The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,55

organism ruthlessly sacrifices degenerate cells, just as the surgeon ruthlessly removes a diseased organ, both, in order to save the whole: so higher organic entities, such as the kinship group or the state, should not shy away in excessive anxiety from intervening in personal liberty to prevent the bearers of diseased hereditary traits from continuing to spread harmful genes throughout the generations.”

Ploetz and Poll looked to British and American eugenicists such as Galton, Priddy, and Davenport as pioneers of this new “science.” The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded was an ideal experiment in genetic cleansing, they noted. By the early 1920s, as women like Carrie Buck were being identified and carted off to eugenic camps in America, German eugenicists were expanding their own efforts to create a state-sponsored program to confine, sterilize, or eradicate “genetically defective” men and women. Several professorships of “race biology” and racial hygiene were established at German universities, and racial science was routinely taught at medical school. The academic hub of “race science” was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics—a mere stone’s throw away from Muller’s new lab in Berlin.

Hitler, imprisoned for leading the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt to seize power in Munich, read about Ploetz and race science while jailed in the 1920s and was immediately transfixed. Like Ploetz, he believed that defective genes were slow-poisoning the nation and obstructing the rebirth of a strong, healthy state. When the Nazis seized power in the thirties, Hitler saw an opportunity to put these ideas into action. He did so immediately: in 1933, less than five months after the passage of the Enabling Act, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring—commonly known as the Sterilization Law. The outlines of the law were explicitly borrowed from the American eugenics program—if amplified for effect. “Anyone suffering from a hereditary disease can be sterilized by a surgical operation,” the law mandated. An initial list of “hereditary diseases” was drawn up, including mental deficiency, schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, blindness, deafness, and serious deformities. To sterilize a man or woman, a state-sponsored application was to be made to the Eugenics Court. “Once the Court has decided on sterilization,” the law continued, “the operation must be carried out even against the will of the person to be sterilized. . . . Where other measures are insufficient, direct force may be used.”

To drum up public support for the law, legal injunctions were bolstered by insidious propaganda—a formula that the Nazis would eventually bring to monstrous perfection. Films such as Das Erbe (“The Inheritance,” 1935) and Erbkrank (“Hereditary Disease,” 1936), created by the Office of Racial Policy, played to full houses in theaters around the country to showcase the ills of “defectives” and “unfits.” In Erbkrank, a mentally ill woman in the throes of a breakdown fiddles repetitively with her hands and hair; a deformed child lies wasted in bed; a woman with shortened limbs walks on all fours like a pack animal. Counterposed against the grim footage of Erbkrank or Das Erbe were cinematic odes to the perfect Aryan body: in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, a film intended to celebrate German athletes, glistening young men with muscular bodies demonstrated calisthenics as showpieces of genetic perfection. The audience gawked at the “defectives” with repulsion—and at the superhuman athletes with envy and ambition.

While the state-run agitprop machine churned to generate passive consent for eugenic sterilizations, the Nazis ensured that the legal engines were also thrumming to extend the boundaries of racial cleansing. In November 1933, a new law allowed the state to sterilize “dangerous criminals” (including political dissidents, writers, and journalists) by force. In October 1935, the Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People sought to contain genetic mixing by barring Jews from marrying people of German blood or having sexual relations with anyone of Aryan descent. There was, perhaps, no more bizarre illustration of the conflation between cleansing and racial cleansing than a law that barred Jews from employing “German maids” in their houses.

The vast sterilization and containment programs required the creation of an equally vast administrative apparatus. By 1934, nearly five thousand adults were being sterilized every month, and two hundred Hereditary Health Courts (or Genetic Courts) had to work full-time to adjudicate appeals against sterilization. Across the Atlantic, American eugenicists applauded the effort, often lamenting their own inability to achieve such effective measures. Lothrop Stoddard, another protégé of Charles Davenport’s, visited one such court in