency Fund for German Science, now the German Research Society.107

  A cascade of German Research Society grants financed Verschuer’s continuing heredity research, including a 1935 grant for twin studies. In 1936 and 1937, Verschuer again received funding for twin research and his search for the specific components in blood. The grants continued through the war years, supporting a broad array of concentration camp experimentation.108

  In the late summer of 1943, Verschuer received German Research Society funding for serology experiments filed under the keyword SpeziJische Eiweisskorper, alternately translated as “Specific Proteins” or “Specific Albuminous Matter.” His project would require voluminous blood samples, as he was seeking the specific blood proteins or albuminous matter that carried genetic traits, from epilepsy to eye color. Verschuer explained in a memo that the blood would come from the Twins Camp at Auschwitz. Mengele, wrote Verschuer, would supervise the operation with the explicit permission of Himmler. “The blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.”109

  Victim after victim, Mengele extracted large amounts of blood from twins and gypsies. He siphoned it from their arms, sometimes both arms, from the neck, sometimes from fingers. Hedvah and Leah Stem recalled, “We were very frightened of the experiments. They took a lot of blood from us. We fainted several times.” One twin survivor remembered years later, “Each woman was given a blood transfusion from another set of twins so Mengele could observe the reaction. We two each received 350 cc of blood from a pair of male twins, which brought on a reaction of severe headache and high fever.”110

  Mengele returned to Berlin from time to time. On one of these trips, he visited his mentor Verschuer for a cozy family dinner. Mengele was asked whether his work at Auschwitz was hard. Years later, Verschuer’s son recalled Mengele’s reply to his mother: “It’s dreadful,” Mengele said. “I can’t talk about it.”111

  Nevertheless, Mengele was tireless in his bloodletting, his eyeball extractions, his infecting, his autopsying and his selecting, most to the left and some to the right. In mid-August of 1944, his superior filed a letter of commendation. “During his employment as camp physician at the concentration camp Auschwitz,” Verschuer asserted, “he has put his knowledge to practical and theoretical use while fighting serious epidemics. With prudence, perseverance and energy, he has carried out all tasks given him, often under very difficult conditions, to the complete satisfaction of his superiors and has shown himself able to cope with every situation.”112

  Years later, Verschuer’s medical technician, Irmgard Haase, was interviewed about the work at Auschwitz. She admitted, “There was the research work, which included enzymes in the blood of Gypsy twins and of Russian prisoners of war…. From the middle of 1943 onwards, there were several consignments of 30 ml samples of citrated blood.” Asked where the blood had come from, she replied, “I don’t know. The specimens were in hoxes, which had been opened. I never saw the sender’s name.” She added, “I thought that they were from a camp for prisoners.” Auschwitz? “ I never heard the word at that time.”113

  Mengele? “Never heard of him.” She emphasized, “Specific enzymes in the blood were being investigated by means of… protective enzyme reactions.” Were there any misgivings? Haase responded no: “It was science, after all. “114

  * * *

  Mengele was not alone. Hitler’s doctors operated a vast network of experimentation in Nazi concentration camps, euthanasia mills and other places in the territories it occupied. Much of that experimentation was eugenic and genetic, such as the work of Mengele. Much of it was strictly medical, such as the testing at Buchenwald designed to find cures or medicines for well-known diseases. Much of it was simply strategic, such as the cruel ice water and high altitude tests at Dachau intended to benefit Luftwaffe pilots bailing out over the North Atlantic.115

  But even when strictly medical or military testing was inflicted on helpless subjects, it was most often imposed along eugenic lines. More specifically, many Aryans-such as habitual criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and socialists-were imprisoned in camps under beastly conditions. Mostly, it was the worthless and expendable-Jews, Gypsies, Russians and other “sub-human” prisoners-who were victimized as medical fodder. The exceptions were those Germans considered hereditary misfits, such as homosexuals and the feebleminded. All of it was in furtherance of Hitler’s biological revolution and his quest for a master race in a Thousand-Year Reich.

  Hitler’s master race would be more than just chiseled blond and blue-eyed Nordics. Special breeding facilities were established to mass-produce perfect Aryan babies.116 They would all be closer to super men and women: taller, stronger and in
many ways disease-resistant. Therefore Verschuer was the vanguard of a corps of Nazi medical men who saw the struggle against infirmity and sickness as consonant if not intrinsic to their struggle for eugenic perfection. Nazi Germany was indeed engaged in advanced medical genetics, now amply funded by the Reich’s plunder, and militarized and regimented by the fascist state.

  Therefore, even as Verschuer and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics were supervising the eugenic murders at Auschwitz, they enjoyed military contracts and German Research Society funding to attack a gamut of dreaded inherited diseases. This research could be conducted in concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Birkenau, or in Kaiser Wilhelm’s grandiose complex of centers for higher learning.

  For example, Hans Nachtsheim, who also worked under Verschuer, investigated epilepsy and other illnesses under German Research Society aegis and military contract SS 4891-53 76, filed under “Research into Heredity Pathology.” One typical status memo in October of 1943 reported that, “Experiments on the significance of a lack of oxygen for the triggering of epileptic seizures in epileptic rabbits, which were carried out jointly with Dr. Ruhenstroth-Bauer from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry… have essentially been concluded. A preliminary report of the research is currently being printed in the journal Klinische Wochenschrift [Clinical Weekly]; a comprehensive report is in the process of being drawn up to be published in the journal Zeitschrift for menschliche Vererbungsund Konstitutionslehre [Journal for Science of Human Genetics and Constitution].”117

  The depth of Nachtsheim’s learning was evident. “Further experiments,” he continued, “are concerned with the effect of the epilepsy gene in association with other genes [Gengesellschaft]. It has been determined that a single dosage of the epilepsy gene may suffice to induce epilepsy in combination with certain other genes, although the epilepsy gene is usually recessive, meaning that it must be present in a double dosage in order to become effective. Thus, a carrier of two albino genes and a single epilepsy gene can become an epileptic. The albino gene is the most extreme and most recessive allele [chromosomal pair] of a series of 6 alleles. In order to understand the essence of genes and their interaction, it is important to know how the other alleles act in combination with the epilepsy gene. Up to now, it could be proven that the allele most closely related to the albino gene… reacts just as the albino factor, while the normal allele, which is dominant over all other alleles in the series, suppresses the outbreak of epilepsy even in a single dosage in the presence of even one epilepsy gene. Experiments with the other alleles remain to be done.”118

  Verschuer studied tuberculosis in rabbits under German Research Society aegis and contract SS 4891-53 77. One typical report explained that, “In addition to crossbreeding, pure breeding continued; in particular, the attempt was made to determine why the members of one family were always killed by lung tuberculosis while this form did not develop in the other family. The attempt was made to change the way in which tuberculosis presented in the various breeds. This was done by means of sac blockage, reinfections and organ implants. These experiments have not yet been concluded, but it appears that the development of tuberculosis in the breeds is extremely resistant. It will be necessary to expand these experiments, since their results could be of fundamental significance for the treatment of tuberculosis in humans.”119

  Similar genuine science could be seen in the other reports of the various Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. One of them was the Institute for Brain Research, an organization financed by Rockefeller money from the ground up starting in the late 1920s. Senior researchers Drs. Julius Hallervorden and Hugo Spatz published their pioneering work on a form of inherited brain degeneration, which was eventually named Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome. After Institute for Brain Research founder Oskar Vogt was removed for his lack of Nazi activism, Spatz took his place and the organization was fully integrated into the Nazi killing process. While Hallervorden held the neuropathology chair at the Institute for Brain Research, he was also appointed senior physician at Brandenburg State Hospital, one of six institutions operating gas chambers under the T-4 euthanasia program. Ultimately, more than 70,200 Germans classed feebleminded were gassed under T-4. In 1938, four autopsies were performed at the Brandenburg facility. During the next five years, 1,260 would be completed. The brains-nearly 700-went to Hallervorden.120

  Hallervorden to his interrogators after the war: “I heard that they were going to do that, and so I went up to them and told them, ‘Look here now, boys, if you are going to kill all those people, at least take the brains out so that the material could be utilized.’… There was wonderful material among those brains, beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease…. They asked me: ‘How many can you examine?’ and so I told them an unlimited number-the more the better…. They came bringing them in like the delivery van from the furniture company. The Public Ambulance Society brought the brains in batches of 150-250 at a time.… I accepted the brains, of course.”121

  Direct Rockefeller funding for Hallervorden and Spatz’s Institute for Brain Research during the Hitler regime stopped in 1934, and funding for Rüdin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry ended in 1935. However, there were undoubtedly additional Rockefeller funds made available to institute researchers through the German Research Society. Rockefeller also provided the seed money for research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology until the war broke out. Moreover, the foundation continued to fund individual physicians, such as Tubingen forensic psychiatrist Robert Gaupp, Breslau patho-psychologist Kurt Beringer, Munich psychiatrist Oswald Bumke and Freiburg neurologist Werner Wagner, each affiliated with his own institution. During these years, Rockefeller also subsidized social scientists in Nazi-annexed Vienna. Much of this money continued until 1939. During the thirties, millions in Rockefeller Foundation grants also flowed to other Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes devoted to the physical sciences. One such was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, which was engaged in weapons research.122

  The mentality behind the foundation’s biological funding could best be seen in the words of Rockefeller Natural Science Director Warren Weaver. Just a few months after Hitler came to power in 1933, Weaver circulated a report to the trustees entitled “Natural Sciences-Program and Policy: Past Program and Proposed Future Program.” That report asserted, “Work in human genetics should receive special consideration as rapidly as sound possibilities present themselves. The attack planned, however, is a basic and long-range one.” A year later, Weaver asked “whether we can develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men?”123

  In pursuing its breeding goals, the Rockefeller Foundation could reassure itself and others that it was not actually furthering the pseudoscience of eugenics. In fact, that 1933 report to the trustees specifically stated, “The attack [for heredity research] planned, however, is a basic and long-range one, and such a subject as eugenics, for example, would not be given support.” After rejecting eugenics by name, the report went on to advocate that “support should be continued and extended to include the biochemical, physiological, neurological and psychological aspects of internal secretions in general.”124

  But while openly eschewing eugenics with statements and memos, Rockefeller in fact turned to eugenicists and race scientists throughout the biological sciences to achieve the goal of creating a superior race.

  Rockefeller never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenic studies in Nazi-occupied Europe when the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller financed, the great institutions it helped found, and the science it helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.

  What could have stopped the race biologists of Berlin, Munich, Buchenwald and Auschwitz? Certainly, the Nazis felt they were unstoppable. They imagined a Thousand-Year Reich of super-bred men. Hence when th
e twins, the prisoner doctors and those selected for the gas chamber looked at Mengele, time after time they reported the piercing look in his eyes. That look-Mengele’s glare-was the Nazi vision wedded to a fanatical science whose soul had been emptied, its moral compass cracked; a science backed not merely by iron dogma but by men wielding machine guns and pellets of Zyklon B. All of them were versed in the polysyllabics of cold clinical murder. Surely, to the victims of Auschwitz, it must have seemed like nothing could stop Nazi science from its global biological triumph.

  But something did defeat Mengele and his colleagues. Not reason. Not remorse. Not sudden realization. Nazi eugenicists were impervious to those powers. But two things did stop the movement. OnJune 6, 1944, the Allies invaded at Normandy and began defeating the Nazis, town by town and often street by street. They closed in on Germany from the west. The Russian army overran the Auschwitz death camp from the east on January 27, 1945. Mengele fled.125

  Hence, Auschwitz was indeed the last stand of eugenics. The science of the strong almost completely prevailed in its war against the weak. Almost.