Abstract
Over the past three decades, historians have uncovered vast amounts of new information about how Nazi domestic policies were perceived and interpreted beyond the Third Reich’s borders. Building on the pioneering work of scholars including Gisela Bock, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Garland Allen, Robert Jay Lifton, Jeremy Noakes and Mark B. Adams in the 1980s, recent researchers have added substantially to the scholarly understanding not only of how Nazi racial policies were implemented in Germany but also how foreign experts, particularly those in the United States and Great Britain, directly contributed to their formulation.1 In parallel to this work, recent revisionist accounts of eugenics outside Germany have provided important new accounts of the origins of these ideas and how they developed in the interwar period.2 The result of these two strands of historiography developing simultaneously was the increasing realization that Nazi racial theories and legislation were strongly linked to events and movements beyond the borders of the Third Reich. Some of the most important early research examining these links was put forward by Stefan Kühl, who concluded that eugenics societies around the world cultivated an extensive ‘Nazi connection’ with German racial hygienists through the 1930s.3 More recently, work by Marius Turda and Sheila Faith Weiss, along with the publication of the extensive Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, has begun to expand the scholarly understanding of eugenics beyond the traditional areas of interest into locations and contexts not previously considered, including Latin America, India, South Africa and Eastern Europe.4 In addition, Nathaniel C. Comfort’s work has situated the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century within the longer-term scientific quest for ‘human perfection’ that commenced long before, and continued beyond, the Second World War.5
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Notes
See, for instance, Jeremy Noakes, ‘Nazism and Eugenics: The Background to the Nazi Sterilization Law of 14 July 1933,’ in Roger Bullen, H. Pogge von Strandmann and Antony Polonsky (eds.), Ideas into Politics: Aspects of European History 1880–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1984);
Diane Paul, ‘Eugenics and the Left,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 45: 4 (1984);
Garland E. Allen, ‘The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History,’ Osiris, 2 (1986);
Bentley Glass, ‘Review: The Roots of Nazi Eugenics,’ The Quarterly Review of Biology, 64: 2 (1989);
Peter Weingart, ‘German Eugenics between Science and Politics,’ Osiris, 5: 1 (1989); Mark B. Adams, The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie: Von der Verhütung zur Vernichtung ‘Lebensunwerten Lebens’, 1890–1945. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987);
Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986).
Particularly Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
Frank Dikötter, ‘Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,’ The American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 470.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means ofNatural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 3rd edn. (London: J. Murray, 1861).
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869);
Francis Galton, ‘Hereditary Improvement,’ Fraser’s Magazine, 7 (1873);
Francis Galton, ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,’ The American Journal of Sociology, 10: 1 (1904).
Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. IIIA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 424.
See Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990, 32–35; Kevles, 59.
Perhaps the best analysis of Ploetz’s views can be found in Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 64–90.
Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 36–37.
Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Press, 2009).
See Black, War against the Weak; Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005);
Stephen Trombley, The Right to Reproduce: A History of Coercive Sterilization (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
Harry H. Laughlin, ‘Historical Background of the Third International Congress of Eugenics,’ in Harry F. Perkins, et al. (eds.), A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1934),
For a discussion of how the war affected eugenics and eugenicists, see Richard Carr and Bradley W. Hart. ‘Old Etonians, Great War Demographics and the Interpretations of British Eugenics, c.1914–1939,’ First World War Studies, 3 (2012), 217–239.
C.P. Blacker, Have You Forgotten Yet? The First World War Memoirs of C.P. Blacker, ed. J.G.C. Blacker (London: Leo Cooper, 2000), 2.
C.P. Blacker, A Social Problem Group? (London: Oxford University Press, 1937).
John Macnicol, ‘Eugenics and the Campaign for Voluntary Sterilization in Britain between the Wars,’ Social History of Medicine, 2: 2 (1989).
William Ralph Inge, Talks in a Free Country (London: Putnam, 1942), 87.
C.P. Blacker, ‘Eugenics in Germany,’ The Lancet, 222 (1933), 674.
Falk Ruttke, ‘Rassenhygiene und Recht,’ in Ernst Rüdin (ed.), Rassenhygiene im Völkischen Staat (Munich: J.H. Lehmanns Verlag, 1934), 91.
For more on Pitt-Rivers’ contributions to eugenic science and demography, see also Bradley W. Hart, ‘Science, Politics, and Prejudice: The Dynamics and Significance of British Anthropology’s Failure to Confront Nazi Racial Ideology.’ European History Quarterly, 43 (2013), 301–325;
F. Landis MacKellar and Bradley W. Hart, ‘Captain George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers and the Prehistory of the IUSSP,’ Population and Development Review, 40 (2014), 653–675;
Bradley W. Hart, George Pitt-Rivers and the Nazis (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
See C.B.S. Hodson (ed.), Report of the Ninth Conference of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (Farnham: I.F.E.O., 1930).
See Eugenics Society Papers, C. 159, letter from Blacker to the editor of the Eugenics Review, 17 July 1936. Hodson had written a pamphlet on sterilization that earned her a reputation as an extremist in the early 1930s: Cora B. S. Hodson, Human Sterilization To-Day: A Survey of the Present Position (London: Watts & Co., 1934).
Rüdin’s controversial career and his involvement with the Nazi hierarchy has been evaluated by a number of scholars: see Matthias Weber, Ernst Rüdin: Eine Kritische Biographie (Berlin: Springer, 1993);
Matthias M. Weber, ‘Ernst Rüdin, 1874–1952: A German Psychiatrist and Geneticist,’ American Journal ofMedical Genetics, 67 (1996).
Eliot Slater, ‘German Eugenics in Practice,’ The Eugenics Review, 27: 4 (1935–36).
National Archives, Kew, Medical Research Council Papers 1/1733. Bureau of Human Heredity Bulletin II 9–10. Leading eugenics researcher Otmar von Verschuer’s activities with Mengele in Frankfurt and later Berlin have now been the subject of much study: see, for a few examples, Susanne Heim, Carola Sachse and Mark Walker, The Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Macmillan, 1986). Verschuer never faced serious legal sanctions for his involvement with Mengele.
For an attempt at rehabilitating British eugenics from the legacy of Nazism, see C.P. Blacker, Eugenics: Galton and After (London: Duckworth, 1952).
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Hart, B.W. (2015). Interwar Britain and German Racial Theory. In: Rüger, J., Wachsmann, N. (eds) Rewriting German History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347794_13
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