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 . . . . United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 1927.

We are all familiar with the images of individuals arriving by train and disembarking to the left or to the right, to life or to an imminent death. The shock of such brutal and callous dividing practices incites us to ask “How could that happen?” We reassure ourselves that such events could never happen here. And yet they did. A Yale study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine noted that “the comparative histories of the eugenical sterilization campaigns in the United States and Nazi Germany reveal important similarities of motivation, intent and strategy. German and American eugenics advocates both believed science could solve social problems, tended to measure the worth of the individual in economic terms and felt mental illness a threat to society grave enough to warrant compulsive sterilization” (David Morgan, Reuters, February 15, 2000).

We can argue that the events that took place in the United States have no comparison to those that transpired in Nazi Germany but they do bear scrutiny simply because without the former the latter may never have happened. At no time is this meant to be an excuse – there is never an excuse – but what we can afford is an examination through which dark things may be brought to light. As Edwin Black (Eugenics and the Nazis – the California Connection, SFGate.com, 2003) notes, “the concept of a … master Nordic race was created in the United States … decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important … role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing.”

America’s eugenics movement inspired a host of imitators including Hitler who displayed his knowledge of American eugenics when he proudly told his comrades “I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would … be of no value” (“Hitler’s Debt to America”, The Guardian, February, 6th 2004). In the early years of the Third Reich, “Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modelled on laws already introduced across America and upheld by the Supreme Court” [see introductory quote above]. Black (SFGate.com 2003) indicates that “Hitler tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it … [and] was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side.” And it was – the long history of forced sterilization in the United States (which began in the 1800’s and did not end until the 1960’s) – had, by 1944, seen over 40,000 U.S. citizens forcibly sterilized after they had been deemed insane or ‘feebleminded’, most likely for their putative masturbatory habits; another 22,000 underwent sterilization from then until 1963 despite revelations of Nazi atrocities (Morgan, ibid.).

Eugenics may never have become more than a dark chapter in the American medical profession had it not been so well-funded by corporate philanthropies. The Carnegie Institution established the Cold Spring Harbour laboratory complex that stockpiled millions of index cards on American citizens as “researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples” (Black, SFGate.com). Money from the Harriman railroad fortune funded local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration “to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York … and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization … the Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz” (Black, ibid.).

In 1959 medical school students still held the belief that masturbation could lead to insanity and in the end, it did. The American medical profession, that so efficiently mutilated and sterilized thousands of people for the simple act of self-love, turned their support to a eugenics program that was based on a pseudo-scientific belief that social problems were inherited (and therefore could be eradicated). The program they instigated in America eventually led to the brutalization, institutionalization, enslavement and finally extermination of millions in Europe. It was only by the intervention of various agencies, and the war itself, that it never progressed in America beyond the brutality it had achieved.

On the surface, it may seem disrespectful to say that policies and practices that were used to regulate masturbation led to mass murder, but the techniques that developed to incite a population to equate self-love with insanity were equally effective in turning a population upon itself to root out ‘inherent’ social problems. When it is acceptable to confine individuals, to mutilate them in the name of medical intervention, when castration can be used to control or eliminate a benign behaviour such as self-love, then it is not a leap to conceptualize the use of the same practices upon other segments of society who are deemed to be the cause of social and economic misery. When it is possible to blame those problems on inherent ‘genetic’ flaws and to use the promise of medical science to eliminate crime, poverty, promiscuity and prostitution, disease and insanity before it breeds another generation, then it is understandable that such a promise, built upon such fervent belief and pseudo-scientific proof, would lead to such a final solution.

In 1934, a California eugenics leader wrote to the Director of the San Diego-based Human Betterment Foundation a congratulatory letter for his impact on Hitler’s work: “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” (Black, ibid.). Indeed.