conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State.”100
"I have studied with great interest," Hitler 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."101
Laughlin bragged about his role in creating the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, and in 1936 was given an award by the Nazis.102
U.S. eugenicist Paul Popenoe published a report on forced sterilizations in California that was widely cited by the Nazis.103 Many eugenicists in California promoted their work in Germany. The Rockefeller Foundation, as well as Carnegie, funded and helped develop German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he worked at Auschwitz gassing people to death and experimenting on them, as well as the German Psychiatric Institute where Ernst Rüdin worked before he became the architect of Hitler’s eugenics program. Edwin Black recounts that:
“In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a 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.’"104
Winston Churchill was an honorary vice president of the British Eugenics Society and a true believer in its power to solve “race deterioration.” In 1910, he proposed sterilizing 100,000 “mental degenerates,” and confining tens of thousands more to state-run labor camps.105
It took Nazism to give eugenics a bad name in the United States, but neither Nazism nor the prosecution of its members for crimes including forced sterilization ended such practices in the United States, where over 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized up through 1963, a third of them in California. In fact, eugenics saw something of a revival in the United States after WWII under the banner of “neo-eugenics,” targeted at the poor and minorities, with possibly 80,000 people forcibly sterilized in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s (up through 1981 in Oregon), and many more sterilized without consent up to the current day.106 From the 1930s to 1970s a third of the female population in Puerto Rico was sterilized.107 In the 1970s, 40% of Native American women and 10% of Native American men were sterilized.108 Even in recent years, such as 2013 in California, scandals pop up revealing the sterilization of prisoners without proper consent.109
After WWII, eugenics organizations and associations in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere were renamed using the term “genetics.” Nazi scientists resumed respectable careers and international collegiality. But the dark sides of the work, and the reliance on dubious science, never disappeared. Humans have only about one-fifth as many DNA sequences as wheat, and 90 percent of them identical to those of mice. Claims that DNA determines your future are extremely weak but extremely widespread, especially among those seeking to use “genetics” -- rather than, say, the distribution of money -- to solve such problems as poverty.110
Human experimentation, like eugenics, and often connected to it, also had a home in the United States before, during, and after WWII. Non-consensual experimentation on institutionalized children and adults was common in the United States before, during, and even more so after the U.S. and its allies prosecuted Nazis for the practice in 1947, sentencing many to prison and seven to be hanged. The tribunal created the Nuremberg Code, standards for medical practice that were immediately ignored back home. Some American doctors considered it “a good code for barbarians.”111
The code begins: “Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity.” A similar requirement is included in the CIA’s rules, but has not been followed, even as doctors have assisted with such torture techniques as waterboarding. Thus far, the United States has never really accepted the Nuremberg Code. While the code was being created, the U.S. was giving people syphilis in Guatemala.112 It did the same at Tuskegee. Also during the Nuremberg trial, children at the Pennhurst school in southeastern Pennsylvania were given hepatitis-laced feces to eat.113
Other sites of experimentation scandals have included the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, and Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. And, of course, the CIA’s Project MKUltra (1953-1973) was a smorgasbord of human experimentation. The United States military, during WWII, experimented on its own troops with gas chambers, segregating the troops, as always, by race, and pursuing pseudo-scientific racial ideas.114
Robert Jackson, Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the trials of Nazis for war and related crimes held in Nuremberg, Germany, following WWII, set a standard for the world: "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."115
Among the trials held in Nuremberg was one of Nazi doctors accused of human experimentation and mass murder. This trial lasted from December 9, 1946, to August 20, 1947. An important witness provided by the American Medical Association was Dr. Andrew C. Ivy. He explained that Nazi doctors' actions "were crimes because they were performed on prisoners without their consent and in complete disregard for their human rights. They were not conducted so as to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering."116
In the April 27, 1947, New York Times, that newspaper's science editor Waldemar Kaempffert wrote that human experiments with syphilis would be valuable but "ethically impossible."117 Dr. John C. Cutler read the short article. He was at the time engaged in giving syphilis to unsuspecting victims in Guatemala. He was doing this with the funding, knowledge, and support of his superiors at the U.S. Public Health Service. He called the Times article to the attention of Dr. John F. Mahoney, his director at the Venereal Diseases Research Laboratory of the Public Health Service. Cutler wrote to Mahoney that in light of the Times article, Cutler's work in Guatemala should be guarded with increased secrecy.
Cutler had gone to Guatemala because he believed it was a place where he could get away with intentionally infecting people with syphilis in order to experiment with possible cures and placebos. He did not believe he could get away with such actions in the United States. In February 1947, Cutler had begun infecting female prostitutes with syphilis and using them to infect numerous men. In April he began infecting men directly.118
For more information about eugenics, I recommend the PBS film “American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade.”119
The eugenics of the Nazis was far more murderous than that of other nations, and -- as responsibility is not a finite quantity -- any blame given to others diminishes the responsibility of the Nazis for their actions not a speck. But without the development of eugenics by the Americans, Nazism would not have resembled what Nazism was. The United States provided the pseudo-scientific rationale for mass-expulsion of the Jews, and then refused to accept the Jews, leading to mass eugenicide.
5. The United States did not have to develop the practice of racist segregation
James Q. Whitman is an American lawyer, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His critically acclaimed 2017 book is well researched. Its title is Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.120
Whitman’s book provides an understanding of U.S. influences on the drafting of Nazi race laws. No, there were no U.S. laws in the 1930s