War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (60 page)

Despite anti-Nazi protests, Rockefeller continued its subventions to Germany. Indeed, the foundation made periodic increases to account for the fluctuating exchange rate. Moreover, it quickly learned that while its grants specified that money go to one project, Nazi science administrators were quite willing to divert it to another department with a greater ideological priority. For example, in October of 1934, Alan Gregg, director of the foundation’s Division of Medical Sciences received a blunt letter from the foundation’s most reliable contact in Rüdin’s institute, Dr. Spielmeyer. “In the field of medicine,” Spielmeyer unhappily conceded, “both practice and scientific research is concerned primarily with genetics and race hygiene, as you know. You convinced yourself of that this summer, during your visit.” He went on to explain that the space and resources that the foundation financed for his blood chemistry research had been appropriated by Rüdin’s race investigations. Rüdin, reported Spielmeyer, simply required more space, more stenographers and more race investigators. “For this reason, it was unfortunately not possible to maintain the chemical division properly…. The Rockefeller Foundation has, for the past four years, provided funds for the maintenance of the chemical division,” said Spielmeyer, but those funds were now being used for “racial research.”
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At about the same time, an internal note was circulated to Rockefeller Foundation officials informing them that a Jewish doctor at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics had made clear to the foundation that, “In his lifetime, the Jews will not be permitted to return to Germany.” Nonetheless, the foundation found additional recipients for its German research funding.
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The foundation began financing biologist Alfred Kuhn’s hormone studies on meal moths. German race hygienists had been actively researching moths for years, claiming they exhibited what Lenz in the
Archiv for Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie
called “Mendelian segregation in later generations.” As such, moths were an ideal species to study for “carriers” of defective genes. Rockefeller official WIlbur Tisdale commented on Kuhn’s 1934 grant, “However uncertain the political situation might make a large or longtime project, [we are] safe in dealing with sound men as Kuhn on a year-to-year basis.” Tisdale added, “Nowhere in the continent or England [does one] find chemists, embryologists, and geneticists willing to cooperate among themselves as are these German scientists.”
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For Rockefeller, it was just eugenics. But for Hitler, science and technology were magical weapons to wield against the Jews and all other non-Aryan undesirables. Just after Hitler rose to power, IBM initiated an aggressive commercial compact with Nazi Germany, generating windfall profits as it organized and systemized the Reich’s anti-Jewish and eugenic programs. As the Hitler regime took each step in its war against the Jews and all of Europe, IBM custom-designed the punch cards and other data processing solutions to streamline those campaigns into what the company described as “blitzkrieg efficiency. “
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It began in 1933, when the company designed and executed Hitler’s first census. From there, IBM’s involvement with the Reich mushroomed. On January 8, 1934, IBM opened a million-dollar factory in Berlin to manufacture Hollerith machines and coordinate data processing functions. At the factory opening, the manager of IBM’s German subsidiary, Willi Heidinger, spoke vividly about what IBM technology would do for Germany’s biological destiny. Standing next to the personal representative of IBM president Thomas J. Watson, and with numerous Nazi Party officials in attendance at a ceremony bedecked by swastika flags and Storm Trooper honor guards, Heidinger emotionally declared that population statistics were key to eradicating the unhealthy, inferior segments of German society.
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“The physician examines the human body and determines whether … all organs are working to the benefit of the entire organism,” asserted Heidinger to the crowd of Nazi officials. “We [IBM] are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body. We report every individual characteristic … on a little card. These are not dead cards, quite to the contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when the cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000 per hour according to certain characteristics. These characteristics are grouped like the organs of our cultural body, and they will be calculated and determined with the help of our tabulating machine.
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“We are proud that we may assist in such task, a task that provides our nation’s Physician [Adolf Hitler] with the material he needs for his examinations. Our Physician can then determine whether the calculated values are in harmony with the health of our people.
It
also means that if such is not the case, our Physician can take corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances…. Our characteristics are deeply rooted in our race. Therefore, we must cherish them like a holy shrine, which we will-and must-keep pure. We have the deepest trust in our Physician and will follow his instructions in blind faith, because we know that he will lead our people to a great future. Hail to our German people and
der Führer!
”
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Most of Heidinger’s speech, along with a list of the invited Nazi Party officials, was rushed to Manhattan and immediately translated for Watson. The IBM leader cabled Heidinger a prompt note of congratulations for a job well done and sentiments well expressed.
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Following up, an August 1934 article in IBM’s German customer newsletter,
Hollerith Nachrichten,
extolled the benefits of advanced data processing for eugenics. The article, entitled “An Improved Analysis of Statistical Interdependencies via Hollerith Punch Card Process,” illustrated how complex data calculations could be better interpreted and predict probabilities. As a prime example, the journal cited “the field of medicine, and the science of genetics and race.” Complex tabulations could be rendered, the article suggested, regarding “the size of fathers and their children, number of children and parents. Diphtheria and age, and the different racial characteristics.”
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Medical questionnaires to be filled out by hand were jointly designed by IBM engineers and Nazi disability or welfare experts for compatibility with Hollerith cards. For example, diseases were coded: influenza was 3, lupus was 7, syphilis was 9, diabetes was 15; these were entered into field 9. As a notice from IBM’s German subsidiary advised, the questionnaires would have to be adapted to the technical demands of IBM’s Hollerith system, not the other way around. A vertical notice printed along the bottom left of typical welfare forms often indicated the information was to be processed “by the punch card office,” generally an in-house bureau.
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Raceology in Nazi Germany was enabled as never before. Statistical official Friedrich Zahn extolled the fact that “registered persons can be observed continually, [through] the cooperation of statistical central offices … [so] other statistical population matters can be settled and regulated.” Zahn proposed “a single file for the entire population to make possible an ethnic biological diagnosis [to] turn today’s theory into tomorrow’s practice. Such a file would serve both practical considerations as well as science.” He added, “Clarified pictures of the volume of genetic diseases within the population … now gives science a new impetus to conduct research … which should promote good instead of bad genetic stock.”
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Mathematic formulas and high-speed data processing of population and medical records would indeed become the key to Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany. In November of 1935, Germany took the next step.

Defining just who was a Jew was problematic, since so many of Jewish ancestry were practicing Christians or unaffiliated. Throughout 1935, German race specialists, bolstered by population computations and endless tabular printouts, proffered their favorite definitions of Jewishness. Some proposals were so sweeping as to include even those with the faintest Jewish ancestry-similar to the familiar “one drop” race purity laws in Virginia. But many tried to create complex pseudoscientific castes, comprised of “full Jews,” who professed the religion or possessed four Jewish grandparents, as well as the so-called “three-quarter,” “half,” and “one-quarter” Jews with fewer Jewish ancestors.
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Adolf Hitler was personally aware of preliminary findings showing that while only about a half million Germans had registered as Jews in the census, the veins of many more coursed with traces of Jewish blood. About a million more, he thought.
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The Jews Hitler feared most were the ones not apparent-what eugenicists called the “carriers.”

Suddenly, on September 13, 1935,
der Führer
demanded that a decree defining Jewishness be hammered out in time for his appearance two days later before the
Reichstag
(Parliament) at the culmination of Party Day festivities. Top eugenic experts of the Interior Ministry flew in for the assignment. Working with drafts shuttled between Hitler’s abode and police headquarters, they finally patched together twin decrees of disenfranchisement and marriage restriction. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and a companion statute, the Reich Citizenship Law, deprived Jews of their German citizenship. These laws-the Nuremberg Laws-would apply not only to full Jews, but also to half and quarter Jews, all defined according to complex eugenic mathematics. Jewish hybrids were called
Mischling,
or mixed-breeds.
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High-speed Hollerith systems offered the Reich the speed and scope that only an automated system could deliver to identify not only half and quarter Jews, but even eighth and sixteenth Jews. It was a new, automated system, yet applied to the well-developed, decades-old Cold Spring Harbor procedure of developing family pedigrees.
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The new formulaic approach to Jewish persecution exploded into world headlines. Under a page one banner story, the
New York Times’s
lead was typical: “National Socialist Germany definitely flung down the gauntlet before the feet of Western liberal opinion tonight … [and] decreed a series of laws that put Jews beyond the legal and social pale of the German nation.” The newspaper went on to detail the legal import of the new ancestral fractions.
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The news was everywhere and inescapable. Centuries of religious prejudice had now been quantified into science. Even if Germans of Jewish ancestry had been practicing Christianity for generations-as many had-henceforth, they would all be legally defined as a race, without regard to religion. That was in 1935.

Eleven years earlier, Harry H. Laughlin’s memo to Representative Albert Johnson’s House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization regarding Jewish racial quotas read: “For this purpose, it would be necessary to define a Jew. Tentatively, such a definition might read, ‘A Jew is a person fifty percent or more of whose ancestry are generally recognized as being Jewish in race. The definition applies entirely to race and in no manner to religion.”
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Shortly after the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935, and in view of the negative publicity race laws were receiving, Nazi eugenicist Ernst Rodenwaldt thought it might be helpful to give Laughlin special recognition for his contribution to Reich policy. Rodenwaldt suggested an honorary degree for Laughlin. In a December 1935 letter to Carl Schneider, dean of the University of Heidelberg’s medical school, Rodenwaldt wrote, “Every race hygienist knows Laughlin as a champion of the eugenic sterilization. Thanks to his indefatigable studies and his indefatigable propaganda activity in America, there exist, since the end of the twenties, in several states of America, sterilization laws and we can report about 15,000 sterilizations until 1930, mainly in California. Professor Laughlin is one of the most important pioneers on the field of racial hygiene. I got to know him in 1927 in Cold Spring Harbor…. Heidelberg University honoring professor Laughlin’s pioneer work would, in my opinion, make a very good and compensating impression in America, where racial hygienic questions are propagated in the same way as here, but where many questions of the German racial hygienic laws are mistrusted.”
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Schneider gladly approved the honor. Laughlin could not travel to Heidelberg to accept, but he expressed his gratitude in a letter to Schneider. “I was greatly honored,” Laughlin wrote, “to accept this degree from the University of Heidelberg which stands for the highest ideals of scholarship and research achieved by those racial stocks which have contributed so much to the foundation blood of the American people…. I consider the conferring of this high degree upon me not only as a personal honor, but also as evidence of a common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics as research in and the practical application of those fundamental biological and social principles.”
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Some three years after Laughlin’s award, shortly after World War II broke out in September of 1939, the same Carl Schneider helped organize the gassing of thousands of adults adjudged mentally handicapped. The project was codenamed T-4 after the address of the staff, located at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. Mass gassings with carbon monoxide, which began in January 1940 at locations across Germany, proved most efficient. Victims were told to undress and to enter a room resembling a shower complete with tiled surfaces, benches and a drain. Crematoria were erected nearby to dispose of the bodies.
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From 1936 to early 1939, Nazi Germany was considered a threat to the other countries of Europe, and indeed to all humanity. Refugees flooded the world. The Third Reich continued arming for war and demanded territorial concessions from its neighbors. In 1938 the Nazis annexed Austria, and then in early 1939 the Reich overran Czechoslovakia in prewar aggression and consolidation. Concentration camps of gruesome notoriety, from Dachau to Buchenwald, were established across Germany; the horror stories they inspired became common talk of the day. Nazi subversion was a new fear in American society.
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