Archives: Story

The longer, mind-blowing answer is revealed in Edwin Black's new book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create A Master Race (Four Walls Eight Windows; 2003; 518 pp. $26).

Combining gripping narrative with corroborating facts and figures, Black connects the dots to what many know, at best, piecemeal: that the racist American pseudoscience of eugenics, pioneered in the first three decades of the 20th century, provided the basis of Hitler's quest for a so-called Master Race. Nor, even after the terrible lessons of the Holocaust, have we given up on a form of eugenics (now known as human genetics) to tinker with and attempt to improve humankind.

Documenting his thesis, the prize-winning investigative author of three books and numerous articles on the Holocaust begins his account in the unlikely rural setting of Brush Mountain, Virginia. There, in the 1930s, writes Black, the county sheriff would begin one of his many raids against the hill families "deemed 'unfit' to exist in nature." These simple mountain folk were then "systematically sterilized under a Virginia law compelling such operation for those ruled unfit." (That law, the Racial Integrity Act of Virginia, was not repealed until 1963.)

Nor was Virginia unique. Black notes that 27 states, including Ohio, used forced sterilization, segregation laws and marriage restrictions in an attempt to wipe out, over time, those who did not conform to a government-approved Nordic stereotype.

Or, as Black shorthands it for me in a brief phone conversation snatched amidst his whirlwind book tour, "The government wanted to breed a better form of human the same way you'd breed a better form of cattle." In fact, he adds, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was foursquare behind the eugenics movement. Happy to take Gregor Mendel's earlier studies of the color and size of peas to a new, more insidious level.

The supporting foundations and individuals named above also applauded the "research" being conducted at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Here, at the seat of the eugenics movement, millions of index cards on ordinary Americans were stockpiled for future use in removing families, bloodlines and whole families, Black notes.

Included in the list of those to be "removed" (ethnically cleansed, as we say today) were the mentally defective and physically deformed, blacks, Indians, Hispanics, Eastern European Jews, dark-haired hill folk and the poor. In short, anyone who didn't fit the upscale Nordic profile.

Hitler eagerly studied American eugenics laws and rationales and found them the perfect scientific wrapping for his own, more virulent package of race hatred and antisemitism. A package that resulted in the genocide of six million Jews plus millions of others deemed unfit or unacceptable for membership in the Fuhrer's Aryan nation.

National socialism, Hitler once said, "is merely applied biology."

All of which is not to blame the U.S., Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. (or their Victorian forebears who dreamed up Social Darwinism) for the iniquities of the Shoah.

"Nothing lessens the guilt of Germans for the Holocaust," Black insists. We can identify who was financing the Third Reich, expose IBM for its technological role, and document the scientific beginnings of the Final Solution. "But the only ones who ran the trains to Auschwitz or dropped the pellets in the gas chambers were the Nazis."

For more than 35 years, Black, the son of survivors, has been an assiduous student of the Holocaust. More importantly, assisted by dozens of volunteer researchers combing archives in several countries and examining thousands of documents, he has broken new ground in helping us understand how it all happened.

He began research for his first book, The Transfer Agreement, in 1979, publishing it in 1984. It documents the dramatic 1933 pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine in which Zionist organizations agreed to break the Jewish-led, anti-Nazi boycott in exchange for the transfer of 60,000 Jews (stripped of their assets) to Palestine.

People were upset with him, Black admits, because they couldn't understand why he was looking at the financial aspects of the Holocaust at a time when people were just "coming to grips with the human enormity" of the Shoah. The Transfer Agreement, he says, "was 15 years ahead of its time."

His next award-winning book, IBM and the Holocaust (2001), revealing how the high-tech mega company "generated windfall profits as it organized and systematized the Reich's anti-Jewish and eugenics programs" was just "15 minutes ahead of its time."

War Against the Weak, which explains the scientific rationale for the Holocaust, Black insists, "is long overdue."

Nominated five times for a Pulitzer Prize, Black compares his last book tour with the current one: However angry people were at IBM for their 12-year-long role in computerizing the Final Solution, he says, doesn't compare to "how stunned and shocked" they are to learn about eugenics (ethnic cleansing) as an American institution.

However, more than attempting to shock people, Black tells me he hopes War Against the Weak will help us "face where our country is headed" with respect to genetics experimentation. He wants to ensure that "the genie of eugenics" will not escape from the bottle once again. "We must be able to learn from what came before."

"What now? The short answer is nobody knows." Thus begins Black's final chapter, "Newgenics." He goes on to say, "The world will not discover the latest human genetic trends in books like this one, but rather in the morning paper."

A day of so after I read those lines, I opened my New York Times and came upon an ad from the Genetics and IVF Institute (GIVF) headlined, "Do you want to Choose the Gender of Your Next Baby?" The ad then describes GIVF's "exclusive, scientifically-based sperm sorting gender election procedure, currently in an FDA clinical trial, for several important reasons: For prevention of genetic diseases: For family balancing ..." It also provides a Web address and phone number for "prospective parents" to call.

"No one should fear the benefits of human reengineering that can obliterate terrible diseases such as cystic fibrosis and Tay Sachs," Black writes. "Yet humanity should also be wary of a world where people are once again defined and divided by their genetic identities ... Only then can humankind be assured that there will be no new war against the weak."

Edwin Black, a dynamic speaker as well as a fine writer, is the Featured Friday guest at The Temple-Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, on Oct. 24 at 8 p.m. His topic is "Eugenics: From Long Island to Auschwitz."