HARVARD & THE HOLOCAUST

Prominent Americans had a significant amount of influence in the implementation and outcome of Hitler's eugenic policies. Many of these were the product of Ivy League education, and in turn, Hitler's formidable propaganda machine was quite happy to have the public approval of America's finest scientists, doctors, and journalists.

Harvard professors and graduates were by far the most influential. Prominent Harvard graduates sat as judges in Hitler's eugenic courts. Harvard graduates and lecturers were part of the administration at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Prominent Harvard professors and students formed the immigration restriction lobby that was instrumental in keeping Jewish refugees from reaching U.S. shores. Prestigious Harvard alumni used their influence to help whitewash the Third Reich's racial policies, and by extension keep the murders a contested "rumor" until the end of the war.

The truth is that you cannot write either a complete or honest history of The Holocaust without addressing how pivotal and indispensable these Ivy Leaguers were in the international eugenics movement which was so crucial in erecting Hitler's eugenics machine. In fact, many of the eugenic notions Hitler expounded in Mein Kampf were plagiarized and lifted from the various publications of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, which was headed up by these Ivy Leaguers in conjunction with German eugenicists.

READ THE FULL PAPER:
https://www.academia.edu/3091739/Harvard_and_the_Holocaust

 

1) I object to the amalgamation of eugenetics and Holocaust which are 2 different things

2) Before the war (and even after the war) eugenetics was legal in several countries and promoted in several countries as Britain and Sweden,people as Churchill and G.B. Shaw openly supprted eugenetics;today in several European countries,eygenetics is reappearing under the euphemism of euthanasia

3)For the rest: I have no sympathy for Harvard which is only a place to breed egos .

 

LJAd,

First, it is eugenics, not eugenetics. Second, the path between eugenics and The Holocaust is clear. The paper trail is undeniable.

1.) The men that implemented the Nuremberg Decrees that lead to The Holocaust were eugenicists, namely Alfred Ploetz, Ernst Rudin, and Ottmar Von Verschuer. The doctors that worked in the death camps were eugenicists and reported to these eugenicists. Dr. Mengele reported directly to Verschuer. There were two reasons for the horrid exams Mengele did on his victims: One was military research. The other was purely eugenics. This is why he studied twins. The study of twins had zero military value, and annihilating European Jews did not necessitate the study of heredity.

2.) The entire notion of breeding a "master race" is textbook eugenics. The laws that redistributed income to eugenically desirable families, and the sterilization laws that were geared towards getting rid of eugenically undesirable "breeders" were textbook eugenics. Case in point, the first victim of euthanasia was an otherwise "Aryan" infant that was born with hereditary defects. The first 250,000 people to be sterilized were the "useless eaters" that were also otherwise "Aryans" but were deemed as genetically inferior. Again, none of this is attributable to anti-Semitism, but to a eugenic policy alone.

3.) The Nuremberg Laws read like verbatim translations of the eugenic laws passed in other countries, targeting the hereditary defective. The propaganda films, namely Erbkrank, target the hereditary defective in order to gain popularity for the Nuremberg Decrees that lead directly to the mass sterilization and the T4 Euthanasia Program. The actual hospital staff and medical equipment used in the sterilization and T4 Euthanasia Programs were very literally and physically transferred to the concentration camps in order to help with the Final Solution.

4.) Every newspaper and publication of the era recognized the direct link between the eugenics movement and Hitler's policies. Hitler's propaganda machine took advantage of the positive view eugenics had in other countries and had his doctors invite many foreign eugenicists to survey and write about their policies. The most important event was the 1935 Population Congress in Berlin where the Nazis described in detail their eugenics and the extent of their sterilization and euthanasia programs to their visitors, and the American and British eugenicist stood up and lectured the rest of the world on why they supported it. TIME magazine covered Dr. Clarence Campbell, of the American Eugenics Society, praising the policies and ending his speech by telling the world that Adolf Hitler was the greatest leader, raising his arm in the Nazi salute, and screaming "Heil Hitler!".

5.) For God's sake!! We had a Harvard graduated eugenicists that helped create the eugenic legislation for Woodrow Wilson while he was governor of New Jersey actually end up as one of the doctors assisting in the genocidal activities and eugenic experimentation at Buchenwald. His name was Erwin Katzenbogen. Lothrop Stoddard, a very famous author and journalist from the time was an avowed white supremacist....even wrote several books with the term 'white supremacy' in the title.....be allowed to act as one of the three judges in Hitler's eugenic courts, which decided who would be sterilized or euthanized.

All of these Germans, Americans, and Britons left a very long paper trail. They were doctors as well as the leaders of the movement. They published papers and books, as well as leaving decades of letters crossing the oceans explaining their intent. The letters from the Germans to the Americans can still be found in the American Philosophical Society, the Cal Tech Archives, Truman University Archives, Stanford University Archives, and of course Harvard's and Yale's archives. Thus there NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER about how eugenics played a role in The Holocaust.

 

Oh, I forgot....

There is nothing in Nazi dogma or propaganda that chastises Jews for their religion. The Nazis could care less about the Jewish faith. The Holocaust was not at all like the Spanish Inquisition. Converting to Christianity would have done nothing to save a Jew in Nazi Germany. To the contrary, it was exactly one of the things Hitler's henchmen were afraid of; that the Jews would mix with Germans. That is why marrying, or worse, having children with a Jew was a crime.

The Nazis thought Jews, and all other non-Aryans by that matter, were "biologically inferior". The goal of breeding a "Master Race" was integral and inseparable from ridding the country of what eugenicists like Hitler thought of inferior breeding stock. This is also why they kidnapped the children of conquered nations they believed to be biologically superior, namely the Dutch. This is why Heinrich Himmler created the Lebensborn Program for breeding and the taking of racially desirable children. This is also why some of the first to be sterilized where the 800 or so children of German-African or European colonist and Africans.

I think it was Goebbels that described Nazism "applied biology", well, because just about every aspect of the regime was geared towards negative and positive eugenics.

 

I continue to oppose the amalgamation of eugenics and Holocaust :in a lot of countries mental and physical disabled were sterilized and even killed(in Belgium already in 1963),the compulsary sterilisation laws in Japan were only abolished in 1996 .But,this had nothing to do with the Holocaust: you will not find a non German supporter of eugenics who was advocating the extermination of the Jews, the blacks,etc .

Jews were murdered not because they were disabled,but because they were considered enemies of Germany :at the start of the T 4 program,thousands of disabled were sterilized /murdered,but the disabled Jews were immediately murdered .In 1941, the assassination of the disabled was stopped, but 1941 was the start of the Holocaust .

There were 70000 victims of the euthanasia program ,this was only a minority of the number of disabled in Germany,while the Germans killed all Jews they could catch /

 

I agree, there is a link between the two, but I believe both of you are correct. Eugenics was founded and practiced long before the Nazi Regime. They just adapted the philosophy to their liking. It's a shame that the highly "educated" were engaged in such atrocities. It just adds to the fact that genius doesn't always reflect a moral compass.

 

Correlation does not imply causation. Early 20th century academia was a hotbed of theories on genetics, eugenics and various race-based questions on both sides of the Atlantic. These things were just in the air at the time and the Reich borrowed some of those ideas.

It's rather like the conspiracy baloney about Ford and other companies having plants and investments in pre-war Germany, or international banks lending money to Germany in the 30's. Those things may be true, but it was business not politics.

 

1.) The link between eugenics and the Final Solution doesn't exist in theory because I say so. It exists because the architects of The Holocaust say so. Again, Mengele reported to Verscheur in the Nazi hierarchy. To be more specific, he reported to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was the epicenter of both German eugenics and where most of the doctors in the death camps reported to. In fact, that is also where they sent much of the harvested body parts.

2.) In 15 years of studying eugenics, scientific racism, and The Holocaust I have never come across a historian or a bioethicist that did not think that German eugenics lead directly to the Final Solution. All of the contemporary researchers that have studied the same documents I have came to the same conclusion. This includes Stephan Kuhl and Ulf Schmidt in Germany, Paul Weindling in England, Victoria Nourse, Edwin Black, and the famous bioethicist Paul Lombardo. Paul Weindling is important as he and other bioethicists did a survey of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's documents in 2004.

3.) There is no demarcation between the racial policies for the Jews and the racial policies for all other ethnicities. The Nazis never made such a distinction. It was all part of a eugenic policy, well, because the authors said so.

4.) Many countries implemented eugenic legislation in different degrees. The United States eugenic policy was much more brutal than that of the British, but there are no serious historians that would claim that the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act was not eugenics because the Parliament watered it down to a degree that made it less effective eugenically than the eugenic laws passed in the United States.

5.) Germany's eugenic legislation was implemented and enforced to a much greater degree precisely because of the dictatorial powers given to the regime. The US Congress and the British Parliament had to contend with a different and much more limiting political realities than did Hitler.

6.) Eugenicists in each country had their own prejudices. IN fact the eugenicists in California focused all of their ire towards the Orientals and Mexicans, while those in the Northeast United States towards blacks, poor southern whites, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants. This didn't make their eugenics of a different kind. It just means their focus was elsewhere. They were still all part of the American Eugenics Society and the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, which the Germans, Britons, and Scandinavians all belonged to.

 

Part of the confusion here is thinking that the sterilization and euthanizing of those with birth defects was not linked to "racial degeneration". All of eugenics was fueled by the fear of "degeneration". All of eugenics believed that there was a racial hierarchy, with whites at the top of the evolutionary ladder and with blacks and aborigines literally "closer to apes than to the white man".

Eugenicists believed that an infant that was the product of the mating of an "Aryan" white with an African black was a "degeneration" back to a lesser evolutionary value. It was a step backwards... a "racial degeneration". They felt the same way about "Aryans" or "Nordics" breeding with Jews, Italians, Orientals, Hispanics, ect.

Likewise, birth defects were defined as "atavisms", or reversions back to a more primitive state. Eugenics preceded genetics by 30 to 40 years. It relied on body and cranial measurements and mental tests not that much more sophisticated than the phrenology of the early 1800s. At no point did any eugenicist study the human cell or employ modern scientific implements such as a microscope. Eugenics was a statistical and "biometric" science. The leading British eugenic journal was called BIOMETRICA.

Thus, even "Aryans" or "Nordics" with birth or social defects were considered potential sources of "racial degeneration", no different than that which happened with an allegedly superior and inferior races mixed.

Again, none of this is my opinion. This is the way that British, German, and American eugenicists consistently described their science.

 

I would also remind the other posters that they are viewing history from the conclusion. The "FINAL" Solution was said to be the "final" one precisely because there were many other attempts to deal with the Jewish, Gypsie, and other "racially inferior" peoples.

Again, they went through the litany of "solutions" that eugenicists in Britain, Scandinavia, and the United States all proposed. The Nazis first tried deportation to Madagascar and Palestine, they also tried sterilization, then segregation, and only then did the Wannssee Conference decide on the "final solution of the Jewish problem" by implementing the methods of the T4 Euthanasia Program that had been used on those with birth defects on the Jews in the camps.

The British eugenicist and son of the famous biologist, Leonard Darwin, along with the Harvard educated Charles Davenport were writing about DEPORTATION, SEGREGATION, STERILIZATION, and EUTHANASIA in the 1920s.....precisely the sequence of options the Nazis tested and tried before the Final Solution.

 

Well its all good and well for every other species...Intellectualism meets real life...the two rarely match. We are animals, stupid mostly, its only mummy that says we are special.

 

BS!
You are writing using made up stories and false facts and you are spouting nazi apologist propaganda. I'm amazed nobody cared to ban your sorry arse out of here.

 

Compulsory birth control(which is an other form of eugenics) for certain immigrants was used ... by . Israel .

 

The theory that only at the Wannsee conference the Nazis decided the Final Solution,is wrong : when the Wannsee conference starte, the Einsatzgruppen had already murdered more than 1 million Jews. The aim of Wannsee was to get away with the bureaucratic difficulties between the several departments .

 

That's not a fair statement.

http://memorialchurch.harvard.edu/world-war-ii-memorial

 

We could use a lot of bandwidth by discussing the fairness /unfairness of life,but that should be not fair to Otto .

 

Hey Skylinedrive....

First, I am a patriot and devoted to the principles of the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Like I said before, it is those principles which prevented the eugenic fad from developing into what it did under a dictatorship.

Second, I am not German. I am an American ethnic minority of mixed ethnicity. Precisely the type of person Nazi eugenics was intended to eradicate.

Last, the only way what I am saying is pro-Nazi is if you are completely illiterate and lack the capacity to discern historical fact from opinion.

Bottom line is that the evidence is there. About the only thing I did different is to write down the Americans that sympathized with the Nazis and noticed a pattern that they were Progressives educated in Ivy Leagues. I kept coming across Harvard professors and graduates in my research. Harvard not only heavily outnumbered all other educational institutions, but their members were more important in the eugenics movement in the United States and abroad.

I am surprised that someone in a forum dedicated to "history" is so adverse to an unbiased reading of the historical facts held in the archives.

 

No one said that the Wannsee Conference was the beginning of the murders or that there were no murders prior deciding on one strategy. To the contrary, I said that there were many so-called "solutions' prior to the decision to eradicate the Jewish population en masse and that the Wannsee Conference basically decided to give up on deportation, segregation, and sterilization. We have the transcripts of the conference, and they actually go through all of the other "solutions" and rejected them for genocide.

The point was that the Nazis followed the eugenic "solutions" that eugenicists had been writing about for decades: Deportation, Segregation, Sterilization, Euthanasia. Euthanasia turned into mass genocide when they literally and physically transferred the doctors, nurses, and equipment used in the T4 Euthanasia Program that was used to murder those with birth defects to murder those in the concentration camps.

The horrible fact is that Wermacht shooting the Jewish populations of nations they trampled over was just one of many ways they tried to commit the mass euthanasia.

 

Slow your roll and pump your brakes....
I am not sure what your agenda is; but, if it includes attracting negative attention to yourself it has been achieved.
Some of the claims you make are, at face value, very inflammatory and can evoke a wide range of resposes.

The membership here has a pretty good grasp of world affairs from 1930-1945.

 

Hey Formerjughead,

I didn't make this personal. Other posters took my comments and made the assertion that they were supportive of Nazi policies despite the fact that NOTHING in my post can be interpreted as such.

Again, if you read my post or the article that it is about it is pretty crystal clear that it is EVIDENCE BASED and relaying actual facts found in the archives. If evidence that some Britons and Americans sympathized with the Nazis fazes you anyone, then yes, I would say that those it takes by surprise were not paying as much attention to the history between 1930 and 1945 as they thought they were.

Almost NOTHING I am saying is news by any stretch of the imagination other than to collect previously reported facts into one report that is organized by University affiliations. All of this was extensively documented by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and TIME mag of the 1930s. It has been documented ad nauseum since the 1970s by well respected historians like Allen Chase and others that followed him. So, yes, I am surprised that news that American eugenics had something to do with The Holocaust is news to anyone in a WWII forum.