On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced that William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the President’s money manager) had pled ‘no contest’ to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal manager of a worldwide cartel between Standard Oil of New Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern. The merged enterprise had opened the Auschwitz labor camp on June 14, 1940, to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied political opponents and Jews as the slaves, who were worked to near death and then murdered. Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil of N.J. (later known as Exxon), of which Farish was president and chief executive, had agreed to stop hiding from the United States’ patents for artificial rubber which the company had provided to the Nazis.
A Senate investigating committee under Senator (later U.S. President) Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify at hearings on U.S. corporations’ collaboration with the Nazis. The Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish was continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that had begin back in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn’t he know that there was a war on?
The Justice department laid before the committee a letter, written to Standard president Farish by his vice-president, shortly after the beginning of World War II (Sept. 1, 1939) in Europe. The letter concerned a renewal of their earlier agreement with the Nazis:
Report on European Trip
Oct. 12, 1939
Mr. W.S. Farish
30 Rockefeller Plaza
Dear Mr. Farish…I stayed in France until Sep. 17th…In England I met by appointment the Royal Dutch[Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from Holland, and…a general agreement was reached on the necessary changes in our relations with the I.G.[Farben], in view of the state of war…[T]he Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially British…I also had several meetings with…the [British] Air Ministry…
I required help to obtain the necessary permission to go to Holland…After discussions with the [American] Ambassador [Joseph Kennedy]…the situation was cleared completely…The gentlemen in the Air Ministry very kindly offered to assist me [later] in reentering England…
Pursuant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my appointments in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal Air Force bomber], where I had three days of discussions with the representatives of I.G. They delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which could operate through the term of the war, whether or not the U.S. came in…
Very truly yours,
F[rank] A. Howard
Here are some cold realities behind the tragedy of World War II, which help to explain the Bush-Farish family alliance–and their particular closeness to the Queen of England:
Shell Oil is principally owned by the British royal family. Shell’s chairman, Sir Henry Deterding, helped to sponsor Hitler’s rise to power, by arrangement with the royal family’s Bank of England Governor, Montagu Norman. Their ally Standard Oil would take part in the Hitler project right up to the bloody, gruesome end.
When grandfather Farish signed the Justice Department’s consent decree in March 1942, the government had already started picking its way through the tangled web of world monopoly oil and agreements between Standard Oil and the Nazis. Many patents and other Nazi-owned aspects of the partnership had been seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian. Uncle Sam would not seize Prescott Bush’s Union Banking Corporation for another seven months.” (From: Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations Into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society” Ed. by Kris Milligan, TrineDay Press, Walterville, Oregon, 2003, pp. 282-283)
To be continued… Sidenote:
The racist eugenics (to be discussed later) connected with Skull and Bones and the Bush family continue to this day through the Russell Sage Foundation and Russell Sage Books (subsidiaries of the Russell Trust Association the official or incorporated name of Skull and Bones) as they are big on conferences and books featuring “bioeconomics”, “experimental economics”, population control, outright eugenics and other related topics (trying to “prove” the so-called model of “Homo Oeconomicus”, biological bases of “race”, “intellect” and “behavior”.) George H.W. Bush was instrumental in getting the U.S. Congress to listen to a special speech by William Shockley the physicist turned racist eugenicist.
Parts II-IV
“The Bush-Farish axis had begun back in 1929. In that year, Harriman bank bought Dresser Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline couplers to Standard and other companies. Prescott Bush became a director and financial czar of Dresser, installing his Yale classmate Neil Mahlon as chairman. George Bush would later name one of his sons after the Dresser executive. William S. Farish was the main organizer of the Humble Oil Co. of Texas, which Farish merged into the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Farish built up the Humble-Standard empire of pipelines and refineries in Texas.
The stock market crashed just after the Bush family got into the oil business. The world financial crisis led to the merger of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers in 1931. Former Brown partner Montagu Norman and his protégé Hjalmar Schacht paid frantic visits to New York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime for Germany.
The most important political event in those preparations for Hitler was the infamous “Third International Conference on Eugenics”, held in New York’s American Museum of Natural History August 21-23, 1932, supervised by the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. This meeting took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans and other allegedly ‘inferior’ and ‘socially inadequate’ groups in reproducing, expanding their numbers, and amalgamating with others. It was recommended that these ‘dangers’ to the ‘better’ ethnic groups and to the ‘well-born’, could be dealt with by sterilization or ‘cutting off the bad stock’ of the ‘unfit’.
Italy’s fascist government sent an official representative. Averell Harriman’s sister Mary, director of ‘Entertainment’ for the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her state supplied the speaker on ‘racial purity’, W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly held the delegates spellbound with his account of the struggle to stop race-mixing and inter-racial sex in Virginia.
The Congress proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman’s mother; she had paid for the founding of the race-science movement in America back in 1910, building the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London. She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races by old George Herbert Walker–they shared with the Bushes and the Farishes a fascination with ‘breeding thoroughbreds’ among horses and humans.
Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to New York for this meeting. The most famous among those transported was Dr. Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin where the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an entire floor for his eugenics ‘research’. Dr. Rudin had addressed the International Federation’s 1928 meeting, speaking on ‘Mental Aberration and Race Hygiene’, while others (Germans and Americans) spoke on race-mixing and sterilization of the unfit. Rudin has also led the German delegation to the 1930 Mental Hygiene Congress in Washington, D.C.
At the Harriman’s 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin was unanimously elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition of Rudin as founder of the German Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder, Eugenics Foundation vice-president Alfred Plotz.
As depression-maddened financiers schemed in Berlin and New York, Rudin was now official leader of the world eugenics movement. Components of this movement included groups with overlapping leadership dedicated to: *sterilization of mental patients (‘mental hygiene societies’); *execution of the insane, criminals and the terminally ill (‘euthanasia societies’);and *eugenical race purification by prevention of births to parents from ‘inferior’ blood stocks (‘birth control societies’)
Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word, these British-American-European groups called openly for the elimination of the ‘unfit’ by means including force and violence. Ten months later, in June 1933, Hitler’s interior minister Wilhelm Frick spoke to a eugenics meeting in the new Third Reich. Frick called the Germans a ‘degenerate’ race, denouncing one-fifth of Germany’s parents for producing ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘defective’ children. The following month, on a commission by Frick, Dr. Ernst Rudin wrote ‘The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity’, the sterilization law modeled on previous U.S. statutes in Virginia and other states.
Special courts were soon established for the sterilization of German mental patients, the blind, the deaf, and alcoholics. A quarter million people in these categories were sterilized. Rudin, Plotz and their colleagues trained a whole generation of physicians and psychiatrists–as sterilizers and killers.” (Ibid. pp. 283-284)
To be continued…
The [government] must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge…. Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children…. The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would … free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune.”
(Adolf Hitler)
“The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries…. Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people–how should we tackle these problems?…. It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s … will be to curb the world’s fertility.” (George H.W. Bush)
Twenty years before he was U.S. President, George Bush brought two ` race-science ‘ professors in front of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. As chairman of the Task Force, then-Congressman Bush invited Professors William Shockley and Arthur Jensen to explain to the committee how allegedly runaway birth-rates for African-Americans were “ down-breeding ” the American population.
Afterwards Bush personally summed up for the Congress the testimony his black-inferiority advocates had given to the Task Force. George Bush held his hearings on the threat posed by black babies on August 5, 1969, while much of the world was in a better frame of mind–celebrating mankind’s progress from the first moon landing 16 days earlier. Bush’s obsessive thinking on this subject was guided by his family’s friend, Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., the founder and chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, and vice chairman of the Planned Parenthood Federation. Draper had long been steering U.S. public discussion about the so-called ” population bomb ” in the non-white areas of the world.
If Congressman Bush had explained to his colleagues how his family had come to know General Draper, they would perhaps have felt some alarm, or even panic, and paid more healthy attention to Bush’s presentation. Unfortunately, the Draper-Bush population doctrine is now official U.S. foreign policy.
William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927, when he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers. Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the Thyssen account.
We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking Corporation in George Herbert Walker’s bank at 39 Broadway, Manhattan. Dillon Read & Co.’s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun working with Fritz Thyssen sometime after Averell Harriman first met with Thyssen–at about the time Thyssen began financing Adolf Hitler’s political career.
In January 1926, Dillon Read created the German Credit and Investment Corporation in Newark, New Jersey and Berlin, Germany, as Thyssen’s short-term banker. That same year Dillon Read created the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (German Steel Trust), incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction of New York and London finance.
William H. Draper, Jr. was made director, vice president and assistant treasurer of the German Credit and Investment Corp. His business was short-term loans and financial management tricks for Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper’s clients sponsored Hitler’s terroristic takeover; his clients led the buildup of the Nazi war industry; his clients made war against the United States. The Nazis were Draper’s direct partners in Berlin and New Jersey: Alexander Kreuter, residing in Berlin, was president; Frederic Brandi, whose father was a top coal executive in the German Steel Trust, moved to the U.S. in 1926 and served as Draper’s co-director in Newark.
Draper’s role was crucial for Dillon Read & Co., for whom Draper was a partner and eventually vice president. The German Credit and Investment Corp. (GCI) was a ` front ‘ for Dillon Read: It had the same New Jersey address as U.S. & International Securities Corp. (USIS), and the same man served as treasurer of both firms.
Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas Dillon were directors of USIS, which was spotlighted when Clarence Dillon was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee’s famous “ Pecora ” hearings in 1933. USIS was shown to be one of the great speculative pyramid schemes which had swindled stockholders of hundreds of millions of dollars. These investment policies had rotted the U.S. economy to the core, and led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
But William H. Draper, Jr.’s GCI ` front ‘ was not apparently affiliated with the USIS “ front ” or with Dillon, and the GCI escaped the Congressmen’s limited scrutiny. This oversight was to prove most unfortunate, particularly to the 50 million people who subsequently died in World War II.
Dillon Read hired public relations man Ivy Lee to prepare their executives for their testimony and to confuse and further baffle the Congressmen. Lee apparently took enough time out from his duties as image-maker for William S. Farish and the Nazi I.G. Farben Co.; he managed the congressional thinking so that the Congressmen did not disturb the Draper operation in Germany–and did not meddle with Thyssen, or interfere with Hitler’s U.S. moneymen.
Thus in 1932, William H. Draper, Jr. was free to finance the International Eugenics Congress as a ` Supporting Member ‘. Was he using his own income as a Thyssen trust banker? Or did the funds come from Dillon Read corporate accounts, perhaps to be written off income tax as “ expenses for German project: race purification ”? Draper helped select Ernst Ru@audin as chief of the world eugenics movement, who used his office to promote what he called Adolf Hitler’s “ holy, national and international racial hygienic mission. ‘
W.S. Farish, as we have seen, was publicly exposed in 1942, humiliated and destroyed. Just before Farish died, Prescott Bush’s Nazi banking office was quietly seized and shut down. But Prescott’s close friend and partner in the Thyssen-Hitler business, William H. Draper, Jr., neither died nor moved out of German affairs. Draper listed himself as a director of the German Credit and Investment Corp. through 1942, and the firm was not liquidated until November 1943.@s2@s8 But a war was on; Draper, a colonel from previous military service, went off to the Pacific theater and became a general.
General Draper apparently had a hobby: magic–illusions, sleight of hand, etc.–and he was a member of the Society of American Magicians. This is not irrelevant to his subsequent career.
The Nazi regime surrendered in May 1945. In July 1945, General Draper was called to Europe by the American military government authorities in Germany. Draper was appointed head of the Economics Division of the U.S. Control Commission. He was assigned to take apart the Nazi corporate cartels. There is an astonishing but perfectly logical rationale to this–Draper knew a lot about the subject! General Draper, who had spent about 15 years financing and managing the dirtiest of the Nazi enterprises, was now authorized to decide who was exposed, who lost and who kept his business, and in practical effect, who was prosecuted for war crimes.(Draper was not unique within the postwar occupation government.)
Consider the case of John J. McCloy, U.S. Military Governor and High Commissioner of Germany, 1949-1952. Under instructions from his Wall Street law firm, McCloy had lived for a year in Italy, serving as an advisor to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. An intimate collaborator of the Harriman/Bush bank, McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler’s box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, at the invitation of Nazi chieftains Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering.
William H. Draper, Jr., as a “ conservative, ” was paired with the “ liberal ” U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in a vicious game. Morgenthau demanded that Germany be utterly destroyed as a nation, that its industry be dismantled and it be reduced to a purely rural country. As the economic boss in 1945 and 1946, Draper “protected ” Germany from the Morgenthau Plan … but at a price. Draper and his colleagues demanded that Germany and the world accept the collective guilt of the German people as the explanation for the rise of Hitler’s New Order, and the Nazi war crimes. This, of course, was rather convenient for General Draper himself, as it was for the Bush family. It is still convenient decades later, allowing Prescott’s son, President Bush, to lecture Germany on the danger of Hitlerism…
This friendly environment emboldened General Draper to pull off a stunt with his military aid advisory committee. He changed the subject under study. The following year the Draper committee recommended that the U.S. government react to the supposed threat of the “population explosion ” by formulating plans to depopulate the poorer countries. The growth of the world’s non-white population, he proposed, should be regarded as dangerous to the national security of the United States.
President Eisenhower rejected the recommendation. But in the next decade, General Draper founded the “ Population Crisis Committee ” and the “ Draper Fund, ” joining with the Rockefeller and Du Pont families to promote eugenics as “ population control. ” The administration of President Lyndon Johnson, advised by General Draper on the subject, began financing birth control in the tropical countries through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
General Draper was George Bush’s guru on the population question. But there was also Draper’s money–from that uniquely horrible source–and Draper’s connections on Wall Street and abroad. Draper’s son and heir, William H. Draper III, was co-chairman for finance (chief of fundraising) of the Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the depopulation activities of the United Nations throughout the world…
The U.S. Agency for International Development says that surgical sterilization is the Bush administration’s “ first choice ” method of population reduction in the Third World. The United Nations Population Fund claims that 37 percent of contraception users in Ibero-America and the Caribbean have already been surgically sterilized. In a 1991 report, William H. Draper III’s agency asserts that 254 million couples will be surgically sterilized over the course of the 1990s; and that if present trends continue, 80 percent of the women in Puerto Rico and Panama will be surgically sterilized. The U.S. government pays directly for these sterilizations.
Logo of the Anglo-American Eugenics Congress: Full of Skull and Bones Members, Bushes, Rockefellers, Harrimans and proto-Nazis like Mengele
Mexico is first among targeted nations, on a list which was drawn up in July 1991, at a USAID strategy session. India and Brazil are second and third priorities, respectively.
On contract with the Bush administration, U.S. personnel are working from bases in Mexico to perform surgery on millions of Mexican men and women. The acknowledged strategy in this program is to sterilize those young adults who have not already completed their families…
The spending for birth control in the non-white countries is one of the few items that is headed upwards in the Bush administration budget. As its 1992 budget was being set, USAID said its Population Account would receive $300 million, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Within this project, a significant sum is spent on political and psychological manipulations of target nations, and rather blatant subversion of their religions and governments.
These activities might be expected to cause serious objections from the victimized nationalities, or from U.S. taxpayers, especially if the program is somehow given widespread publicity. Quite aside from moral considerations, legal questions would naturally arise, which could be summed up: How does George Bush think he can get away with this?
In this matter the President has expert advice. Mr. (Clayland) Boyden Gray has been counsel to George Bush since the 1980 election. As chief legal officer in the White House, Boyden Gray can walk the President through the dangers and complexities of waging such unusual warfare against Third World populations. Gray knows how these things are done.
When Boyden Gray was four and five years old, his father organized the pilot project for the present worldwide sterilization program, from the Gray family household in North Carolina. It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking for a way to begin again in America. Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz had just then seared the conscience of the world.
It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking for a way to begin again in America. Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz had just then seared the conscience of the world. The Sterilization League of America, which had changed its name during the war to “Birthright, Inc.”, wanted to start up again. First they had to overcome public nervousness about crackpots proposing to eliminate “ inferior ” and “ defective ” people. The League tried to surface in Iowa, but had to back off because of negative publicity: A little boy had recently been sterilized there and had died from the operation.
They decided on North Carolina, where the Gray family could play the perfect host. Through British imperial contacts, Boyden Gray’s grandfather, Bowman Gray, had become principal owner of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden’s father, Gordon Gray, had recently founded the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in Winston-Salem, using his inherited cigarette stock shares.
The medical school was already a eugenics center. As the experiment began, Gordon Gray’s great aunt, Alice Shelton Gray, who had raised him from childhood, was living in his household. Aunt Alice had founded the “ Human Betterment League, ” the North Carolina branch of the national eugenical sterilization movement. Aunt Alice was the official supervisor of the 1946-47 experiment. Working under Miss Gray was Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of “medical genetics ” at Bowman Gray Medical School.
Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble soap fortune, was the sterilizers’ national field operations chief. The experiment worked as follows. All children enrolled in the school district of Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special “intelligence test. ” Those children who scored below a certain arbitrary low mark were then cut open and surgically sterilized.
We quote now from the official story of the project:
In Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the [Sterilization League’s] field committee had participated in testing projects to identify school age children who should be considered for sterilization. The project in Orange County was conducted by the University of North Carolina and was financed by a `Mr. Hanes,’ a friend of Clarence Gamble and supporter of the field work project in North Carolina. The Winston-Salem project was also financed by Hanes. ” [“ Hanes ” was underwear mogul James Gordon Hanes, a trustee of Bowman Gray Medical School and treasurer of Alice Gray’s group]…The medical school had a long history of interest in eugenics and had compiled extensive histories of families carrying inheritable disease. In 1946, Dr. C. Nash Herndon … made a statement to the press on the use of sterilization to prevent the spread of inheritable diseases…The first step after giving the mental tests to grade school children was to interpret and make public the results. In Orange County the results indicated that three percent of the school age children were either insane or feebleminded…. [Then] the field committee hired a social worker to review each case … and to present any cases in which sterilization was indicated to the State Eugenics Board, which under North Carolina law had the authority to order sterilization….Race science experimenter Dr. Claude Nash Herndon provided more details in an interview in 1990.
Alice Gray was the general supervisor of the project. She and Hanes sent out letters promoting the program to the commissioners of all 100 counties in North Carolina…. What did I do? Nothing besides riding herd on the whole thing! The social workers operated out of my office. I was at the time also director of outpatient services at North Carolina Baptist Hospital. We would see the [targeted] parents and children there…. I.Q. tests were run on all the children in the Winston-Salem public school system. Only the ones who scored really low [were targeted for sterilization], the real bottom of the barrel, like below 70. Did we do sterilizations on young children? Yes. This was a relatively minor operation…. It was usually not until the child was eight or ten years old. For the boys, you just make an incision and tie the tube…. We more often performed the operation on girls than with boys. Of course, you have to cut open the abdomen, but again, it is relatively minor.
Dr. Herndon remarked coolly that “we had a very good relationship with the press ” for the project. This is not surprising, since Gordon Gray owned the Winston-Salem Journal, the Twin City Sentinel and radio station WSJS.
In 1950 and 1951, John Foster Dulles, then chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, led John D. Rockefeller III on a series of world tours, focusing on the need to stop the expansion of the non-white populations. In November 1952, Dulles and Rockefeller set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars from the Rockefeller family.
At that point, the American Eugenics Society, still cautious from the recent bad publicity vis-a-vis Hitler, left its old headquarters at Yale University. The Society moved its headquarters into the office of the Population Council, and the two groups melded together. The long-time secretary of the American Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborne, became the first president of the Population Council. The Gray family’s child-sterilizer, Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, became president of the American Eugenics Society in 1953, as its work expanded under Rockefeller patronage. Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in London, in the offices of the British Eugenics Society.
The undead enemy from World War II, renamed “Population Control, ” had now been revived. George Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, when with prodding from Bush and his friends, the U.S. Agency for International Development first made an official contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The League had changed its name twice again, and was now called the “Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception. ” The U.S. government began paying the old fascist group to sterilize non-whites in foreign countries.
The Gray family experiment had succeeded. In 1988, the U.S. Agency for International Development signed its latest contract with the old Sterilization League (a.k.a. Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception), committing the U.S. government to spend $80 million over five years. Having gotten away with sterilizing several hundred North Carolina school children, “ not usually less than eight to ten years old, ” the identical group is now authorized by President Bush to do it to 58 countries in Asia, Africa and Ibero-America. The group modestly claims it has directly sterilized “ only ” two million people, with 87 percent of the bill paid by U.S. taxpayers.
Meanwhile, Dr. Clarence Gamble, Boyden Gray’s favorite soap manufacturer, formed his own “Pathfinder Fund ” as a split-off from the Sterilization League. Gamble’s Pathfinder Fund, with additional millions from USAID, concentrates on penetration of local social groups in the non-white countries, to break down psychological resistance to the surgical sterilization teams. [ibid. pp. 289-292]
Eugenics victims are heard at last Outrage voiced over state sterilization
By Ellen Barry, Globe Correspondent, 08/15/99
State-sanctioned sterilization, which has sparked new outrage in the wake of advance publicity for a book on Vermont’s eugenics program,was never a secret in the middle decades of the century, when states from California to Maine allowed the sterilization of people whose genetic material was considered inferior.
But while historians have established that at least 60,000 Americans were sterilized some who had been coerced, and others who had not given their consent – the voices of people who fell victim to these programs have not been heard.
In the last week, however, three people have contacted the Vermont historian Nancy Gallagher, the author of ”Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State,” saying that they were sterilized and that they never expected to read about what happened to them in the newspaper.
The new witnesses could add to historians’understanding of the scope of sterilization efforts this century in the United States, in Vermont and beyond. Moreover, the publicity surrounding Gallagher’s book has shed new light on the largely forgotten story of Vermont’s sterilization program. Some in the state are calling for an official inquiry; others, especially those from Abenaki Indian families singled out by the eugenicists, are asking questions about their family histories.
‘Vermont is abuzz” over the long-dormant issue of sterilization policy, said Fred Wiseman, a professor of humanities at Johnson State College and the director of the Abenaki Tribal Museum. ”People in the governor’s office are thinking about it. I’ve gotten all kinds of calls about it. Just about everybody in the [Abenaki] Nation that has ever had this happen is thinking about it.”
The idea of a government response may not be farfetched. In other countries that have had sterilization programs, victims have demanded reparations. Canada and Sweden, which had their own race-purifying programs at work through the 1970s, have both recently paid millions of dollars in compensation to people who were sterilized by government order.
But there have never been cash settlements in the United States, where even the process of gathering information on what happened – mostly behind the closed doors of state institutions – has been tortuous. Now, as the majority of those sterilized move into their late 70s and 80s, it may be too late. They do not have much longer to live, and, as researchers on the topic point out, they leave no descendants to demand historical vindication.
”I can tell you this – the clock is ticking,” said Dr. Philip R. Reilly, who is director of the Shriver Center for Mental Retardation and author of ”The Surgical Solution,” a 1991 history of involuntary sterilization. ”It won’t be long before you won’t be able to find anyone alive who was sterilized.” But the response to Gallagher’s Vermont research has raised the possibility of a breakthrough, and shows that information about eugenic history still has the power to shock. After her series of telephone conversations, Gallagher is increasingly certain that sterilization is a topic worth addressing – if not by her, then by the victims themselves.
”I think they ought to redress that type of thing. I mean, what kind of country are we if we can’t do that?,” said Gallagher, who began her research for a master’s thesis. ”Sometimes I think I’ve opened Pandora’s Box. And other times I think, there are stories out there … That’s a pain that we need to look at.”
Vermont’s sterilization law came within the context of an international push for eugenics – the idea that traits such as poor health and bad character could be bred out of the race by preventing ”inferior” genetic material from being passed on.
Starting with the passage of a series of laws, beginning in Indiana in 1907 and continuing until mid-1970s, some states provided for the sterilization of upwards of 60,000 epileptics, alcoholics, those considered discipline problems, and retarded people. Some subjects consented, and others were coerced or had no knowledge of what was being done to them.
In 1931, Vermont became the 24th state to pass a sterilization law, according to Gallagher, and the number of sterilizations performed there was a fraction of those performed nationwide. The only official data on sterilization – a report by the eugenics survey mastermind, Henry Perkins, in the late 1940s -put the number of procedures at around 200. John Moody, an independent ethnohistorian from Sharon, Vt., says the real number is much higher, perhaps in the thousands.
In the United States, unlike Sweden and Canada, the policy was upheld by the Supreme Court, Reilly said. The court sided with Virginia state law in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, which permitted the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded to sterilize 18-year-old inmate Carrie Buck. In his written opinion on the case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, ”It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or letting them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Since then, there has been only one attempt in this country to secure compensation for forced sterilization.
In 1980, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in Lynchburg, V a., on behalf of 7,200 state mental patients who were sterilized without their knowledge until the practice was ended in 1973. The suit sought damages and notification of people who had been sterilized, as well as a ruling that the sterilizations were unconstitutional. The ACLU and the state settled the case.
But the settlements in Canada and Sweden suggest that the public mood may have changed. Moody, who has worked extensively with the Abenaki, has pressed the state to open up records from the eugenics survey and from two ”training schools” that frequently sterilized young inmates. He would like to see the state begin to contact families and inform them what occurred. Referring to Vermont Governor Howard Dean, he said, ”I’d love to see the Dean administration take a proactive stance.” Failing that, Moody said, he could imagine filing a class-action lawsuit. Informing those who have been sterilized is an initiative that has never been undertaken on a national scale, said Reilly, and probably never will be. ”Now many of them are very old people, and there is the ethical issue of letting sleeping dogs lie,” Reilly said. And among the more angry of the Abenaki, sterilization simply seems like another aspect of a multi-faceted campaign to destroy them. Homer St. Francis, a longtime chief of the Abenaki, reels off the names of childless family members who he assumes were sterilized. He sees sterilization as part of a larger government conspiracy to eliminate his family – a campaign that he said includes generations of abduction and outright murder. When historians in Vermont first discovered crates of Henry Perkins’s eugenic surveys, St. Francis said he found names of people he knew on the list of research subjects, people who had been singled out as ”degenerate” by Perkins’s researchers.
It confirmed everything he had already believed about the state and the Abenaki.”It made me sick,” he said.”How would you feel if people were trying to kill you?” And while there was some talk about seeking a legal remedy, it faded among the tribe’s long list of grievances. ”We don’t have any money for attorneys, so we just grit our teeth and bear it,” he said.
This story ran on page B01 of the Boston Globe on 08/15/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
From “Hitler and His Secret Partners: Contributions, Loot and Rewards, 1933-1945″ by James Pool, Pocket Books, N.Y. 1997:
“Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said: ‘ For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: To Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’ [Hitler, “Secret Conversations p. 57] Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as ‘Redskins’. He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or ‘Redskins.’ ‘I don’t see why’, he said, ‘a German who easts a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.’ [Ibid. p. 57] ” (Pool, pp 254-55)
“Set the blood-quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed, and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the federal government will be finally freed from its persistent Indian problem.”
(BIA document)
Ethnic Cleansing in Connecticut: Our state’s role in the Nazi eugenics movement
by Edwin Black
September 11, 2003
Also see cover art
Peter M. Morlock Photo Illustration
Photo Courtesy Max Planck Gesellscharf Archive
Nazi eugenicist Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer examining twins with eye color chart. (American Philosophical Society Photo)
“Some people are born to be a burden on the rest,” circa 1926.
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called “Master Race.” But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Hitler’s. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in Connecticut, two to three decades before Hitler came to power, the product of the American eugenics movement. Hartford and indeed the state of Connecticut played an important albeit unknown role in this country’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. What’s more, Connecticut was an important player in America’s eugenic nexus with Nazi Germany.
Eugenics was the racist American pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings except those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. The philosophy was enshrined into national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions enacted in 27 states. In 1909, Connecticut became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning.
In Connecticut, only some 600 were coercively sterilized, but hundreds of thousands more were slated for the surgery before the plan was abandoned.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for massive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims. Connecticut was considered both an epicenter for eugenic propaganda and a test case for ethnic cleansing.
The Carnegie Institution literally invented the American movement by establishing a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. This complex stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans as the movement carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation’s social service agencies and associations.
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found and fund the German eugenics program and even funded the program that ultimately sent Josef Mengele into Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American movement came from the American Eugenics Society of New Haven, and the Eugenics Research Association of Long Island, which coordinated much of its activity with the AES. 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.
Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people only married other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton’s ideas were imported into the United States just as Gregor Mendel’s principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenic advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man.
In an America demographically reeling from massive immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early 20th century. Elitists, utopians and so-called “progressives” fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton’s eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind — and less or none of everyone else.
The superior species the eugenics movement sought was not merely tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract Negroes, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.
How? By identifying so-called “defective” family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior — the so-called “unfit.”
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.” Although point eight was euthanasia, the breeders believed it was too early to implement this solution. Instead, the main solution was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as more marriage restrictions.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a “lethal chamber” or gas chamber.
Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed eugenics as national policy. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “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.” This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’ words in their own defense.
In late 1936, Connecticut governor Wilbur Cross commissioned a “Survey of the Human Resources of Connecticut,” to be undertaken by Carnegie Institution researcher Harry H. Laughlin. The purpose of the survey was to bring ethnic cleansing to Connecticut in an organized scientific fashion. Laughlin was the perfect choice. He was editor of Eugenical News, a leader of the AES, and America’s most accomplished authority on preparing government-backed elimination of unfit families. After helping transplant his idea into Nazi Germany, he was awarded an honorary degree in 1937 by the University of Heidelberg.
Laughlin’s plan was to sterilize approximately 175,000 Connecticut residents — or about 10 percent of the state’s population. The state’s eugenical laws did not require a court order. The plan was to emulate Hitler’s eugenical regime whereby doctors were required to denounce those citizens considered racially or medically “unfit. “The state’s official report called upon the state’s 2,400 physicians to assume personal responsibility for “selection of an individual for sterilization under the state’s statutes which govern this means of preventing future degeneracy… . Thus when in social medicine the physician works for the elimination of human defect, he performs an invaluable service.” These ideas were incorporated into a formal public address that was presented to the Yale Medical School by the eugenic commission’s chairman, former U.S. Sen. Frederick C. Walcott.
The state placed much of its hopes on “physicians who specialize in diseases of the eye, the ear, on nervous or mental disorders, on the heart, the lungs, the digestive system and upon crippled bodies.” The plan was to eliminate the family bloodlines of anyone who was sick. Indeed, special emphasis was placed on those with even the slightest vision problems. In that regard, the nation’s organized ophthalmologists had long promoted legislation to identify all those related to anyone with a vision problem so they could be rounded up, placed in camps, and their marriages prohibited or annulled. Ultimately those related to anyone with a vision problem would be forcibly sterilized.
Connecticut’s survey was to parallel similar biological surveys of “useful plant and animal life,” as its preamble makes clear. Because eugenicists saw themselves as breeders, and indeed were encouraged by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, they considered the human species as one to be pruned and cultivated, like any herd of cattle or field of corn. Eugenicists believed that crime, poverty, immorality, unchaste behavior and other undesired traits were genetic and could not be stamped out unless the entire family was prevented from reproducing.
To save expense, others would not be sterilized but simply thrown out of the state. Immigrants would be deported to their native countries. Unfit Americans would be expelled to their family’s original locale. For example, an American judged unfit might be traced generations back to Kentucky or Massachusetts. That person and his entire family, under the plan, would be rounded up and deposited into the so-called originating state. Ultimately, so many people would be dumped into ancestral towns and states, creating so vast a social displacement problem, that concentration camps would be needed to handle the uprooted population. Property was to be seized to pay for their economic drain on the state.
In other words, the joint Carnegie Institution-Connecticut plan was to create domestic refugees or displaced persons in a fashion identical to that employed by the Nazis at that very moment in refugee-torn Europe.
Connecticut established 21 human cross-classifications to qualify them for life or eugenic treatment. Age, for example was cross-classified by “Race Descent,” “Nativity and Citizenship,” and “Kin in Institutions.” Just being related to someone in an institution was a mark against your reproductive record. The same racial and family linkages were measured for intelligence, and criminal record. Even before the survey was undertaken, Laughlin’s proposal made it clear that the targets were Negroes, Orientals, Mexicans and others who had found their way into the United States.
A proposed population registry card was designed for any future IBM processing. Connecticut’s plan to use IBM punch cards never came to fruition. Indeed, the American eugenics movement was less successful precisely because it lacked the punch card technology that IBM so carefully developed for the Nazi eugenic and extermination campaigns. Ironically, IBM’s Nazi technology was actually first tested by the company in a pilot program in Jamaica in 1928, five years before the Hitler regime. The Carnegie Institution’s 1928 Jamaica Race Crossing Project introduced the race classification card that evolved into the SS card IBM used in Germany. The Jamaica Race Crossing Project was the first step in a plan to wipe out all black people on earth.
In Connecticut, Laughlin quietly surveyed 160 towns in eight counties. The first 11,960 citizens slated to be sterilized were to be residents of penal institutions — weak, disabled, morally unacceptable or otherwise “socially inadequate.”
One town, Rocky Hill, was selected as a model for biological surveillance. Nearly all of the town’s 2,190 citizens were registered, and almost half fingerprinted. A proposed racial registration card for IBM technology was part of the state’s study. Although the planning phase of the state’s comprehensive survey was completed in 1938, it was never implemented on the scope desired and as WWII approached, was cast aside. Just a few copies of the full secret report were ever circulated.
Only after eugenics and race biology became entrenched as an American ideal was the campaign transplanted into Germany, where it came to Hitler’s attention.
Hitler studied American eugenic laws and rationales and preferred to legitimize his innate race hatred and anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in a more palatable pseudoscientific facade — eugenics. Indeed, Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of eugenics that Hitler adopted in 1924 were strictly American.
During the ’20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany’s fascist eugenicists. In 1924, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he frequently quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics and its phraseology. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race, his “bible.”
Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, coined a popular adage in the Reich: “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”
Hitler’s struggle for a superior race would be a mad crusade for a Master Race. Now, the American term “Nordic” was freely exchanged with “Germanic” or “Aryan.” Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler’s Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler’s war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and even hand-select the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.
During the Reich’s first 10 years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenic leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, “You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought … . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
More than just the scientific roadmap, America used its money to fund and help found Germany’s eugenic institutions.
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 — almost $4 million in 20th century money — to hundreds of German researchers. For example, in May of 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s eugenic complex of institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The Institute for Brain Research received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler’s medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin’s organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society declared of Nazism, “While we were pussy-footing around … the Germans were calling a spade a spade.”
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity. The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller’s endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of the Institute for Anthropology continued directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer’s early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the Institute to form a rival eugenic facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenic press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed up by government decrees mobilizing all twins. At about that time, Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenic doctor’s journal he edited, that Germany’s war would yield a “total solution to the Jewish problem.”
Verschuer had a long-time assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.
Joseph Mengele “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz whose escape from Justice was aided and abetted by CIA under Operation Paperclip
On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, “My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer [captain] and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler].”
Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them, he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer’s Institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin’s eugenic institutes.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenic studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie had financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science it helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
What stopped the race biologists of Berlin, Munich and Auschwitz? Certainly, the Nazis felt they were unstoppable. They imagined a Thousand-Year Reich of super-bred men. But something did defeat Mengele and his colleagues. On June 6, 1944, the Allies invaded at Normandy and began defeating the Nazis, town by town and often street by street. They closed in on Germany from the west. The Soviet army overran the Auschwitz death camp from the east on January 27, 1945. Mengele fled.
Hence, Auschwitz was indeed the last stand of eugenics. The science of the strong almost completely prevailed in its war against the weak. Almost.
After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity — an act of genocide. Germans were tried. Their American collaborators were not. Verschuer himself esped prosecution. He re-established his connections with American eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade “human genetics.”
Soon, Verschuer once again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists.
In the fall of 1950, the University of Münster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.
The genocidal eugenic roots of genetics were lost to a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism, and succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war.
Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the later 20th century. Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human code via the Human Genome Project. Now every individual can be biologically identified and classified by trait and ancestry. Yet even now, leading voices in the genetic world are calling for a cleansing of the unwanted among us, and even a master human species.
Newgenics has wracked the insurance and employment world. At press time, America’s first genetic anti-discrimination legislation had passed the House and Senate. Yet most informed observers believe that because globalization now dominates genetics, no nation’s law can stop the abuses.
Edwin Black is the New York Times best-selling author of the award-winning IBM and the Holocaust and the just-released War Against the Weak (Four Walls Eight Windows) from which this article is adapted. He can be reached via
Copyright 2003 Edwin Black
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