America Exported Eugenics to Hitler

By Brannon S. Howse

I pointed out earlier that the pope and Vatican are promoting ideas not very different from some social concepts promoted by the Third Reich. But to be fair, it is also not far off the mark from what America espoused in the early 1920s that was exported to the Third Reich. We encouraged population control using eugenics as the “Newspeak” masking term. 

As shocking as it may be, many institutions, organizations, individuals, state governments, and even the U.S. Supreme Court encouraged Adolf Hitler in his ideology that led to the horrors of the Third Reich. In his book Nazi Nexus, Edwin Black reveals that many companies such as IBM, GM, and Ford, and foundations such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, were involved in various ways with the Third Reich. You may be just as shocked to learn who is and who will be laying the foundation for the coming Religious Reich. 

While I am blessed to have been born in America because of the many freedoms this nation has afforded me, I am increasingly disturbed as my research uncovers what a sinful history and heritage this nation possesses. Several years ago, I vowed never again to stand and sing “God Bless America,” because I discovered just how debased this nation is and couldn’t, in good conscience, ask God to bless this nation. It seems, in fact, that God has chosen to give us over, as described in Romans 1.

America surely deserves to be judged by God, but you would not know it from all the Republican Party talking heads, like Sean Hannity, who spew their “America is exceptional” rhetoric. Yes, we’re so “exceptional” that we have murdered more than 57 million babies since 1974, we export pornography all over the world, and we’re rushing headlong toward active euthanasia through the rationing of healthcare. America also has a sad history of anti-Semitism that is clearly seen from our refusal to give sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Third Reich. 

In June 1939, America refused to allow the S.S. St. Louis to land in America and give refuge and safe harbor to its Semitic passengers. In Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust, Sarah A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller reveal the fate of those America refused to embrace and protect:

[quote] Of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, we determined that eighty-seven were able to emigrate before Germany invaded western Europe on May 10, 1940. Two hundred fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands after that date died during the Holocaust. Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis. Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe survived the war. [end quote] 

In numerous articles and in his bestselling book War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black reveals how America exported eugenics to the Third Reich. An interviewer asked Black about America’s history with eugenics, and he offers this short overview:

 [quote] Twenty-seven states had adopted laws mandating compulsory sterilization. This was not done in the dead of night. This was not done in the shadows. This was not done by a couple of guys in Mississippi waving a Confederate flag in a pickup truck. This was done by America’s brightest and best—by our judges, by our doctors, by our legislators. Everything that made America exceptional became corrupted in our quest for a master race. When America reached Nazi-conquered Europe and they went through their concentration camps, they looked around and they saw what eugenics had bequeathed. And they saw, clearly, that it was based on the California Eugenics Act, that it was based on the rulings of the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. And they said, “No, no, this is not us. This could not be based on an American ideal,” even though Hitler, in Mein Kampf , had explained that it was. So America went into collective amnesia—societal forgetfulness. They changed the word eugenics to genetics, and decided to take a look-the-other-way academic view, and most people aren’t taught that in school. [end quote] 

In an article for The Guardian, Black went in to greater detail as to how America influenced Germany and particularly Hitler:

[quote] Germany had certainly developed its own body of eugenic knowledge and library of publications. Yet German readers still closely followed American eugenic accomplishments as the model: biological courts, forced sterilisation, detention for the socially inadequate, debates on euthanasia. As America’s elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as “bacteria,” “vermin,” “mongrels” and “subhuman”, a superior race of Nordics was increasingly seen as the answer to the globe’s eugenic problems. US laws, eugenic investigations and ideology became blueprints for Germany’s rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers. 

One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action. While there, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American ethnological stalwarts. And he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its “corruption” by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail. 

In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote: “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilisation of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.” 

One day in the early 1930s, Whitney visited Grant to show off a letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race. The fan letter called Grant’s book “his Bible”. The man who sent those letters was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler displayed his knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. In Mein Kampf, for example, he declared: “The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole.”  [end quote] 

One of the older sources for such ideas is not surprising. The original name of Charles Darwin’s 1859 book was The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection for the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, but because of the racist nature of the longer title, it was shortened to The Origin of the Species. Although the term “eugenics” was not used until 1883 by Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton, Darwin laid the philosophical groundwork for eugenics. 

In Chapter 4, we discussed John Ruskin and his influence on Sidney Webb and Cecil Rhodes and their push for a world government based out of Europe, but there are a few more dots to be connected with regard to eugenics. Dennis Cuddy explains:

[quote] Thus, during the 1870s, Oxford lecturer John Ruskin would instill in his students, like Cecil Rhodes, the concept that they were “the best northern blood” and should rule the world. Rhodes scholarships were not only given to students from America and Commonwealth nations, but also to those from Germany beginning in the very early 1900s. Germans at this time were also being conditioned to see historical progression in terms of “blood and land,” a sort of Teutonic knighthood descended from the Aryans. In 1914, Madame Blavatsky’s Aryan doctrine had spread through Germany and Austria, and it was from her writings that a young Adolph Hitler learned the meaning of the Aryan swastika.

By this time, eugenics was a growing international movement with the first International Congress of Eugenics held in 1912 with Vice-Presidents Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell…Gifford Pinchot, and former Harvard University president Charles Eliot. 

In this same year, eugenics proponent Woodrow Wilson signed into law a brutal sterilization act, and the next year eugenics adherent Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the need to improve “racial qualities.” Calvin Coolidge wrote similarly in “Whose County Is This?” (Good Housekeeping, February 1921), after Arthur Calhoun in Volume 3 of his widely used textbook A Social History of the American Family (1919) explained that “in the new social order, extreme emphasis is sure to be placed upon eugenic procreation.” [end quote] 

Dr. Cuddy also connects the dots between the eugenics movement and many American foundations when he writes: 

[quote] Men of wealth like Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers played an important part in funding the eugenics movement. In 1904, the Carnegie Institution, with Daniel Coit Gilman as president, financed the establishment of a biological experiment station related to eugenics at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was begun there and later received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation after John D. Rockefeller, Jr. formed the Bureau of Social Hygiene.

In 1926, Rockefeller money funded the founding of the American Eugenics Society, and the next year on May 2, 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court by an 8 to 1 majority ruled in Buck v. Bell that certain “unfit” people could be forcibly sterilized. Regarding this ruling, British [Fabian Socialist] Professor Harold Laski wrote his friend Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all fundamentalists.” 

Across the nation during the 1930s, state legislatures (eventually 38) enacted sterilization laws regarding the “feeble-minded.” [end quote] 

Did you catch that? Fabian Socialist Harold Laski wanted to “sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all fundamentalists.” So, are you shocked that many Fabians and communitarians of today are pushing “school-to-work” programs that would relocate Christians to positions of little, if any, influence?

Even after the horrors of the Third Reich were fully revealed, Julian Huxley, the first Director General of UNESCO (United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization), wrote the following in 1948:

[quote] [E]ven though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much of what is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable. [end quote] 

As you can see, America, as early as 1904, was well underway in advocating eugenics—a full 29 years before Adolf Hitler came to power. Not only did Hitler get conceptual support for eugenics from America, he also received some of his funding from Americans. As Edwin Black writes in an article entitled, “Eugenics and the Nazi—the California Connection”:

[quote] The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz. Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena’s Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations—which functioned as part of a closely-knit network—published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis. [end quote] 

Black also backs up the assertion I made earlier that euthanasia is a form of eugenics:

[quote] Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 “Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder’s Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.” Point No. 8 was euthanasia. [end quote] 

In Chapter 6, I explained how private German doctors created the gas chambers in Germany. Yet, did you know that, in America in 1918, gas chambers were being discussed as a means by which to murder Americans? Black explains:

[quote] The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a “lethal chamber” or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, Applied Eugenics, which argued, “From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.” [end quote] 

On May 2, 1927, in the case Buck v. Bell alluded to in the Dennis Cuddy quote above, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in favor of forced sterilization. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes commented:

[quote] 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. [end quote] 

If it were not bad enough that Hitler got many of his eugenics ideas from America, he also got some of the technology by which to carry out the holocaust from IBM. In his best-selling book, IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black reveals:

[quote] When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed. 

 However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system—a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler’s program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before—the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation. 

IBM Germany, known in those days as Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, or Dehomag, did not simply sell the Reich machines and then walk away. IBM’s subsidiary, with the knowledge of its New York headquarters, enthusiastically custom-designed the complex devices and specialized applications as an official corporate undertaking. Dehomag’s top management was comprised of openly rabid Nazis who were arrested after the war for their Party affiliation. IBM NY always understood—from the outset in 1933—that it was courting and doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi Party. The company leveraged its Nazi Party connections to continuously enhance its business relationship with Hitler’s Reich, in Germany and throughout Nazi-dominated Europe. [end quote] 

But did IBM really understand what the company was involved in? Black answers that question:

[quote] Some of it IBM knew on a daily basis throughout the 12-year Reich. The worst of it IBM preferred not to know—“don't ask, don’t tell” was the order of the day. Yet IBM NY officials, and frequently Watson’s personal representatives, Harrison Chauncey and Werner Lier, were almost constantly in Berlin or Geneva, monitoring activities, ensuring that the parent company in New York was not cut out of any of the profits or business opportunities Nazism presented. When U.S. law made such direct contact illegal, IBM’s Swiss office became the nexus, providing the New York office continuous information and credible deniability. [end quote] 

If major American and world corporations were aware of how their technology was being used to support the systematic and ruthless murder of millions of people simply because of their genetic heritage, are we to believe that millions would not be persecuted because of their worldview? Do you really think government will protect you, given that world governments, including the United States of America, protected thousands of Nazi war criminals from prosecution?

Eric Lichtblau wrote The Nazis Next Door, and in an October 26, 2014 article in the New York Times, he revealed the following:

• [quote] In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
   
• They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
   
• And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
   
• Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis. One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews. Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.
   
• When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston named Aleksandras Lileikis, the C.I.A. tried to intervene. The agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked “under the control of the Gestapo during the war,” his C.I.A. file noted, and “was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.” [end quote] 

Jeremiah 17:9 tells us that the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? Thus, should we be shocked that sinful, depraved man has and continues to commit such unthinkable crimes? 

Life is perhaps even more devalued today than any time in world history, which should not be surprising since 2 Timothy 3:1-4 tells us that in the last days things will become more perilous as people love themselves, are haughty, are disobedient to parents, ungrateful, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. 

If the Bible warns that things are going to get worse as apostasy increases, then should we not expect to see a repeat of the horrors of the Third Reich in the coming Religious Reich? While the violence and brutal savagery may have the appearance of a more humane and sensitive agenda, make no mistake, it will still be brutal, as 2 Timothy describes.

Sadly, several generations here in America have been educated in many of the philosophies that produced the Third Reich and will be the foundation of the coming Religious Reich. Since the 1970s, students have been indoctrinated in:

Values clarification and situational ethics courses (moral relativism)

Pragmatism (the end justifies the means)

The right to die (doctor assisted suicide)

The duty to die (active euthanasia)

Evolution (the basis of eugenics)

Postmodernism (truth and reality are created by man)

Nihilism (Life has no ultimate meaning)

Hedonism (pursuit of pleasure)

Self-esteem (love of self) 

Tolerance Education (Christians and Biblical truth is intolerant)

Sustainable Development (Population Control)

Life Boat Scenario (less valued individuals are expendable)

One of the outcomes of this sort of thinking is extreme self-centeredness. And if you don’t think that America’s young people are self-absorbed, then take note of how many selfies average students take of themselves on a given day.

American school children have been indoctrinated in values and philosophies that would make them good little Nazis. Yet the next Reich will not be about national socialism, but international socialism, and they will not be “good little Nazis” but “good little collectivists” who go along with the global group consensus. 

If this chapter does anything, it should cause you to realize that ideas have consequences, that the heart of man is steeped in depravity, and that apart from the biblical Gospel, there is no amount of legislation or religious talk that can transform the human heart, a society, a culture, or a nation. A global, political, and religious authority is moving fast, and the celebration of Pope Francis in America in September 2015—despite his radical worldview—reveals just how easy it will be for an even more radical world leader to step onto the world scene and take total control with virtually no resistance. 

Copyright 2015 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.