It began with a simple boycott of Jewish shops and ended in the gas chambers at Auschwitz as Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

In January 1933, after a bitter ten-year political struggle, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. During his rise to power, Hitler had repeatedly blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I and subsequent economic hardships. Hitler also put forward racial theories asserting that Germans with fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes were the supreme form of human, or master race. The Jews, according to Hitler, were the racial opposite, and were actively engaged in an international conspiracy to keep this master race from assuming its rightful position as rulers of the world.

Jews at this time composed only about one percent of Germany's population of 55 million persons. German Jews were mostly cosmopolitan in nature and proudly considered themselves to be Germans by nationality and Jews only by religion. They had lived in Germany for centuries, fought bravely for the Fatherland in its wars and prospered in numerous professions.

But they were gradually shut out of German society by the Nazis through a never-ending series of laws and decrees, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which deprived them of their German citizenship and forbade intermarriage with non-Jews. They were removed from schools, banned from the professions, excluded from military service, and were even forbidden to share a park bench with a non-Jew.

At the same time, a carefully orchestrated smear campaign under the direction of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels portrayed Jews as enemies of the German people. Daily anti-Semitic slurs appeared in Nazi newspapers, on posters, the movies, radio, in speeches by Hitler and top Nazis, and in the classroom. As a result, State-sanctioned anti-Semitism became the norm throughout Germany. The Jews lost everything, including their homes and businesses, with no protest or public outcry from non-Jewish Germans. The devastating Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew went so far as to compared Jews to plague carrying rats, a foreshadow of things to come.

In March 1938, Hitler expanded the borders of the Nazi Reich by forcibly annexing Austria. A brutal crackdown immediately began on Austria's Jews. They also lost everything and were even forced to perform public acts of humiliation such as scrubbing sidewalks clean amid jeering pro-Nazi crowds.

Back in Germany, years of pent-up hatred toward the Jews was finally let loose on the night that marks the actual beginning of the Holocaust. The Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) occurred on November 9/10 after 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot and killed Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official in Paris, in retaliation for the harsh treatment his Jewish parents had received from Nazis.

Spurred on by Joseph Goebbels, Nazis used the death of vom Rath as an excuse to conduct the first State-run pogram against Jews. Ninety Jews were killed, 500 synagogues were burned and most Jewish shops had their windows smashed. The first mass arrest of Jews also occurred as over 25,000 men were hauled off to concentration camps. As a kind of cynical joke, the Nazis then fined the Jews 1 Billion Reichsmarks for the destruction which the Nazis themselves had caused during Kristallnacht.

Many German and Austrian Jews now attempted to flee Hitler's Reich. However, most Western countries maintained strict immigration quotas and showed little interest in receiving large numbers of Jewish refugees. This was exemplified by the plight of the St. Louis, a ship crowded with 930 Jews that was turned away by Cuba, the United States and other countries and returned back to Europe, soon to be under Hitler's control.

On the eve of World War II, the Führer (supreme leader) publicly threatened the Jews of Europe during a speech in Berlin: "In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

Hitler intended to blame the Jews for the new world war he was soon to provoke. That war began in September 1939 as German troops stormed into Poland, a country that was home to over three million Jews. After Poland's quick defeat, Polish Jews were rounded up and forced into newly established ghettos at Lodz, Krakow, and Warsaw, to await future plans. Inside these overcrowded walled-in ghettos, tens of thousands died a slow death from hunger and disease amid squalid living conditions. The ghettos soon came under the jurisdiction of Heinrich Himmler, leader of the Nazi SS, Hitler's most trusted and loyal organization, composed of fanatical young men considered racially pure according to Nazi standards.

In the spring of 1940, Himmler ordered the building of a concentration camp near the Polish city of Oswiecim, renamed Auschwitz by the Germans, to hold Polish prisoners and to provide slave labor for new German-run factories to be built nearby.

Meanwhile, Hitler continued his conquest of Europe, invading Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, placing ever-increasing numbers of Jews under Nazi control. The Nazis then began carefully tallying up the actual figures and also required Jews to register all of their assets. But the overall question remained as to what to do with the millions of Jews now under Nazi control - referred to by the Nazis themselves as the Judenfrage (Jewish question).

The following year, 1941, would be the turning point. In June, Hitler took a tremendous military gamble by invading the Soviet Union. Before the invasion he had summoned his top generals and told them the attack on Russia would be a ruthless "war of annihilation" targeting Communists and Jews and that normal rules of military conflict were to be utterly ignored.

Inside the Soviet Union were an estimated three million Jews, many of whom still lived in tiny isolated villages known as Shtetls. Following behind the invading German armies, four SS special action units known as Einsatzgruppen systematically rounded-up and shot all of the inhabitants of these Shtetls. Einsatz execution squads were aided by German police units, local ethnic Germans, and local anti-Semitic volunteers. Leaders of the Einsatzgruppen also engaged in an informal competition as to which group had the highest tally of murdered Jews.

During the summer of 1941, SS leader Heinrich Himmler summoned Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss to Berlin and told him: "The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to carry out this order...I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose."

At Auschwitz, a large new camp was already under construction to be known as Auschwitz II (Birkenau). This would become the future site of four large gas chambers to be used for mass extermination. The idea of using gas chambers originated during the Euthanasia Program, the so-called "mercy killing" of sick and disabled persons in Germany and Austria by Nazi doctors.

By now, experimental mobile gas vans were being used by the Einsatzgruppen to kill Jews in Russia. Special trucks had been converted by the SS into portable gas chambers. Jews were locked up in the air-tight rear container while exhaust fumes from the truck's engine were fed in to suffocate them. However, this method was found to be somewhat impractical since the average capacity was less than 50 persons. For the time being, the quickest killing method continued to be mass shootings. And as Hitler's troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union, the pace of Einsatz killings accelerated. Over 33,000 Jews in the Ukraine were shot in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev during two days in September 1941.

The next year, 1942, marked the beginning of mass murder on a scale unprecedented in all of human history. In January, fifteen top Nazis led by Reinhard Heydrich, second in command of the SS, convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin to coordinate plans for the Final Solution. The Jews of Europe would now be rounded up and deported into occupied Poland where new extermination centers were being constructed at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Code named "Aktion Reinhard" in honor of Heydrich, the Final Solution began in the spring as over two million Jews already in Poland were sent to be gassed as soon as the new camps became operational. Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland had by now declared: "I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear."

Every detail of the actual extermination process was meticulously planned. Jews arriving in trains at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were falsely informed by the SS that they had come to a transit stop and would be moving on to their true destination after delousing. They were told their clothes were going to be disinfected and that they would all be taken to shower rooms for a good washing. Men were then split up from the women and children. Everyone was taken to undressing barracks and told to remove all of their clothing. Women and girls next had their hair cut off. First the men, and then the women and children, were hustled in the nude along a narrow fenced-in pathway nicknamed by the SS as the Himmelstrasse (road to Heaven). At the end of the path was a bathhouse with tiled shower rooms. As soon as the people were all crammed inside, the main door was slammed shut, creating an air-tight seal. Deadly carbon monoxide fumes were then fed in from a stationary diesel engine located outside the chamber.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, new arrivals were told to carefully hang their clothing on numbered hooks in the undressing room and were instructed to remember the numbers for later. They were given a piece of soap and taken into the adjacent gas chamber disguised as a large shower room. In place of carbon monoxide, pellets of the commercial pesticide Zyklon-B (prussic acid) were poured into openings located above the chamber upon the cynical SS command - Na, gib ihnen shon zu fressen (All right, give 'em something to chew on). The gas pellets fell into hollow shafts made of perforated sheet metal and vaporized upon contact with air, giving off lethal cyanide fumes inside the chamber which oozed out at floor level then rose up toward the ceiling. Children died first since they were closer to the floor. Pandemonium usually erupted as the bitter almond-like odor of the gas spread upwards with adults climbing on top of each other forming a tangled heap of dead bodies all the way up to the ceiling.

At each of the death camps, special squads of Jewish slave laborers called Sonderkommandos were utilized to untangle the victims and remove them from the gas chamber. Next they extracted any gold fillings from teeth and searched body orifices for hidden valuables. The corpses were disposed of by various methods including mass burials, cremation in open fire pits or in specially designed crematory ovens such as those used at Auschwitz. All clothing, money, gold, jewelry, watches, eyeglasses and other valuables were sorted out then shipped back to Germany for re-use. Women's hair was sent to a firm in Bavaria for the manufacture of felt.

One extraordinary aspect of the journey to the death camps was that the Nazis often charged Jews deported from Western Europe train fare as third class passengers under the guise that they were being "resettled in the East." The SS also made new arrivals in the death camps sign picture postcards showing the fictional location "Waldsee" which were sent to relatives back home with the printed greeting: "We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival."

In the ghettos of Poland, Jews were simply told they were being "transferred" to work camps. Many went willingly, hoping to escape the brutal ghetto conditions. They were then stuffed into unheated, poorly ventilated boxcars with no water or sanitation. Young children and the elderly often died long before reaching their destination.

Trainloads of human cargo arriving at Auschwitz went through a selection process conducted by SS doctors such as Josef Mengele. Young adults considered fit for slave labor were allowed to live and had an ID number tattooed on their left forearm. Everyone else went to the gas chambers. A few inmates, including twin children, were occasionally set aside for participation in human medical experiments.

The death camp at Majdanek operated on the Auschwitz model and served both as a slave labor camp and extermination center. Chelmno, the sixth death camp in occupied Poland, operated somewhat differently from the others in that large mobile gas vans were continually used.

Although the Nazis attempted to keep all of the death camps secret, rumors and some eyewitness reports gradually filtered out. Harder to conceal were the mass shootings occurring throughout occupied Russia. On June 30 and July 2, 1942, the New York Times reported via the London Daily Telegraph that over 1,000,000 Jews had already been shot.

That summer, Swiss representatives of the World Jewish Congress received information from a German industrialist regarding the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. They passed the information on to London and Washington.

In December 1942, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden stood before the House of Commons and declared the Nazis were "now carrying into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe."

Jews in America responded to the various reports by holding a rally at New York's Madison Square Garden in March 1943 to pressure the U.S. government into action. As a result, the Bermuda Conference was held from April 19-30, with representatives from the U.S. and Britain meeting to discuss the problem of refugees from Nazi-occupied countries. But the meeting resulted in complete inaction concerning the ongoing exterminations.

Seven months later, November 1943, the U.S. Congress held hearings concerning the U.S. State Department's total inaction regarding the plight of European Jews. President Franklin Roosevelt responded to the mounting political pressure by creating the War Refugee Board (WRB) in January 1944 to aid neutral countries in the rescue of Jews. The WRB helped save about 200,000 Jews from death camps through the heroic efforts of persons such as Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg working tirelessly in occupied countries.

The WRB also advocated the aerial bombing of Auschwitz, although it never occurred since it was not considered a vital military target. The U.S. and its military Allies maintained that the best way to stop Nazi atrocities was to defeat Germany as quickly as possible.

In April 1944, two Jewish inmates escaped from Auschwitz and made it safely into Czechoslovakia. One of them, Rudolf Vrba, submitted a detailed report to the Papal Nuncio in Slovakia which was then forwarded to the Vatican, received there in mid-June. Thus far, Pope Pius XII had not issued a public condemnation of Nazi maltreatment and subsequent mass murder of Jews, and he chose to continue his silence.

The Nazis attempted to quell increasing reports of the Final Solution by inviting the International Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt, a ghetto in Czechoslovakia containing prominent Jews. A Red Cross delegation toured Theresienstadt in July 1944 observing stores, banks, cafes, and classrooms which had been hastily spruced-up for their benefit. They also witnessed a delightful musical program put on by Jewish children. After the Red Cross departed, most of the ghetto inhabitants, including all of the children, were sent to be gassed and the model village was left to deteriorate.

In several instances, Jews took matters into their own hands and violently resisted the Nazis. The most notable was the 28-day battle waged inside the Warsaw Ghetto. There, a group of 750 Jews armed with smuggled-in weapons battled over 2000 SS soldiers armed with small tanks, artillery and flame throwers. Upon encountering stiff resistance from the Jews, the Nazis decided to burn down the entire ghetto.

An SS report described the scene: "The Jews stayed in the burning buildings until because of the fear of being burned alive they jumped down from the upper stories…With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which had not yet been set on fire…Despite the danger of being burned alive the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us."

Resistance also occurred inside the death camps. At Treblinka, Jewish inmates staged a revolt in August 1943, after which Himmler ordered the camp dismantled. At Sobibor, a big escape occurred in October 1943, as Jews and Soviet POWs killed 11 SS men and broke out, with 300 making it safely into nearby woods. Of those 300, most were hunted down and only fifty survived. Himmler then closed Sobibor. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Jewish Sonderkommandos managed to destroy crematory number four in October 1944.

But throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, relatively few non-Jewish persons were willing to risk their own lives to help the Jews. Notable exceptions included Oskar Schindler, a German who saved 1200 Jews by moving them from Plaszow labor camp to his hometown of Brunnlitz. The country of Denmark rescued nearly its entire population of Jews, over 7000, by transporting them to safety by sea. Italy and Bulgaria both refused to cooperate with German demands for deportations. Elsewhere in Europe, people generally stood by passively and watched as Jewish families were marched through the streets toward waiting trains, or in some cases, actively participated in Nazi persecutions.

By 1944, the tide of war had turned against Hitler and his armies were being defeated on all fronts by the Allies. However, the killing of Jews continued uninterrupted. Railroad locomotives and freight cars badly needed by the German Army were instead used by the SS to transport Jews to Auschwitz.

In May, Nazis under the direction of SS Lt. Colonel Adolf Eichmann boldly began a mass deportation of the last major surviving population of European Jews. From May 15 to July 9, over 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. During this time, Auschwitz recorded its highest-ever daily number of persons killed and cremated at just over 9000. Six huge open pits were used to burn the bodies, as the number of dead exceeded the capacity of the crematories.

The unstoppable Allied military advance continued and on July 24, 1944, Soviet troops liberated the first camp, Majdanek in eastern Poland, where over 360,000 had died. As the Soviet Army neared Auschwitz, Himmler ordered the complete destruction of the gas chambers. Throughout Hitler's crumbling Reich, the SS now began conducting death marches of surviving concentration camp inmates away from outlying areas, including some 66,000 from Auschwitz. Most of the inmates on these marches either dropped dead from exertion or were shot by the SS when they failed to keep up with the column.

The Soviet Army reached Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. By that time, an estimated 1,500,000 Jews, along with 500,000 Polish prisoners, Soviet POWs and Gypsies, had perished there. As the Western Allies pushed into Germany in the spring of 1945, they liberated Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau. Now the full horror of the twelve-year Nazi regime became apparent as British and American soldiers, including Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, viewed piles of emaciated corpses and listened to vivid accounts given by survivors.

On April 30, 1945, surrounded by the Soviet Army in Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide and his Reich soon collapsed. By now, most of Europe's Jews had been killed. Four million had been gassed in the death camps while another two million had been shot dead or died in the ghettos. The victorious Allies; Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, then began the daunting task of sorting through the carnage to determine exactly who was responsible. Seven months later, the Nuremberg War Crime Trials began, with 22 surviving top Nazis charged with crimes against humanity.

During the trial, a now-repentant Hans Frank, the former Nazi Governor of Poland declared: "A thousand years will pass and the guilt of the Germany will not be erased."

CREDITS/SOURCES:
www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap09.html
www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/index.html

The massive slaughter that Adolf Hitler caused in Germany and all Europe is well known. His unreasoning and violent hatred of Jews is also well known. The purpose of this chapter is not to describe World War II in detail, nor to describe the Holocaust in detail. The purpose of this chapter is to put German eugenics in context, to see how much evil came of Social Darwinism (in conjunction with other causes), and to understand some of the links between eugenics in Germany and eugenics elsewhere.

One of the bizarre aspects of education in America today is that so many students have heard of World War II, but have not heard of eugenics. World War II was in many ways a continuation of World War I; both wars were started by Germans who believed in a version of eugenics theory, and felt that a racially superior people deserved more land. The most horrifying aspects of World War II were the labor camps and death camps, designed to use and kill people considered to be inferior, particularly Jews. To understand the camps, you must understand Europe's long history of antisemitism -- and also the shorter history of eugenics.

Adolf Hitler hated Jews and tried to exterminate them. Much of his explanation for hatred is based on eugenics. How can anyone begin to understand World War II if they don't understand eugenics?

Further, Hitler and his supporters knew that their ideas about building a better race had support outside Germany. French and British eugenicists did not want a war with Germany, but they understood Hitler's racial goals. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in England, Marshal Philippe PÈtain in France, and the leading advocate of neutrality in the United States, Charles Lindbergh, were all supportive of eugenics and were all members of eugenics societies at some point.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Europe was confidently carving up the globe, establishing empires. There were both winners and losers among the Europeans: Spain's empire had shrunk, Portugal's had shrunk and France's had declined, while the British Empire had grown. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was huge. Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands had ambitions. On the other side of the ocean, America had spread across an entire continent, and had acquired Cuba and the Philippines. But Germany had been left out of the land grabs. Germany had access to the ocean, but had never been a great sea power. When Germans thought about expansion, they did not plan expeditions overseas; they looked at their neighbors. So when they launched World War I, they attacked other European nations.

A mixture of motives drove Hitler and his followers. They wanted land for the German people, land like the colonies that their neighbors had amassed overseas, land to grow into -- lebensraum. They had a lust for power, the desire to establish themselves as the rulers of the continent, imitating the heroic Romans -- and using the title Kaiser, or Caesar. They wanted a rematch to end the humiliation of Versailles, the treaty that ended World War I and imposed crippling conditions on Germany.

Eugenicists in other parts of the world argued that the desire for land was a failure of their movement. They said that a proper regimen of population control would keep people content within their borders, and would make wars of conquest unnecessary. So it may be unfair to charge the eugenics movement with encouraging the Germans to go to war for land. However, Hitler's lust for power was unmistakably a form of eugenics. He believed passionately in improving the human race. His conviction that the Aryans were the peak of evolution, and that the world would be better off if the Aryans controlled more of the world more firmly, were ideas that circulated in the eugenics movement.

It is nonsense to try to understand World War II without looking at the thinking of the man who led Germany to war. To understand how this huge slaughter came about, we must understand the thinking of Adolf Hitler. And his thinking was not hidden.

Ideas Have Consequences

Within German society, there were many people who took eugenics into realms not experienced elsewhere. German eugenics was influenced by an aristocratic French writer, Arthur Count de Gobineau (1816-1882). In the mid-1850s, Gobineau had published a racist tome entitled Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. He argued that a tiny fair-haired Aryan aristocracy had always been the flower of Europe, but it had lost its vigor by intermarriage with inferior races. The French generally ignored the book, but Germans loved it. In 1890, the book was revived, and in 1894 admirers founded the Gobineau Association, which included many teachers.

In 1899, an Englishman holding German citizenship, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), published a book building on Gobineau, entitled The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. He argued that the Germans were the purest of the Aryans, and he attacked Jews and blacks. The book was reprinted over and over.

When Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf -- exalting the Aryans, promoting eugenics, and damning the Jews -- his writing was powerful, but not original.

Antisemitism in Mein Kampf

In 1923, Adolf Hitler was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis. He led an uprising that earned him international attention and a prison term. While he was in the Landsberg prison, he wrote a book about his life and his hopes called Mein Kampf (or My Struggle).

The book includes Hitler's well-known hatred of Jews, or antisemitism. He wrote, for example: "Was there any form of filth ... without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light -- a kike!" His language was inflammatory and insulting, appealing to gutter instincts.

He described a time of "the greatest spiritual upheaval" when he "had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite." He brought the fervor of a convert to the cause of antisemitism, and described it as a spiritual question. Characterizing hatred as the requirement of religious faith may seem bizarre to many people, but Hitler was vehement about it: "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

One of the curious aspects of Mein Kampf is that a casual reader who had never heard of the Jews might well come away from the book with a great desire to meet these remarkable people. Hitler hated them, and blamed them for a variety of things, including pornography, prostitution and syphilis. But he also blamed them for Communism and for its opposite, capitalism. He blamed them for democracy: "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight." Hitler said that the Jews ran everything, and that unless there was a change, the Jews would one day "devour the other nations and become lords of the earth." If a Martian dropped in and read Hitler's book, he might catch on that Hitler was consumed by hatred and set aside all the criticisms of Jews, and hope to meet one of these powerful lords.

Eugenics in Mein Kampf

The antisemitism in Hitler's book is well known, but the eugenics is less familiar.

He described the Jews as the best example of eugenics at work: "The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self-preservation developed more strongly than in the so-called 'chosen.' Of this, the mere fact of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof. ... What people, finally, has gone through greater upheavals than this one -- and nevertheless issued from the mightiest catastrophes of mankind unchanged? What an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species speaks from these facts!" And yet, in the name of eugenics, Hitler set out to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Hitler's book makes the Jews sound like fascinating and in many ways attractive people. However, the hatred in the book cannot be treated as a joke. Hitler and his Nazis drove the Jews into work camps and death camps, where about six million Jews were killed. Millions of other people died in the war, including other targets of Nazi eugenics -- Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill. But the Jews were particular targets, and the Nazis caught and killed about one third of all the Jews in the world.

One of the great puzzles about the Nazi Holocaust is its horrific efficiency. Europe has a long and shameful history of antisemitism. Why was the Nazi assault so much worse than anything before? Part of the explanation is that the Germans are efficient, taking pride in "getting the job done," whatever the job is. But part of the explanation, surely, is that Nazi antisemitism was mixed with eugenics.

Throughout most of the history of Christianity, there has been antisemitism. The scripture read by Christians has passages that say "the Jews" did various things. These passages can be taken out of context and used to stir up antisemitism. This has happened many times in the history of Christianity. But the texts are being abused, and read in ways that the author did not intend. The passages would not be changed much (if at all) if you said instead that "all the people there" or "the crowd" did these things. St. Paul's letters report various times that "the Jews" undercut his work, but the modern reader would probably understand the passages better if we substituted the phrase "our own people" for "the Jews." That is, Paul is eloquent about his disappointment in many of his own people (the Jews). The use of scripture as a basis for antisemitism has been common in history, but it requires ignorance.

Antisemitism based on the Gospel has another problem, a built-in contradiction: Jesus was Jewish, along with all of his apostles. And still further, Jesus commanded solemnly that we love each other.

Christians must admit that there has been a long history of antisemitism, but antisemitism among the followers of Jesus the Nazarene is obviously wrong. In Nazi Germany, on the other hand, the seeds of antisemitism were planted in the soil of eugenics. Eugenics tends to increase one's contempt for other individuals or other nations.

To take a single example, look at the words of the first man chosen for the chair of eugenics established by Francis Galton at London University. Karl Pearson, a pre-eminent eugenicist, wrote that the evolutionary progress of the human race requires warfare. He argued that war was necessary to get rid of inferior humans. He wrote: "This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. [When wars cease] mankind will no longer progress [for] there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection."

Pearson also wrote: "History shows me one way and one way only, in which a high state of civilisation has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race." That is different from Christianity, even from Christianity tainted with the evil of antisemitism.

Mein Kampf: Eugenics and Antisemitism Together

Hitler echoed standard eugenics thought about miscegenation: "Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel ..."

Like eugenicists from the Greeks on, he used animal models in an attempt to clarify his thinking about humans: "The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice." In other words, it is permissible for Germans to kill the unfit, because the Germans belong at the top, and the way to get there is to kill, and we should not be sentimental about such natural events.

In his understanding of eugenics, evolution justified or even demanded violence: "Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development."

Like other white supremacists, he was extremely concerned about the possible damage to evolution that miscegenation could do: "No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow."

Like white supremacists in the United States, he took it for granted that the history of North and South America proved the importance of opposing miscegenation. "Historical experience ... shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood."

Hitler's ideas about miscegenation were the same as the white supremacist ideas in America, but the application was different. In America, racists feared contamination from blacks. By contrast, Hitler's principal fear was contamination from the Jews.

He considered the Jews to be the threat to Aryan success, but also saw them as the source of arguments against eugenics. After laying out his view of eugenics, he turned to the critics: "Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to overcome Nature!' ... Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense."

When Hitler said, "All who are not of good race in this world are chaff," the thought was not original, nor specifically Nazi. It was simple eugenics.

Cooperation with Hitler, Support for Eugenics

Hitler's main opponents were France, Russia, England and the United States. But in three of these nations, he found national leaders who were ready to get along with him. These three men were all eugenicists.

Henri Philippe PÈtain (1856-1951) was a French hero in World War I who is credited with holding Verdun against the German assault. But he did not like parliamentary governments, and preferred dictatorships. After Hitler's armies defeated France in 1940, he led the French government. His admirers say that he protected France as well as possible after a military defeat, but others consider him a traitor who cooperated with the Nazis. After the war, the French government put him on trial for collaboration with the enemy; he was convicted and imprisoned for the rest of his life. PÈtain was a member of a French eugenics society.

Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) was the British Prime Minister just before World War II. He is remembered chiefly for his policy of "appeasement" toward Germany. He tried to negotiate with Hitler, rather than go to war. To be fair to him, it is important to say that his policies were popular in Britain at the time. However, on September 30, 1938, he agreed to let Germany take over most of Czechoslovakia in order to satisfy the Germans and prevent war. This ill-fated decision, called the Munich agreement, has become a byword for naivete, retreat and cowardice in the face of an unscrupulous and greedy enemy. Hitler took what he was given in peace, then launched a war to take some more. Chamberlain was a member of the Eugenics Society.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-1974) was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris. The flight made him an international hero. However, he later used his fame to oppose America's entry into World War II, and his arguments were extremely disturbing.

Between 1931 and 1935, Lindbergh worked with Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) on an artificial heart, and the two men deserve great credit for it. However, during this same period, Carrel was working on the book Man, the Unknown, published in 1935. He suggested building euthanasia institutions for killing the mentally ill with some suitable gas. Lindbergh did not break off his relationship with Carrel because of this savage proposal; in 1938, they coauthored a book, The Culture of Organs.

In 1938, Lindbergh visited Germany, and accepted a medal from Hermann Goering, a Nazi official. This caused an outcry in the United States.

In 1939, Lindbergh returned to the United States after years in Europe, and immediately began speaking out against America's entry into the war. He made arguments echoing eugenics themes, that the war would kill the wrong people. He charged that America was being dragged into the war by Jews (among others).

In 1940, Hermann Goering, Air Minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, launched the "Battle of Britain," bombing the British in preparation for an invasion across the English Channel. This included bombing civilians, to terrorize them. Nevertheless, in 1941, Lindbergh became a leading spokesman for a newly founded peace group called the America First Committee.

Lindbergh was later a Director of the American Eugenics Society.

excerpt from "Social History and the Eugenics Societies"
by Katharine S. O'Keefe
Research on the history of eugenics and the eugenic societies could affect our understanding of crucial events in this century. For example, Neville Chamberlain was a member of the English Eugenics Society in 1935 while Chancellor of the Exchequer; and Marshal PÈtain, who led the Vichy government in France, was a member of the French eugenic society in the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh, the leading exponent of appeasement in America in 1940, was a director of the American Eugenics Society in the 1950s. To write the history of the period of appeasement while not knowing that the architect of appeasement in England (Chamberlain), the would-be architect of appeasement in America (Lindbergh), the architect of the Vichy government (PÈtain), as well as the architect of the Nazi party (Hitler), were all eugenicists, is as if we were to write post-war history without mentioning that Stalin, Tito and Mao TseTung were all Communists. Similarly, we will never understand population control, if we do not know that the main agent of this biopolicy, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), spent the first seventeen years of its existence in rent free quarters at the headquarters of the English Eugenics Society and even was a member of that Society in 1977.

The Machinery of Death

Hitler's writing was not original. He took the ideas of others and applied them effectively, without mercy. The machinery of death begins with an ideology that permits or encourages killing, and the murderous ideology of eugenics took root in Germany before Hitler.

As we saw above (see chapter two), in 1922, before anybody had ever heard of Adolf Hitler, Hoche and Binding published a book calling for the destruction of lives that were not worth living.

Two of the chief architects of the racial policies of the Nazis were Dr. Alfred Ploetz and Dr. Ernst R¸din. In 1904, Ploetz founded the journal Archiv f¸r Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (or Archive for Racial and Social Biology to publish articles about eugenics. The following year, Ploetz and R¸din founded a society to promote eugenics, called the "Gesellschaft f¸r Rassenhygiene" (or Society for Racial Hygiene). They understood term "racial hygiene" to be a German translation of the English word "eugenics," but they also used the phrases "racial biology" and "social biology" to refer to the same collection of ideas. Their ideas did not become the foundation of public policies until Hitler came to power. But by that time, they had already been thinking for three decades about how to use sterilization and euthanasia. They were ready to act.

Just a few months after Hitler came to power, Germany passed the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Disease in Posterity," the Sterilisation Law. The chief architect of the law was R¸din, who had pushed his ideas in a variety of posts, including Professor of Psychiatry at the Munich University, Director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography, and Director of the Research Institute for Psychiatry.

Others who had pushed for eugenics before Hitler came to power were Professors Dr. Erwin Baur, Dr. Eugen Fischer, and Dr. Fritz Lenz. In 1921, the published a textbook that was used around the world: Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene.

In 1923, Munich University established a chair for racial hygiene. The first Professor for Racial Hygiene was Dr. Lenz. He called for the introduction of racial hygienic education into high schools and universities, saying: "As soon as racial hygienic conviction has become a living ideology, then the racial hygienic organisation of life, even public life, will happen by itself."

Baur and Fischer also worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Eugenics. The KWI was a hotbed of eugenics.

Another man who worked at the KWI was Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. In 1934, Von Verschuer was invited to take the ideas from the KWI to a new university, to be the founder and first director of the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Research at Frankfurt University. There, von Verschuer trained an assistant named Josef Mengele. When Fischer retired as the head of the KWI, von Verschuer returned from Frankfurt and took over the post.

Mengele went on to the Auschwitz camp in Poland. Originally, Auschwitz had been planned as a slave-labor camp, to provide workers for IG Farben (a company that produced Zyklon gas, for the gas chambers), but it was turned into a death camp. When Mengele arrived at the camp, there was a typhoid epidemic that required his immediate attention. He selected out hundreds of the sick immediately and sent them to the gas chamber.

He conducted experiments that still horrify the world, including some experiments on living and fully conscious prisoners. But he was not isolated in his barbarity: he sent data and even body parts back to the KWI, where various people wrote papers based on what Mengele had done. Von Verschuer was particularly interested in Mengele's tuberculosis experiments, injecting the bacteria into identical twins and watching the course of the disease.

After the war, Mengele fled to Argentina and lived for some years on gold and jewelry taken from prison inmates, including gold fillings. Von Verschuer was rehabilitated. He was not able to return to Berlin, but he founded a new genetics institute in Munster, and worked there until his death in 1968. He did not turn away from his old ideas. When a white supremacist journal, Mankind Quarterly, was founded, he was on the masthead as an advisor. He was a member of the American Eugenics Society in the 1950s.

Further Reading

For more about German eugenics, read Murderous Science, by Benno M¸ller-Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Mein Kampf is available on line at http://www.alpha.org