Control, p.11
Control, page 11
THE AFTERMATH
The Nazis had embraced involuntary sterilization with laws derived from American legislation, and euthanasia directly from Hitler’s absolute edict. In just a few decades, eugenics in Germany had escalated from theory to genocide. On July 23, 1944, Soviet troops liberated the Majdanek concentration camp. Auschwitz followed on January 27, 1945, also liberated by the Soviets. American troops entered Buchenwald on April 11 and Dachau on April 29, and the British freed Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Those soldiers were the first to see the true realization of the Nazi’s policies, crimes of unfathomable cruelty and evil that were fueled, at least in part, by the ideas of eugenics. On May 8, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies. The formal reckoning of the crimes of the Nazis began that November with the Nuremberg trials. These had been set in motion in 1943 at the Moscow Conference, when the Atrocities Declaration was signed by the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, promising legal retribution in response to “evidence of atrocities, massacres and cold-blooded mass executions which are being perpetrated by Hitlerite forces.”
It is worth noting that this document, which set out the criteria for prosecution of the Nazis, was largely drafted by Churchill, who thirty years earlier had campaigned for British eugenics policies. The Nuremberg trials focused on the German high command, but a year later, a new court case began: United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al. (aka the Doctors’ Trial). Twenty-three doctors and scientists were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The war-crimes charges included planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatized as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed and so on, by gas, lethal injections and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums, and participating in the mass murder of concentration camp inmates.
Seven were acquitted, seven hanged, including Brandt; nine were imprisoned for terms no less than a decade. One thing that emerged from the Doctors’ Trial was what is now called the Nuremberg Code—a ten-point charter that outlines principles of research ethics when human experimentation is being performed. The code is not a legally binding document but is broadly supported by most countries as an important set of guidelines, primarily concerning the informed consent of participants in experiments, reduction of potential harm, and sound justification for the research. As it is not a detailed document, it doesn’t specify the possible involvement of children or their parents in acquiring consent, but as the language stands, it is arguably the case that the gene editing of Lulu and Nana in China in 2018 violates one or more of these rules.
Josef Mengele escaped prosecution and died from drowning in 1979 in Brazil. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Mengele’s supervisor, was deemed a Mitläufer—a neutral Nazi fellow traveler—and was fined six hundred marks in his denazification hearing. It is possible that he had destroyed records that may have condemned him as a war criminal, certainly, he was a member of the Nazi Party, and his profoundly racist and antisemitic work from before the war remained in the public domain. He reinvented himself as a successful geneticist after the war, studying human heredity in Berlin, and later as director of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Münster. He died in 1969 having spent ten months in a coma following a car crash. Verschuer remained a member of the American Eugenics Society until his end.
In under forty years, an idea had grown from esoteric, academic and obscure to mainstream, popular and policy. The men who formulated these scientific ideas—Ploetz, Fischer, Lenz and many more—were not directly responsible for the Holocaust, the concentration camps, the murder of six million Jews and millions of others. Ultimately the policies of the shortest of the three Reichs were deranged and haphazardly drew from many sources, ideologies, cults and religions, and overwhelmingly from Hitler’s commitment to Aryan superiority and fanatical antisemitism. However, Aryan supremacy and racial purity were the blood in the major artery pumping through the actions of the Nazis to the end, and eugenics flowed with them. The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was an act taken way past the spurious scientific creed of eugenics—but it was nurtured by it.
This does not exonerate any of those eugenicists, German, British or American. They acted within a culture of extreme prejudice, classism and racism which they had contributed to and validated, and continued to do so throughout the years of murder and experimentation on humans in death camps. Antisemitism may not have been a driving force for some of the eugenicists, but their creation of scientific labels of the unfit, of racial hygiene, of tiers of human value and of a scientific justification for the removal of people from reproducing their weaknesses in future generations, green-lighted what would follow. Lebensunwerten Lebens directly gave rise to the dehumanization of millions of people, including Jews, as Untermensch—“subhumans”—and that enabled their persecution. The Holocaust, the Final Solution, the concentration camps were much more than simply eugenics enacted, but that scientific creed had fueled their existence. The pathway of eugenics led directly to the gates of Auschwitz.
THE NEUTERING OF GALTON
The policies were deranged and genocidal and cloaked in a science that was unproven. In the second half of the book, I’ll specifically address the consequences of mass sterilization and Aktion T4 on the German people, as part of a broader examination of the question of whether their eugenics did or could work. But before drawing this first half to a close, I wish to make a short detour about the influence of several of these key eugenicists of the prewar era, and how we regard their legacies today.
Francis Galton’s influence is unmatched in nurturing eugenics into the twentieth century, a nucleation site on which ideas began to crystallize. He’s also been a major figure throughout my adult life. In the next few pages, I want to step out of the science and brief history and consider the presence of scientists and historical figures in our present. My undergraduate years studying evolutionary genetics in the 1990s occurred in the Galton Laboratory, where I (sometimes) listened to my tutors in the Galton Lecture Theatre; I also did my first research projects on the same corridor as a small glass case that held some of Galton’s belongings—a head crank for craniometry, some notebooks with diagrams about the nose and facial shapes that constituted his data on female beauty.
The Galton lab had moved from its original home on Gower Street in central London by then, and was housed in a drab 1960s building on Stephenson Way just around the corner. It was all orange Formica fittings, institutional linoleum and frosted glass. The building is no longer there, and the collection of Galton’s works and kit currently has no permanent home, though this is unconnected to the formal removal of Galton’s name from UCL that occurred in 2020. Eighteen months before that, the provost of UCL launched an inquiry into the university’s historical association with eugenics. Many academics and experts, myself included, provided testimony to the inquiry committee, who published their final report in February 2020.
There was minor drama around this event, which was intended to be a milestone in the history of the university: the report was penned by a minority of the committee and subsequently denounced by the majority, who refused to sign it because it contained historical errors and appeared to ignore some of the testimony given. The dissenters published their own report instead. This type of academic catfighting is not unheard of, but it is unedifying. Nevertheless, the recommendations that followed included the removal of Galton’s name from buildings and academic positions at UCL. The Galton Professorship, at that time held by a scientist whose work is entirely unconnected to eugenics, was permanently retired, and the name of the first person to hold that position, Karl Pearson, was also erased from the campus. The Galton Lecture Theatre is now Theatre 115, the Pearson Lecture Theatre now G22, and the Pearson Building is now the North West Wing.
The genetics department, the direct descendant of the Eugenics Laboratory, subsequently and autonomously elected to change the name of its R.A. Fisher Centre to the UCL Centre for Computational Biology in 2020. Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where Fisher was an undergraduate, fellow and president, removed a stained-glass window commemorating his work.
Fisher’s defenestration was not limited to the country of his birth: in June 2020, the U.S. Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies permanently retired the R.A. Fisher Award and Lecture, and within days, the American Society for the Study of Evolution also announced that it would also be renaming the R.A. Fisher Prize.
These cultural shifts are contagious. The founding president of Stanford and keen eugenicist David Starr Jordan had a phalanx of things named after him too, most of which have been retired in the last couple of years. Indiana University (where he also served as president) removed his name from the biology department, a parking garage and a creek that flows through the campus. In February 2022, Jordan Avenue in Bloomington was renamed Eagleson Avenue after a prominent local African American family. In 2020, the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, itself a cousin only a century earlier of the Eugenics Record Office, opted to rename as simply the School of Biological Sciences, after reconsidering James Watson’s explicit and well-documented racism over many years.
These renamings or unnamings are never uncontroversial, and often are met with irate resistance. But the arguments that rage against these decisions are frequently not clever. The posthumous naming of a building, or the erection of a statue, is a political act in itself, and allows the greatness of historical figures to loom above us without context, and without any form of analysis or education about who those people were and what they did. In that sense, statues are the precise opposite of history. Did a single student who sat in the Galton Lecture Theatre or by the Jordan River ever stop to think who these men were, and why they apparently deserved buildings or creeks named after them, many decades after they had died?
One striking thing is how inconsistent these reappraisals are. The Galton Institute (of which I am a member)—formerly the Eugenics Education Society—evolved into the Adelphi Genetics Forum in 2022. In November 2021, Imperial College London considered (and ultimately rejected) a proposal to remove a bust and the name of the nineteenth-century evolutionary scientist and vocal abolitionist Thomas Huxley from its campus, on account of his views on racial hierarchies (views very widely held at the time), while apparently not considering that the whole university is named after the empire that oversaw slavery. Kellogg remains a global brand apparently untainted by its weird sex-obsessed racist eugenicist founder, just as many of us drive Ford cars despite the proud antisemitism of Henry Ford, who is name-checked in Mein Kampf as a role model to its author. The past is a dirty place, its protagonists are merely people—evil, genius and everything else in between. We cannot and should not abandon nor trash the scientific works of Galton, Fisher, Pearson, Jordan, Watson and the many others on whose scientific shoulders we stand. Their techniques and discoveries are in constant use, for the betterment of science and, by extension, all humans. These are formidable legacies. But the time of carte blanche for the unquestioned heroes of history is over. We can choose not to honor their names.
It is not without irony that part of Galton’s financial endowment has been redistributed to fund research positions for fellows from minority and racialized groups who were targeted by the eugenics policies of the past. I lecture at UCL about Galton, Pearson, Fisher and the history of eugenics, and my salary is derived from Galton’s bequest. In a sense though, the precise wording of his codicil, in which he outlines the purpose of his endowment, is continuing to be fulfilled, deliberately, though perhaps not as he intended. It states that his money should be used to fund various activities, including to:
Collect materials bearing on Eugenics; Discuss such materials and draw conclusions; Extend the knowledge of Eugenics by all or any of the following means namely (a) Professional instruction (b) Occasional publications (c) Occasional public lectures (d) Experimental or observational work which may throw light on Eugenic problems.
My colleagues and I do all those things. There is an elegant irony in a man launching a field with specific intentions only to have that very same field flourish, reject and condemn all his presuppositions. Such is science.
Perhaps D. H. Lawrence’s fantasy of a lethal chamber for the sick and the poor was youthful folly, for he did not return to those grotesque ideas in public. We cannot provide such excuses for Fisher. He truly believed in eugenics, and those ideals were persistent in his thoughts and work throughout his life. They are expressed in his early enthusiasms while in his twenties at Cambridge, in his field-defining work at UCL, and in his writings after the Second World War, when many had abandoned such convictions in the shadow of Hitler’s evil. Fisher expressed sympathy toward the eugenics policies of the Nazis and defended the Nazi Otmar Verschuer. During the war, Verschuer employed Josef Mengele, and used samples obtained from Jews murdered in concentration camps. Genetics emerged out of eugenics labs, and some Nazis escaped convictions for war crimes by reinventing themselves as scientists, some in America, with impunity. Whether Fisher was fully aware of Verschuer’s direct associations with Nazi experimentation on people is not known.
All these people and so many others of cultural and historical significance were great supporters of an idea we have learned to despise. A common response to this truth is that they were women and men “of their time.” This is vapid. All people are of their time, and it is impossible to be alive at any other time. It is perfectly possible and indeed desirable to criticize the past, and to criticize the views of people in the past through the lens of our values and those of their contemporaries. That is the definition of history. Hitler was a man of his time, and was legitimately (albeit among political chaos) appointed to the position of German chancellor in 1933.
Too often, the argument that the past was a foreign country where people did things differently, and that they were simply acting appropriately for that era, is deployed to end or avoid discussion and debates, or to reinforce a cultural history that serves only to make the powerful feel comfortable.
If you wish to understand the past and its legacies, then it is not good enough to simply exonerate people’s acts because times were different. It’s a specious attempt to gloss over difficult subjects. Crucially of course, the views and cultural norms of past times were not universally held, just as they are not today. Not all people held the same opinions, and racism, sexism and other views that have waned through time were not necessarily universally supported. It is undeniable that many Germans were dismayed by the politics of the Nazi Party and were opposed to its racist, fascist regime. Significant parts of the German Catholic Church publicly denounced the Nazis’ sterilization and euthanasia programs. Similarly, the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes had a despotic and unquenchable thirst for conquest, and this was viewed as contemptible by many. The Manchester Guardian’s obituary for him in 1902 was quite clear that he had “outlived the warmest of admiration that he thus won. For one thing his exclusive preoccupation with purely material considerations had led him terribly wrong, and through him and his press, had led this country terribly wrong too.”
Even the great satirist and anti-imperialist Mark Twain reserved one of his sharpest insults for Rhodes: “I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”
In years to come, our descendants will condemn us for what we believed, or for what we fought for or against, or for the things that we remained silent about. They will be right to, and we can forgive ourselves for our beliefs that will only become controversial or wrong as culture continues to change. But in our present, we can and must be honest about the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
A SCIENTIFIC CREED (PART ONE)
Josiah Wedgwood, the British politician who did more than perhaps anyone else to stand in the way of enforced sterilization in Britain, summed up the whole eugenics movement with a telling phrase: “legislation for the sake of a scientific creed which in ten years may be discredited.” This single line holds the key to so many of the problems with eugenics, in his time and ours. It was a science project always intended for policy, a meeting of theory and public health, population control and political hegemony—science marshaled into ideology.
Why should we care about the obscure academic works of a few dead turn-of-the-century gentleman scientists? The woman on the street or the farmhand in rural Kansas surely did not care much about the writings of Charles Davenport or Ronald Fisher, just as a factory worker in Bavaria probably spent little time discussing the racial hygienism of Alfred Ploetz or Eugen Fischer. But these men provided a scientific justification for policy and invented a fuel to stoke its fires. This is how a niche idea became normalized. The cultural milieu provides the soil in which a political seed is planted. It is nurtured and fed by these men of science, who are revered and respected, and their ideas stabilize and become popular, and politicians latch on to them. Our societies elevated these men to the status of Masters of the Universe, who with data, funding and a new science could see truths beyond the day-to-day grind of life. Science in the service of belief.
Genetics is tough, and specialist, and requires years of training, hard graft and luck to succeed. And at the end of all that exploring, the least worst outcome we can hope for is that we are not wrong. We study the richest data set ever known—our DNA—using the most complicated structure in the known universe—our brains—all in the context of how people actually live. Lives are jumbled and chaotic, and the job of those of us who study humans is to fastidiously sift through this muddle on the hunt for answers and explanations of why we are the way we are. We must always expect science to be misrepresented, overstated and misunderstood, because it is complex, because the data is unending and because people are strange. What is galling is when science is misrepresented, overstated and misunderstood by scientists: not us average schmos who muddle along doing the best we can with our limited capabilities—but those who are the finest minds in their fields and, by extension, assumed to be among the smartest people who have ever lived. The whole purpose of science is to unshackle us from the biases that we are burdened with, and culturally bound to, so that we can see reality not as we perceive it, but as it really is. The eugenics project, conceived, birthed and nurtured by these brilliant minds, shows just how hard it is for us to cut loose from our prejudices, from politics, from morality and even hatred.
