Dear Sir: I write to "request" your help. In the year of "1954" while a patient at the (State Hospital), at Milledgeville, Ga, a visectomy or sterilization operation was performed upon me, by orders of a state (eugenics board). A mental (deficiency dygnoses was made of my case. At the time I was only 18 years old.
I was wondering as the (Carnegie Instutions Dep. of experimental evolution or (eugenics studies) have have been ingaged in the study of (state mental inistutions records of (certain mental deficiency cases, if to your "knowledge" there has been in (eugenic's studys connected with the (Carnegie Inistutions at the (Milledgeville State Hosp in the State of Ga, in 1954.
The purpose of this "inquirey" is to obtain records for the American Civil Liberty's Union, in order to present be for a (U.S. Court of Law the (circumstances of my case, in 1954, whereby a (State Hospital acting under orders of a (Eugenics) Board did cause a (vocectomy) or sterlization operation, upon me at the age of 18.
I feel this was (uncessary, in violation of the (Fundimental, or basic freedoms guaranteed under the (U.S, Contitution) as no (mental deficiency of a genetic nature has ever exzisted in my case.
Your help in this matter will be greately appriecated.
I am Sincerely
Joseph Juhan
c/o U.S., VA Hospital
Murfreesboro, Tenn 37130 [49]
A response came from Agnes Fisher, the Record Office's secretary.
Dear Mr. Juhan,
I am writing in reply to your letter addressed to Dr. Charles Davenport. (Dr. Davenport retired from the Carnegie Institution in 1934, and died in 1944.)
You inquired about the possibility that eugenic studies were made by the Carnegie Institution at the Milledgeville State Hospital in 1954.
The Eugenics Record Office, formerly connected with the Department of Genetics in Cold Spring Harbor, was closed in 1939 upon the retirement of its director, Dr. H.H. Laughlin. At that time all studies and activities carried on by the Record Office or its staff were discontinued. Therefore no such studies could have been made in 1954. [50]
The American Civil Liberties Union never filed a sterilization suit in Georgia. But a few years later, in 1980, the ACLU in Richmond did file a historic suit against the state of Virginia on behalf of the victims of the Lynchburg Training School where Carrie Buck was sterilized. The ACLU ultimately forced Virginia to confront its history. In May of 2002, the governor of Virginia formally apologized to victims living and dead for decades of eugenic sterilizations. The governors of California, Oregon, North Carolina and South Carolina have followed suit. [51]
Nonetheless many of the laws are still on the books. For example, North Carolina's eugenic sterilization law, although not used for years, remains in force and was even updated in 1973 and 1981. Chapter 35, Article 7 still allows for court ordered sterilization for moral as well as medical improvement. While most states stopped enforcing sterilization statutes in the sixties and seventies, the practice did not stop everywhere. Across the country, additional thousands of poor urban dwellers, Puerto Rican women and Native Americans on reservations continued to be sterilized -- not under state laws, but under special federal provisions. [52]
In the seventies, for example, a group of Indian Health Service physicians implemented an aggressive program of Native American sterilization. According to a U.S. General Accounting Office study, hospitals in just four cities sterilized 3,406 women and 142 men between 1972 and 1976. The women widely reported being threatened with the loss of welfare benefits or custody of their children unless they submitted to sterilization. A federal court ordered that all future Indian Health Service sterilizations employ the proper safeguards of legitimate therapeutic procedures, and that "individuals seeking sterilization be orally informed at the outset that no Federal benefits can be withdrawn because of failure to accept sterilization." During the same four-year period, one Oklahoma hospital alone sterilized nearly 8 percent of its fertile female patients. No one will ever know the full scope of Indian sterilization in the postwar period because medical records were either not kept or were incomplete. [53]
Eugenics left behind more than sterilization laws. Marriage prohibitions remained in force. For example, Walter Plecker's Racial Integrity Act and numerous similar state statutes endured long after the ERO and Plecker disappeared. These laws potentially affected millions in ways that society can never measure. In 1958, two Virginians, a black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving, were married in Washington, D.C., to avoid violating Plecker's law. Upon their return to Virginia, they were arrested and indicted by the Caroline County grand jury. The trial judge suspended their one-year jail sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for twenty-five years. [54]
From their new residence across the river in Washington, D.C., the Lovings appealed the infringement of their civil rights. Appellate courts, one after another, affirmed Virginia's law and the couple's conviction. Finally, almost nine years later in 1967, the United States Supreme Court considered the case. [55]
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared: "There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause .... The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival. ... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these (Virginia] statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.... These convictions must be reversed. It is so ordered." [56]
After the Lovings' victory in 1967, other states' racial integrity laws became unenforceable. In 2000, Alabama became the last state in the union to repeal its antimiscegenation statute. [57]
With the science stripped away, all that remained to justify eugenic legislation was bigotry. Late in the twentieth century, in an enlightened postwar era, the eugenic notions that gripped a nation and then a world were finally understood. It had all just been colossal academic hubris masquerading as erudition.
***
By the late 1920s, the Carnegie Institution had confirmed by its own investigations what many in the scientific world and society at large had long been saying: that the eugenic science it helped create was a fraud.58 Nevertheless, Carnegie allowed its Cold Spring Harbor enterprise to supply the specious information needed to validate Virginia's legal crusade to sterilize Carrie Buck. Relying on Laughlin's pseudoscience and his own prejudices, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had established the law of the land. In 1927, Holmes' famous opinion decreed:
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. [59]
With Holmes' decision in hand, Carnegie's Cold Spring Harbor enterprise had unleashed a national campaign to reinforce long dormant state laws, enact new ones and dramatically increase the number of sterilizations across America. Sterilizations multiplied, marriage restrictions were broadened. Hundreds of thousands were never born. Untold numbers never married. The intent had been to stop the reproduction of targeted non-Nordic groups and others considered unfit. It continued into the 1970s, probably even later. It was all said to be legal, based on science, sanctioned by the highest courts. But what was it really?
As early as December of 1942, the Nazi plan was obvious. In a highly-publicized warning simultaneously broadcast in more than twenty-three languages the world over, the Allies announced that the Nazis were exterminating five million Jews and murdering millions of other national peoples in a plan to perpetrate a master race. The Allies vowed to hold war crimes trials to punish the Nazis and all those who abetted them. [60] Ultimately, the trials would bring to justice more than just the executioners, but those who ordered them, financed them, inspired them, facilitated their crimes and gave them scientific and medical support. These war crimes trials would ultimately include bankers, industrialists, philosophers, a newspaper editor, a radio propagandist, and many doctors and scientists.
By 1943, humanity needed a new word for the Third Reich's collective atrocities. The enormity of Nazi butchery of whole peoples by physical extermination, cultural obliteration, biological deracination and negative eugenics defied all previous human language. Nothing like it on so sweeping a scale had ever occurred in history.
Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee at Duke University, formerly a prosecutor from Warsaw and an expert on international law, was commissioned by human rights organizations to study the crime. After a few months fighting as a partisan, Lemkin had fled Poland for Sweden and ultimately settled in the United States. His new word describing the overall Nazi campaign in Europe sprang from the same Greek root Galton had used. Eugenics was the study of "well-born life." Lemkin's new word, contemplated by him since 1940, encompassed the systematic destruction of an entire group's life. His new word was genocide. [61]
On October 30, 1943, as Lemkin was finalizing his study, the Allies met in Moscow and issued a joint declaration reconfirming that there would be war crimes trials for Nazi perpetrators, to be conducted in both the victimized countries and in Germany. The Allies demanded that all such crimes cease during the final turbulent days of Europe's liberation. "Let those who have hitherto not imbrued their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done." The declaration was signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin. [62]
Days later, on November 15,1943, Lemkin completed his study, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which was published a year later. In a chapter entitled "Genocide," Lemkin listed the several physical and administrative "techniques of genocide." Among the techniques was a section labeled "Biological." Lemkin later explained the principle: "The genocidal policy [of the Nazis] was far-sighted as well as immediate in its objectives. On the one hand an increase in the birth rate, legitimate or illegitimate, was encouraged within Germany and among Volksdeutsche in the occupied countries .... On the other hand, every means to decrease the birth rate among 'racial inferiors' was used. Millions of war prisoners and forced laborers from all the conquered countries of Europe were kept from contact with their wives. Poles in incorporated Poland met obstacles in trying to marry among themselves. Chronic undernourishment, deliberately created by the occupant, tended not only to discourage the birth rate but also to an increase in infant mortality. Coming generations in Europe were thus planned to be predominantly of German blood, capable of overwhelming all other races by sheer numbers." [63]
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe even quoted a relevant Hitler speech: "We are obliged to depopulate as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out .... Nature is cruel, therefore we, too, may be cruel. ... I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin! And by 'remove,' I don't necessarily mean destroy; I shall simply take the systematic measures to dam their great natural fertility .... There are many ways, systematical and comparatively painless, or at any rate bloodless, of causing undesirable races to die out." [64]
Some five months later, Lemkin's chapter on genocide was popularized in an article entitled "Genocide -- A Modern Crime," appearing in Free World, a new United Nations multilingual magazine. In Free World, Lemkin again cited "Biological" techniques as a means of genocide. By this time Lemkin had become an advisor to the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army, and military tribunal planners were working with him and his concepts as they prepared to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. [65]
Within a month of the publication of "Genocide -- A Modern Crime," the Third Reich fell. Lemkin's codified principles of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity became pivotal. In August of 1945, the victorious Allies met in London and chartered an international military tribunal to bring the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals to justice. The so-called Nuremberg Trials began just three months later. The dock was hardly limited to those Nazis who pulled triggers and ordered murders -- such as Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Governor-General of Poland Hans Frank -- but also included key propagandists and facilitators, such as newspaper editor Julius Streicher and radio director Hans Fritzche. At the same time, international justice groups continued to further define the prior acts of genocide in anticipation of more war crimes tribunals, these for individuals of lesser stature who were nonetheless instrumental in Nazi genocide. These additional trials would prosecute doctors, scientists and industrialists. Many of these tribunals would be conducted exclusively by the United States. [66]
On December 11, 1946, as the United States was readying its own prosecutions, the United Nations approved Resolution 96 (I), which embedded the concept of "genocide" into international law. It proclaimed: "Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups, and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations." [67]
Shortly thereafter, the articles of a forthcoming Treaty Against Genocide were formulated and later adopted through a succession of resolutions, conventions and treaties to become settled international law. The international convention enumerated crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide in five categories; the last two categories -- in subsections (d) and (e) -- squarely confronted eugenic policies: sterilization and the kidnapping of eugenically qualified children to be raised as Aryans. Article II stated: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." [68]
Article III assigned equal guilt to those who were responsible for "direct and public incitement" to commit the crimes described as genocide, and those who in other ways become complicit. Article IV declared that the law could punish anyone in any country, "whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals." American prosecutors at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials took their cue from the treaty. [69]
In early July of 1947, the Allies indicted the leaders of the Reich's militarized eugenics umbrella organization, the SS Race and Settlement Office, which forcibly sterilized thousands, kidnapped Polish children with Nordic racial features, organized the Nordic breeding program known as Lebensborn, developed extensive genealogy files on millions and conducted eugenic examinations of prisoners before deciding if they should be saved or exterminated. For these activities, SS Race and Settlement Office leader General Otto Hofmann stood among those in the dock. [70]
The indictment clearly enumerated the various aspects of Nazi eugenics as genocide: "Kidnapping the children of foreign nationals in order to select for Germanization those who were considered of 'racial value.' ... Encouraging and compelling abortions on Eastern workers .... Preventing marriages and hampering reproduction of enemy nationals." [71]
A week after the indictment was served on the accused, the military occupation's semiofficial newspaper, Die Neue Zeitung, drove home the point to the German people, publishing extracts of the U.N. Treaty on Genocide. The newspaper announced: "On 10 June the Secretary's Office of the United Nations completed the first draft of an international convention for the punishment of government officials who attempted to exterminate racial, religious, national, or political groups .... Three distinct types of 'genocide' are listed." The paper then itemized actions that qualified as genocide, including "open mass murder" and housing people in conditions calculated to kill. Die Neue Zeitung explained that the other of the three most significant forms of genocide was "sterilization of large groups and forcible separation of families as 'biological genocide.'" The article itself was entered into the Nuremberg Trial record. [72]
During the long trial, which lasted almost a year, prosecutors outlined a lengthy bill of eugenic particulars, including the murder of those who did not pass eugenic tests. "The SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) was responsible," prosecutors declared, "among other things, for racial examinations. These racial examinations were carried out by RuSHA leaders or their staff members, called racial examiners." Prosecutors charged that as part of the Reich's genocidal campaign, RuSHA was continually engaged in "classification of people of German descent." It added, "RuSHA, in carrying out racial investigations and examinations, took a leading part in the accomplishment of the [extermination] program. Since negative results of racial investigations and examinations led to the extermination or imprisonment in concentration camps of the individuals concerned, the Staff Main Office ... acted in close cooperation with the SS Reich Security Main Office [the chief SS agency overseeing physical extermination]. The Reich Security Main Office imposed capital punishment and imprisonment in concentration camps upon individuals designated by RuSHA." [73]
An entire portion of the prosecutors' case, "Section 4: Sterilization," presented documents and evidence concerning the mass sterilization of unfit individuals by Nazis throughout Europe during the Reich's twelve-year reign of terror. Leaving no doubt, prosecutors declared, "The fundamental purpose ... was to proclaim and safeguard the supposed superiority of 'Nordic' blood, and to exterminate and suppress all sources which might 'dilute' or 'taint' it. The underlying objective was to assure Nazi dominance over Germany and German domination over Europe in perpetuity." [74]
Eugenics was also pivotal to a gamut of other war crimes. Often before burning a town or murdering an entire community, Nazis identified and kidnapped the eugenically fit Nordic children so they could be raised in Aryan institutions. This was done, prosecutors stated, "in accordance with standards ... [of] Nazi racial and biological theories." What had occurred in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, was read into the record as an example. After Lidice was selected for obliteration, every adult man in the village was executed and most of the village's women were deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp. But the village's children were dispatched to Poland for a thorough "medical, eugenic, and racial examination carried out by the physicians of the health offices." Those deemed sufficiently Nordic were sent to live with Aryan families where they would undergo Germanization. Those deemed unfit were "deported." The prosecutor stated, "Here ends all traces of these 82 children of Lidice." [75]
"And so," prosecutors solemnly explained, "the final balance gives us these terrible facts: 192 men and 7 women shot; 196 women taken into concentration camps, of whom 43 died from torture and maltreatment; 105 children kidnapped .... The village was burned, buildings leveled, streets taken up and all other signs of habitation completely erased." To protest the utter eugenic extermination of Lidice, many small towns later adopted the name of the village. Hence the people are gone, but the memory of Lidice lives on. [76]
Count after count recited the fact that "racial value" following a eugenic analysis made all the difference between life and death, genocide and survival.77 Prosecutors sorted Germany's many eugenic atrocities into specific categories of war crimes. Point 15, entitled "Hampering Reproduction of Enemy Nationals," specified sterilization and marriage restriction: "To further weaken enemy nations, both restrictive and prohibitive measures were taken to discourage marriages and reproduction of enemy nationals. The ultimate aim and natural result of these measures was to impede procreation among nationals of Eastern countries." Point 18, entitled "Slave Labor," explained that through the racial examinations of RuSHA, "foreign nationals without any German ancestry were sent to Germany as slave labor," where they were worked to death. [78]
Point 21, "Persecution and Extermination of Jews," explained how genealogy offices were critical to Hitler's war against the Jews across Europe. "RuSHA also participated extensively in the persecution and extermination of Jews. The Genealogy Office (Ahnentafelamt) of RuSHA prepared and retained in its files the names of all Jewish families in the Reich and persons having any Jewish ancestry. This office also participated in preparing similar files in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Danzig, and France where it worked together with the SS Reich Security Main Office. These files were used for enforcing discriminatory measures against Jews and preparing transport lists of Jews to be taken from Germany and the occupied countries to the extermination camps in the East." [79]
On January 20, 1942, SS Race and Settlement Office leader Hofmann had attended the infamous Wannsee Conference, the planning session associated with the Final Solution. The Wannsee Protocol produced after the conference made the eugenic guidelines clear. Mixed Jews of the "first degree," that is, Jews with substantial German blood in their ancestry, could be exempted from "evacuation," the code word for extermination, but only if they were sterilized. The Wannsee Protocol recorded: "Hofmann is of the opinion that extensive use must be made of sterilization." The protocol also recorded that "[Persons of mixed blood] exempted from evacuation will be sterilized in order to obviate progeny and to settle the [mixed blood] problem for good. Sterilization is voluntary, but it is the condition for remaining in the Reich." [80]
Confronted by prosecutors at his trial with charges of eugenic extermination, Hofmann said little in his own defense, and openly admitted he was a Nazi eugenicist.
PROSECUTOR: When did you become chief of the Eugenics Office in RuSHA?
HOFMANN: At the beginning of 1939 I was appointed to this task ....
Q: What were your duties there?
A: The Eugenics Office was responsible for carrying out the betrothal and marriage order which Himmler had issued on 31 December 1931 to the SS.... The RuSHA leader had to look after the eugenics research offices of the SS, regiments, and, according to his qualifications and talents, he influenced cultural life within the areas of the main district. [81]
Hofmann could not understand why the United States thought his actions were crimes against humanity. He placed into evidence a special report on America produced by the Nazi Party's Race-Political Office years before on July 30, 1937. "The United States," asserted the report, "however, also provides an example for the racial legislation of the world in another respect. Although it is clearly established in the Declaration of Independence that everyone born in the United States is a citizen of the United States and so acquires all the rights which an American citizen can acquire, impassable lines are drawn between the individual races, especially in the Southern States. Thus in certain States Japanese are excluded from the ownership of land or real estate and they are prevented from cultivating arable land. Marriages between colored persons and whites are forbidden in no less than thirty of the Federal States. Marriages contracted in spite of this ban are declared invalid." Typical laws were recited from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California and Florida. [82]
The special report added, "Since 1907, sterilization laws have been passed in twenty-nine States of the United States of America." [83]
Hofmann's document made one other point. It offered the following justification, originally translated from English into German and then back into English for the trial:
In a judgment of the [U.S.] Supreme Court ... it says, among other things:
"It is better for everybody if society, instead of waiting until it has to execute degenerate offspring or leave them to starve because of feeble-mindedness, can prevent obviously inferior individuals from propagating their kind." [84]
Hofmann was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment. [85]
For three -- perhaps four -- decades after the Treaty Against Genocide was adopted, the United States continued to sterilize targeted groups because of their eugenic or racial character, real or supposed; continued to prevent marriages because of their eugenic or racial character, real or supposed; and continued to hamper reproduction, interfere with procreation, and prevent births in targeted groups. After the Hitler regime, after the Nuremberg Trials, some twenty thousand Americans were eugenically sterilized by states and untold others by federal programs on Indian reservations and in U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico.
They said it was legal. They said it was science. What was it really?