CIA Agent stated that ..W We designed mRNA To Kill.."
According to the agent and leaked top-secret documents, the COVID pandemic was a psyop, run by the CIA to frogmarch humanity towards a total surveillance state.
And COVID mRNA vaccines were not developed during Operation Warp Speed, but were ready and waiting for deployment for at least 10 years prior to the pandemic!
'I'm a Zionist,' says Biden, calls for peace efforts in Gaza
President Joe Biden has reiterated that he is a Zionist and said Israel must take advantage of an opportunity to have peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians.
"You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist. I'm a Zionist. Where there's no Israel, there's not a Jew in the world to be safe," Biden said on an appearance on "Late Night With Seth Meyers" on NBC late Monday.
Rupert Murdoch ties the knot for the 5th time in ceremony at his California vineyard
Gates Foundation funding $40 million effort to help develop mRNA vaccines in Africa in coming years
Bill Gates Is A CIA Asset
Michael Ruppert former Loas Angeles Police Drug Investigator showed evidence before he was murdered that Bill Gates was a CIA Agent Prior to forming the CIA Controlled and owned multi Billion Dollar Microsoft Group of Companies
Bill Gates speaks to The Associated Press during a visit of the Institut Pasteur in dakar, Senegal, Sunday, Oct. 8, 2023.A $40 million investment will help several African manufacturers produce new messenger RNA vaccines on the continent where people were last in line to receive jabs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday, Oct. 9, 2023. (AP Photo)
Please watch this report - whistleblower military testimony confirming Covid 19 shots were given in 2014. Additionally, the information regarding Moderna’s contract with Nanosphere and Nanotherapeutics, aka Resilience, which has countless contracts with the government concerning biological warfare and gene-specific sensors wanted by the DoD.
The CIA invented mRNA technology, in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and the Rockefeller Foundation, according to bombshell testimony of a CIA agent who admits that COVID vaccines were developed as a bioweapon to control humanity.
According to the agent and leaked top-secret documents, the COVID pandemic was a psyop, run by the CIA to frogmarch humanity towards a total surveillance state.
And COVID mRNA vaccines were not developed during Operation Warp Speed, but were ready and waiting for deployment for at least 10 years prior to the pandemic!
These revelations are all backed-up by fully verifiable documents and sources, and they will spell doom for the elite if we spread this information to enough people.
Three years ago, Klaus Schwab openly bragged that the World Economic Forum and their globalist stakeholders were on track to have total control over the human race by the year 2030.
How wrong he was. Unfortunately for the globalist elite, their authoritarian vision of microchips, open-air prisons, CBDCs and mandatory vaccination is receding faster than Yuval Noah Harari's hairline!
The people of the world are waking up, and the elite are now in panic mode, terrified of being served justice for their crimes against humanity. It's not just Gates. Schwab has emerged as a global hate figure, as ordinary people finally wake up to his agenda to enslave humanity.
When historians look back on this year, it will be remembered as the moment the Globalist elite revealed their hand and began to lose grip on power. Every week now, we're receiving more good news on this front. The World Health Organization has been forced to suspend the launch of its controversial Pandemic Treaty, due to pushback from millions of citizens who were demanding justice for the crimes perpetrated by the elite during the pandemic.
Sorry Tedros, the people are rising up against your Globalist vision and rejecting your plans for Agenda 2030 and the New World Order. But don't think you are becoming irrelevant. We will be seeing you at Nuremburg 2.0 trials, where you will be held to account for your crimes against humanity.
In even better news, the list of perpetrators to be held to account at Nuremburg 2.0 just got a whole lot longer, thanks to the testimony of a CIA agent who admitted that the COVID pandemic and mRNA vaccines were a CIA PSYOP planned years in advance.
The Globalists are trying to make us all poorer and destroy what's left of the economy. The Biden regime is following all of the WEF dictats to the letter. They literally want you to own nothing and pretend to be happy. It's no joke...
Tom Renz is an Ohio-based attorney who has risen to become a legal force in the fight to hold the Global Elite to account. Renz has developed a legal case against EcoHealth Alliance, alleging their involvement in creating SARS-CoV-2 with the CCP and Wuhan Lab.
[Video of Tom Renz testimony in court regarding the 2014 medical records that he obtained from an Army soldier stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas that show that he received five Moderna "immunization" shots for COVID-19].
Tom Renz: I'm not going to go out and tell you that this proves that this was built five, ten years ago or that the timeline was entirely fraud. I'm going to tell you that we ought to look into it. And if we're going to ask questions, we ought to ask real questions.
Our DOD and CIA were involved with this. To what extent? How long has this been involved? This was created in a lab in one of the greatest enemies to the United States of America!]
It's not just the DOD and CIA who were involved in the murky origins of the pandemic.
It's all the usual suspects that make up the global elite. In 2021, Moderna hired and tasked a supposedly new pharmaceutical manufacturing company called Resilience to mass-produce their COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to roll out to the entire world.
The company goes by more names than P. Diddy, including Nanotherapeutics, Nanosphere Inc., Ology Bioservices and Government Resilience Services. Do you get the impression that they might be trying to hide something?
As Destiny Resendes reports, Resilience is rife with conflicts of interest, especially within the intelligence community. Investors in Resilience included Google, Lux Capital, Magnetic Ventures and 8VC. And the chief operating officer of the company also served as a senior advisor to Pfizer, according to database website Crunchbase.
Resendes revealed that board members and investors tied to those companies include Council on Foreign Relations members, a board member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CIA affiliates, Merrill Lynch and the Rockefeller University. Additionally, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb served as a Resilience board member.
Also, Nanosphere and Nanotherapeutics, aka Resilience, has countless contracts with the government concerning biological warfare and gene-specific sensors wanted by the DoD, Resendes noted.
To add insult to injury, Resilience was even tapped by the World Economic Forum to lead the Davos panel on cybersecurity. They really do think we are stupid. "A biopharmaceutical company on cybersecurity? Okay, sure, go get that Moderna booster if you dare," Resendes posted.
Intelligence dangerously compromised, warned CIA and FBI whistleblowers. You're not the only one to report this, of course, but I was reading your report on it this morning.
This is something that you have been warning about for quite some time, and
[Video of Congressional testimony of Michael Shellenberger before Sen Josh Hawley].
Josh Hawley: The allegations stem from a whistleblower who has come forward to the House, a whistleblower from the Central Intelligence Agency. I have the letter, the relevant letter here from the House Oversight Committee. The whistleblower alleges that a CIA team was paid to change its assessment of the origins of COVID-19.
Do I have that broadly correct? Is that your understanding of the report?
Michael Shellenberger: And just on the very specific point of we were the first to identify the three people that contracted the coronavirus in China. They were the people working on gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wall Street Journal confirmed our reporting two weeks later.
And then, I think it was one week after that or a few days after that, the ODNI report came out and it did not reveal this information. And we had multiple sources, the Wall Street Journal. We have no idea if the Wall Street Journal sources were the same, but I think we're clearly seeing a lot of abuses of power occurring in multiple executive agencies.
So we've seen it with the FBI. One of the things that we noted yesterday was that we saw perverse incentives in the FBI to go after so-called "Domestic Violent Extremism", pulling an agent off of things like child exploitation onto really hyping a set of cases that particularly appeared to be aimed at spreading disinformation around the idea that there is a significant increase of domestic extremism when we don't think that the evidence shows that.
And now, we see this report that came out that suggests that there's an FBI whistleblower who says that six of the seven analysts had said it was a laboratory origin and that they had reversed their position in some exchange for some sort of a salary bonus or some sort of financial incentive.
There is no turning back. Many of the elites are fleeing like rats leaving a sinking ship while others are pounding the panic button, in a desperate attempt to replace the front men and move forward with a diabolical bloodlust.
Should we forgive and forget, grant them amnesty and allow them to regroup and rebrand? Or is it time for Nuremberg 2.0? The people have spoken and so it shall be.
CISA drove my website out of business and I've been de-platformed by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, MailChimp, ConstantContact and Ezoic. Amazon de-platformed my film and Wikipedia deleted their article on me. I'm nearly disappeared off the web
Rupert Murdoch and Elena Zhukova posing for a photo Saturday 1st June 2024 at their wedding ceremony at his vineyard estate on Bel Air California
Rupert Murdoch talks with London Media 15tth June 2024 has married for the fifth time to
67-year-old Elena Zhukova Russian Born molecular biologist
Rupert Murdoch and Elena Zhukova posing for a photo Saturday 1st June 2024 at their wedding ceremony at his vineyard estate on Bel Air California
Rupert Murdoch and Elena Zhukova posing for a photo Saturday 1st June 2024 at their wedding ceremony at his vineyard estate on Bel Air California
Rupert Murdoch ties the knot for the 5th time in ceremony at his California vineyard
NEW YORK (AP) — Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, 93, has married for the fifth time, his corporation, News Corp, confirmed Sunday.
Murdoch and Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old Russian-born retired molecular biologist, wed Saturday in a ceremony at his vineyard estate in Bel Air, California. Photographs of the newly married couple were released by News Corp. The couple announced their engagement in March.
Murdoch was most recently married to model and actor Jerry Hall. They were wed in 2016 and divorced in 2022.
Zhukova is the ex-wife of Alexander Zhukov, a billionaire energy investor and Russian politician. Their daughter, Dasha, was previously married to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who used to own the Premier League soccer club Chelsea.
Last fall, Murdoch stepped down as leader of both Fox News’ parent company and his News Corp media holdings. His son, Lachlan, took his place in a media empire that spans continents and helped to shape modern American politics.
In 1952, Murdoch inherited a newspaper in his native Australia from his father. Over decades, he built a news and entertainment enterprise that became prominent in the United States and Britain, including ownership of such notable newspapers as The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal.
Fox News Channel, the 24-hour network founded in 1996, has profoundly influenced television, becoming a popular news source among many conservative U.S. audiences and politicians.
'I'm a Zionist,' says Biden, calls for peace efforts in Gaza
'Where there's no Israel, there's not a Jew in the world to be safe,' says US president
Servet Gunerigok 27.02.2024
President Joe Biden has reiterated that he is a Zionist and said Israel must take advantage of an opportunity to have peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians.
"You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist. I'm a Zionist. Where there's no Israel, there's not a Jew in the world to be safe," Biden said on an appearance on "Late Night With Seth Meyers" on NBC late Monday.
'I'm a Zionist,' says Biden, calls for peace efforts in Gaza
WASHINGTON
President Joe Biden has reiterated that he is a Zionist and said Israel must take advantage of an opportunity to have peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians.
"You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist. I'm a Zionist. Where there's no Israel, there's not a Jew in the world to be safe," Biden said on an appearance on "Late Night With Seth Meyers" on NBC late Monday.
"But here's the deal. They also have to take advantage of an opportunity to have peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians who are being used as pawns by Hamas," he said.
The president noted that there is a process underway.
"I think if we get that that temporary cease-fire, we're going to be able to move in a direction where we can change the dynamic" to have a two-state solution to guarantee Israel's security and independence of the Palestinians, said Biden.
Turning to a possible Israeli operation in Rafah, Biden said that the Israelis "made a commitment to me they're going see to it that there's the ability to evacuate significant portions of Rafah before they go and take out the remainder of Hamas."
He reiterated that there are too many innocent people that are being killed in Gaza.
Stating that Israel has had the overwhelming support of the vast majority of nations, Biden said, "If it keeps this up with this incredibly conservative government they have and Ben-Gvir and others, they’re going to lose support from around the world".
He was referring to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
"And that is not in Israel's interest," he added.
The president also said that Israel would halt its war in Gaza during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan if a hostage-release deal is reached.
"Ramadan’s coming up and there has been an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in activities during Ramadan as well, in order to give us time to get all the hostages out," said Biden.
Earlier, he said he hoped a cease-fire would be reached by March 4.
Gates Foundation funding $40 million effort to help develop mRNA vaccines in Africa in coming years
Bill Gates speaks to The Associated Press during a visit of the Institut Pasteur in dakar, Senegal, Sunday, Oct. 8, 2023.A $40 million investment will help several African manufacturers produce new messenger RNA vaccines on the continent where people were last in line to receive jabs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday, Oct. 9, 2023. (AP Photo)
Bill Gates Is A CIA Asset
Michael Ruppert former Loas Angeles Police Drug Investigator showed evidence before he was murdered that Bill Gates was a CIA Agent Prior to forming the CIA Controlled and owned multi Billion Dollar Microsoft Group of Companies
BY KRISTA LARSON October 9, 2023
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — A $40 million investment will help several African manufacturers produce new messenger RNA vaccines on the continent where people were last in line to receive jabs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday.
While it could still take at least three more years before any of the vaccines are approved and on the market, the foundation said that its mRNA investment marks an important step forward in improving vaccine equity.
“Whether it’s for local diseases in Africa like Rift Valley (fever) or for global diseases like TB, mRNA looks like a very promising approach,” Bill Gates told The Associated Press on Sunday after visiting one of the facilities involved, the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal. “And so it allows us to bring in lots of African capabilities to work on these vaccines, and then this can be scaled up.”
The mRNA vaccine technology came to the forefront with the production of COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. The messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code-carrying instructions for making proteins. And by picking the right virus protein to target, the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.
Those COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were fast-tracked through the regulatory process and granted emergency use authorization. The new vaccines under development in Africa face a far longer development timeline — anywhere from three to seven years.
“So we think that this technology will have a tremendous impact in terms of autonomy through regional manufacturing,” he said.
With $8.3 billion to give away in 2023, the Gates Foundation is the largest private philanthropic donor. And with an endowment of more than $70 billion, its spending power is likely to continue for many decades. It has spent billions of dollars to vaccinate against polio, treat and prevent malaria and HIV and more recently advance vaccines for diseases like cholera.
DAKAR (October 9, 2023) – Today at the 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting, Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced new investments to advance access to mRNA research and vaccine manufacturing technology that will support low- and middle-income countries’ (LMICs) capacity to develop high-quality, lifesaving vaccines at scale.
The move builds on lessons the foundation has learned from more than 20 years of working with vaccine manufacturers in LMICs and the opportunity to leverage recent scientific advances to develop low-cost, high-quality health tools that reach more people around the world. mRNA technology is considered a potential game-changer for a range of infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and Lassa fever, which disproportionately affect people in LMICs. This new technology can significantly lower the costs of mRNA research and manufacturing and enable expanded access—helping to close critical gaps.
“Putting innovative mRNA technology in the hands of researchers and manufacturers in Africa and around the world will help ensure more people benefit from next-generation vaccines,” said Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s coordinating minister of health and social welfare and a global expert on vaccines. “This collaboration is an encouraging step that will increase access to critical health technologies and help African countries develop vaccines that meet the needs of their people.”
The foundation announced a total of US$40 million in funding to advance access to Quantoom Biosciences’ low-cost, mRNA research and manufacturing platform, which was developed with an early-research Grand Challenges grant made to its parent company, Univercells. The Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD) and Biovac, research institutes with vaccine manufacturing experience based in Senegal and South Africa, respectively, will receive US$5 million each to acquire the technology and will be able to use it to develop locally relevant vaccines. To further advance the technology and lower costs for commercialization, the foundation also will provide US$20 million to Quantoom Biosciences, ensuring LMICs can benefit from the next-generation mRNA health tools. The Gates Foundation will grant another US$10 million to other LMIC vaccine manufacturers to be named.
This new funding builds on the foundation’s previous US$55 million investment in mRNA manufacturing technology.
“Expanding our capacity to discover and manufacture affordable mRNA vaccines in Africa is an important and necessary step towards vaccine self-reliance in the region,” said Dr. Amadou Sall, CEO of IPD. “We welcome this new funding, which will promote the development of lifesaving technologies on the continent while also contributing to global health security by expanding the supply and access to vaccines—allowing us to achieve greater health equity worldwide.”
mRNA vaccines have simpler research and manufacturing processes than traditional vaccines, so expanding access to this next-generation technology can help countries like Senegal and South Africa gain autonomy to discover and develop low-cost, high-quality vaccines for diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis that are consistent with their health priorities.
“Innovation can be transformative, but only if it reaches the people who need it most,” said Morena Makhoana, CEO of Biovac. “This collaboration will help close critical gaps in access to promising mRNA vaccines against diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest. It will also assist us in our mission to establish end-to-end vaccine manufacturing capability at scale in Africa for global supply."
Quantoom’s modular mRNA technology addresses common bottlenecks in current mRNA research and manufacturing technologies, making it simpler and cheaper to use. For example, the cost to produce a vaccine could drop by more than 50% with Quantoom’s platform compared to traditional mRNA technology. It could also significantly reduce the need for deeply trained experts, which continues to be a barrier to vaccine production in Africa and elsewhere, while maintaining or even increasing the quality of the product.
“Expanding the availability of affordable, high-quality vaccines that meet the needs of local communities is one of the best ways to improve global health outcomes and reduce preventable deaths,” said Trevor Mundel, president of the foundation’s Global Health Division. “By lowering barriers to access for low- and middle-income countries, we can help ensure more people around the world benefit from lifesaving health innovation.”
“The development of new vaccines is costly, resource intensive, and concentrated in high-income countries,” said José Castillo, CEO of Quantoom Biosciences. “We’re thrilled to partner with IPD and Biovac to scale our technology in Senegal and South Africa and help increase access to novel mRNA vaccines—one of medicine’s most promising new tools.”
The additional funding for Quantoom builds on an initial grant made in 2016 to Univercells in response to a Grand Challenges call for new interventions for vaccine manufacturing. The Univercells proposal focused on developing modular engineering principles that would facilitate decentralized, small-footprint manufacturing of vaccines.
IPD plans to start manufacturing essential measles and rubella vaccines using Univercells’ original vaccine manufacturing technology, expanding the region’s capacity to deliver routine immunization campaigns.
About Grand Challenges
The Grand Challenges family of programs stems from a century-old idea that crowdsourcing solutions to a defined set of unsolved problems can spark innovation and accelerate progress. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its Grand Challenges funding partners first used Challenges—open requests for grant proposals—in 2003 to focus attention and effort on pressing global health and development problems for those most in need. Together, Grand Challenges partners have awarded US$1.6 billion across 3,800 grants to a diverse pool of problem solvers in 118 countries, while at the same time fostering a global innovation ecosystem in places where it will have the most impact. The foundation and its Grand Challenges partners will continue to launch RFPs to support innovators from around the world in tackling the hardest, most urgent Grand Challenges. To learn more, visit grandchallenges.org.
About the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Mark Suzman, under the direction of Co-chairs Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates and the board of trustees.
Media contact
Phone: 206-709-3400 Mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Eugenics before 1945
Author(s): Jakob Tanner
Source: Journal of Modern European History / Zeitschrift für moderne europäische
Geschichte / Revue d'histoire européenne contemporaine , Vol. 10, No. 4, Eugenics after
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Eugenics before 1945 An appropriate understanding of eugenics before 1945 implies that this break is questioned and put into perspective. The article conceives eugenics as a multifarious project of modernity that derived from the biopolitical aspiration to improve public health and enhance human capabilities. Consequently, it was supported across the political spectrum. In the course of the Twentieth Century, an international eugenics movement took shape and found widespread and transnational resonance in the public opinion. However, the conflation of the Aryan myth, racial purity and medical coercive measures in Nazi-Germany discredited the concept of eugenics after 1945. Nonetheless, such measures, often combined with elements of soft coercion, were applied in many countries, particularly in the U.S., the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland up to the 1970s. Meanwhile, the feasibility of Reproductive Medicine gave rise to a «liberal eugenics» which is entrenched in the promises of health and happiness descending from the Nineteenth Century. Eugenik vor 1945 Ein angemessenes Verständnis …View full abstract
1 N. Lays Stepan, «The Hour of Eugenics». Race, Gen-
the Welfare State. Sterilization Policy in Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, and Finland, East Lansing 1996
(Preface of the 2005–edition), X.
In Germany, a major turn was brought about in the field of eugenics by the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, the final collapse of the terrorist NS-dictatorship and the liberation of Nazi-Europe by the Allied Forces. As the Holocaust, the whole project for «conquering of Lebensraum in the east» and the eugenic and euthanasia programs of the NS-State were stopped, the significance of eugenics as both a broad social movement and a scientific concept in Germany and the occupied territories was effectively reversed. Indeed, a few years later, in 1949, the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) stipulated that «the dignity of men is
unimpeachable». As Nancy L. Stepan has put it: «After World War II Nazi eugenics was rightly condemned as a gross perversion of science and morality; the word itself was purged from the vocabulary of science and public debate.»1
This semantic watershed was not limited though to the sphere of influence of the extinct «Third Reich». It had a strong impact in most European and many other countries.
1. Eugenics = Nazism?
It was in the 1960s that historical research began to question the assumption of a
decisive «zero hour» in German and also European history.2
Particularly after the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963/65) the recognition of the manifold continuities before and after 1945 seeped into the public consciousness. Paradoxically, the per-
ception that eugenics was something intrinsically tied to the NS regime was rein-
forced by this change. Especially in the 1970s, the identification of eugenics with
Nazism became stronger than ever.3
This created a situation in which any allusion
. Lays Stepan, «The Hour of Eugenics». Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America, Ithaca-London
1991, 4.
2 C. Klessmann, 1945 – welthistorische Zäsur und «Stunde Null», 2010, Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte,
3 G. Broberg / N. Roll-Hansen (ed.), Eugenics and the Welfare State. Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, East Lansing 1996
(Preface of the 2005–edition), X.
to «eugenics» almost automatically evoked associations with the «Nazi» atrocities
and violations of human rights.
When Scandinavian historians – working on Sweden, Denmark, Norway and
Finland – came up with accounts in the 1990s on the continuation of eugenic programmes and sterilization practices in their countries up until the early 1970s,4 these historical findings were immediately tied to the NS-regime. The alarm that was sounded by the mass media raised the following question: Who would have ever thought that some of the worst crimes of the Third Reich could have survived in democratic countries (besides the Scandinavian countries also the United States)5 and Switzerland6
?
In this situation, historians start emphasizing «the multifarious dimensions and extraordinary appeal of eugenics to individuals of very different social background, political convictions, and national affiliations», as Frank Dikötter notes in a Review
Essay in 1998.7
Not only did the continuity after 11945 come under scrutiny, but also the crucial question of how «the ordinary eugenics of the 1920s and early 1930s
became the extraordinary eugenics of Nazi Germany?» could be raised in a new way.8
In their German Anthropology in the Age of Empire Matti Bunzl and Glenn Penny stated: «As the essays in this volume illustrate, however, no clear trajectory can be drawn from the complex and multiple constellations that characterized imperial anthropology to the race science embraced by the Nazis. […] Instead of a nineteenth-century explanation for the crimes of the twentieth, this volume ultimately illuminates German ethnology and anthropology as local phenomena, best approached on the terms of their own worldly provincialism.»9
This thesis is much in line with Paul Weindling’s understanding that «the synthesis between Nazism and eugenics was a process of adaption and appropriation on both sides.»10
The study «What is National Socialist about Eugenics» summarizes the current state of research.11 The new explanatory framework does not deny that, after 1933, the eugenic issue was indeed closely linked to racial concepts, aggressive racist ideologies and radicalized anti-Semitism, which constituted the bedrock of the Nazi state.12 It also states that eugenics was neither confined to the NS regime or fascist countries nor limited to the period before 1945. It was, on the contrary, embedded in the democratic principles of societies with a full-blown legal system and a highly
developed sense of social justice and responsibility. As a «biologically based move-
ment for social reform»13, eugenics was a pervasive trend and ingrained in population politics, family planning, disease prevention, public cost control and other fields of activity of the modern social state.14 In re-evaluating eugenics in twentieth-cen-
tury France, William H. Schneider shows how it «provided a broad cover for a variety
of movements that aimed at the biological regeneration, such as natalism, neo-Mal-
thusianism, social hygiene and racist immigration restrictions».15 More generally, eugenic efforts were expected to contribute to the solution of some of the most urgent problems of industrialization and urbanization.
Apparently, democratic societ-
ies were not bound to a strict compliance with the civic and civil rights which form the basis of their constitutions. With the rise of nationalism and the accelerated formation of nation states in the nineteenth century, the very concept of rights was permeated by an ideology of community which generated strong emotions of solidarity and which could also be used to expel groups, «foreign bodies», «inferior races», «vagrant individuals», etc. from the body of the collective. These «moral sentiments» were not universalistic but confined to national boundaries, ethnic identification or racial affiliation and organized in terms of criteria like public health, homogeneity and purity.
Stating these priorities does not confound the totalitarian NS state with the political modus operandi of democracies nor does it distort the «global history of eugenics» in a way proposed by Edwin Black in his book War against the weak. Black suggests that the phantasmagorical imagination of a «pure and supreme master Aryan
race» was concocted in the United States of America before 1933 and then exported to Germany to form the ideological nucleus of Nazi racial hygiene policy.16 Certainly,
the NS regime did not rely on American racism and expertise in order to implement eugenic legislation founded on a racist and anti-Semitic worldview. While they were on an equal footing in terms of science and eugenic legislation and this was passed band applied in both countries, the social and political context was significantly differ-
ent, as were the levels of public resonance and scientific support for eugenic rac-ism.17 The strong argument, driven home by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectics of Enlightenment in 1944 and reintroduced by Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust18 in 1989 is misunderstood when it results in the thesis that there is no significant difference between democratic systems and dictatorship.
Quite the reverse, in stating that, in its intrinsic ambivalence, modernity is not automatically related to political and social progress (of any kind), it fosters an awareness of the importance of institutional mechanisms that are capable of maintaining a decisive difference, not between the modern and the barbaric, but between modern
democracy and modern dictatorship.
2. Multiple Genealogies of Eugenics
Propositions about how to guarantee the health and robustness of the population through political supervision of human reproduction can be traced to antiquity. Since the eighteenth century, Plato’s Republic became a topic in debates concerning
selective breeding in both the animal world and among humans. This appropriation of old ideas in a new context changed their meaning. During the last third of the nineteenth century, a Darwinian approach was mingled with degeneration fears, mostly of Catholic origin.19 The result was a contradictory eugenic thinking that was shaped by the imagined threats and advanced by the shared aspirations of social groups which were eager to fashion society «in accord with their purposes by taking some of these beliefs, transforming some of them, and adding new elements».20
The threshold for the advent of eugenics as a legal-medical concept and a broad palliative for all sorts of social evils was crossed only after 1900. In the previous decades, a multitude of theoretical trajectories, political visions and social capacities
had developed in a way that might be described as «simultaneity of the non-simultaneous».
One important impetus came from Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius, pub- lished in 1869. Galton aimed at coping with the problem of physical, intellectual and moral degeneration which was placed on the agenda by different authors, especially the French psychiatrist and devout Catholic Bénédict Augustin Morel, who released
his seminal Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces varitétés maladives in Paris in 1857. Influenced by the so-called «Morel’s law» – which had found resonance beyond its initial religious connotation in liberal strands of thinking, accelerating the dissemination of biologi-
cal values since the 1860s – Galton advanced the hypothesis that intellectual abilities were transmitted over time from generation to generation. The British scientist was among the first to assert that «intelligence» was a scientifically meaningful concept, that it was subject to laws of heredity and, as a consequence, accessible to human engineering. He closely coordinated the practice «to obtain by careful selection a
permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running» and the project «to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations».21
In order to prove his assumptions were correct, Galton gathered and produced statistical evidence
.
Although Galton never produced a satisfactory measurement of intelligence, his claim had a strong impact on discussions of social problems. The apparent lack of scientific concepts was overcompensated for by the proliferation of a colourful language that permitted cultural and social phenomena to be translated into biological
facts and hereditary circumstances. The appropriate solution to such problems had to coincide rhetorically with the paradigms of biological evolution and heredity. The nGalton proposals for human intervention into the problem of differential birth rates in the late 1860s and 1870s were subsequently labelled «positive» because they were addressed to the upper classes. They should – this was the chief message – recog-
nize their responsibility and spread their «genius» by means of an intensified pro creation within large families. Avant la lettre, eugenics was about the promotion of higher reproduction among those social classes with superior hereditary traits.
In the following decades, however, the problem of degeneration became part of the debate on the socially negative effects of the industrialization process. Around the same time, a fundamental crisis of «old liberalism» occurred. As a consequence, the perception of the issue of degeneration changed dramatically. Moreover, from the 1870s onward the British upper and middle classes, unlike the lower social classes, limited family size in order to stabilize or raise their financial living standard. Consequently, the elites became uneasy about the prospect that they could be overwhelmed by so-called «inferior stocks» or «trash people» – that is, by an accelerated demographic growth triggered by fertile strata of the population which were considered to be either problematic or potentially revolutionary. Under the new regime of perception, the so-called positive approach was substituted by the negative
one: motivation (to produce more of the «desired») was replaced by repression (of the «undesired»).
In this context, the debate on «eugenics» and – with a certain time lag – on sterilization programmes emerged. The decisive semantic innovation was again made by Galton. In 1883, he coined the term «eugenics».22 As a fervent advocate of quantitative analysis, Galton pursued an empirical approach, based on statistical meth-
ods, in order to end up in «racial improvement» through selective human breeding.
Galton’s emphasis was on class. He uses the term «race» rather to describe a «stock», an aggregate of individuals which can be described by statistical measures like average and variation.23 Galton’s primary assumption is that biological value
and hereditary fitness are expressed in social standing and that the class position of each individual is therefore a social marker of his genetic worthiness. He mapped out British society along the lines of class hierarchy, which made his suggestion appealing to the elites and the better-off. Thus even before the eugenic movement
started to flourish around 1900, it was a good example of the «relationship between scientific ideas and the interests and purposes of social groups».24 Galton attracted attention not only by advancing new theses about the problems of British society, but also in using innovative visual representations of his statistical findings which
were displayed in many of Galton’s articles from that period and which also started to circulate in popular media. He uses scientific knowledge to embark on a new understanding of social morality. In his «Essays in Eugenics», published in 1909, he
stated that «Eugenics strengthens the sense of social duty» and «Eugenic belief […]
sternly forbids all forms of sentimental charity that are harmful to the race, while it eagerly seeks opportunities for acts of personal kindness, as some equivalent to the loss of what it forbids.» Accordingly, «eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness and appealing to many of the noblest feelings of our nature.»25 In this way, Galton
established a perfidious feedback loop between the support of eugenics and a noble character. Those groups that were attracted to eugenics, and approved and supported the concept, in effect demonstrated their intellectual, moral and biological superiority. Critiques from other groups, conversely, gave unequivocal proof of their
inferiority.
3. Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel
Even if Galton thought of eugenics as being more than «a mere vision in Utopia», underlining that «the practice of Eugenics has already obtained a considerable hold on popular estimation, and is steadily acquiring the status of a practical question»,26
there was a utopian drive in the eugenic mission of middle-class «Darwinian demagogue»27 who propagated «racial hygiene» and «public health». They tried to strengthen their position by crusading for eugenic ideas in the name of overarching social norms and moral values or by claiming that the survival of the race underpinning the state could only be guaranteed by a consequent eugenic reconfiguration of races or national populations. This moral enterprise was intimately bound to a careerist mentality, for it implied the opportunity for social advancement as well as for greater earning potential.28
It took two decades, however, before eugenics had both gained scientific respectability and become a social movement and project for biological solutions for social problems. The rediscovery of the Mendelian laws in 1900 unleashed new im-
pulses for eugenic thinking. In Britain, it was Karl Pearson, professor of applied
mathematics and mechanics at University College, London, and a beacon for statistical analysis, who explored what he considered to be relevant phenotypical differences (stature, cephalic index, eye colour, fertility, and longevity).29 This obsession with difference among humans and nations produced a strong hierarchical bias,
whereby differences were mainly perceived in terms of superior versus inferior and of intelligent versus feebleminded. Whenever scientists start to judge populations through the lenses of «racial improvement», their prejudices are inevitably corroborated. In the end, eugenic assumptions worked as kinds of propagandistic self-ful-filling prophecies. In general, eugenic concepts like that of an inherited constitution were accepted in medicine, especially in psychiatry, biology, sociology and social work.30
Neither Mendelianism nor Darwinism was a theoretical prerequisite for develop-
ing eugenic approaches. In France, neo-Lamarckianism, based on the assumption
that acquired characteristics could be inherited, flourished and was combined with
pro-natalist measures and positive eugenics. The scientific framework was in gen-
eral so blurred and heterogeneous that no uniform scientific discourse could be es-
tablished.31
The driving forces for a law enforcement of eugenic measures were public health reformers and social-Darwinist ideologists who aimed at implementing effective cures against what they judged to be a degenerative threat to the society.32 They
made their first appearance in the United States in the last years of the nineteenth century. In 1896, Connecticut introduced marriage restrictions and many US states imitated this type of law. In 1907, Indiana became a pioneer in the compulsory ster-
ilization of individuals. The Indiana Supreme Court repealed the respective law, but the US Supreme Court verified its constitutionality in 1927. Since 1894, an Immigration Restriction League fought for eugenic goals, whereas at the beginning of the
twentieth century laboratory research was intensified in the Station for Experimen-
tal Evolution, headed by Charles B. Davenport. In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office started to document eugenic measures in the United States.33 Another early forerunner was Switzerland. Auguste Forel, a renowned psychiatrist (and, at the same time, a social reformer, sexologist, researcher on ants, socialist and a pacifist) became an early advocate for sterilization practices. In 1907, the Swiss parliament ad-
opted a national Civil Code that went into effect in 1912 and included a eugenically motivated marriage restriction article.34 This law would later become a model for many other countries.35
4. International and National Institutions and Organizations
The organizational achievements of the eugenic movement in «the West» in the decade before the First World War were impressive. National eugenics societies mushroomed: in Germany (1905), in England (1907), in the United States (1910)
and in France (1912). In 1912, on the initiative of the British Eugenics Education Society, the First International Eugenics Congress met in London. It was dedicated to Francis Galton, who had died in 1911, and presided over by Leonard Darwin, a son
of Charles Darwin, and listed among its vice-presidents Winston Churchill.36 An important outcome of this congress was the creation of a whole series of national eugenic associations and the establishment of the Permanent International Eugenics Committee, which was designed to foster transnational cooperation in the rapidly
expanding field.37
The First World War had complex effects on the rising international eugenic movement. On an organizational level, the effort to strengthen transnational cooperation was interrupted. But a new common denominator took shape. There was a
wide consensus that, in terms of collective genetic fitness, the war resulted in a
contra-selective effect. The «best stock» of every nation, the young soldiers, had died
in a «technical-industrial» war. To steer in the opposite direction, the claim for eu-
genic pacifism achieved support and was combined with the demand to radicalize
eugenic practices in order to re-establish pre-war levels of hereditary health. This
project brought eugenicists and geneticists into close interaction. In the first years
after the war, it seemed to be evident that US science-based and professional eugen-
ics had taken the lead of the international movement.38
This could be observed at the Second International Eugenics Conference in
1921, whose motto was «Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution».39 The
conference papers were published in 1923 under the title Eugenics, Genetics and the
Family.
40 In order to foster the idea of eugenic engineering around the world, the
International Federation of Eugenic Societies (IFES) was founded to coordinate the
activities of the numerous national organizations and the various legal initiatives
developed since 1912. A third international conference was held, again in New York,
in 1932. The fact that the Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist Ernst Rüdin41, who emi-
grated in 1928 to Germany, was unanimously elected as president of the IFES is a
clear hint that the relative coherence of the US approach had been undercut and that
the eugenic movement was already past its apogee in terms of being a self-confident,
future-oriented project for the biological social engineering of national communi-
ties and – in the long run – mankind.
The internationalization of eugenics evolved, even before the First World War,
but especially in the interwar period, because several countries outside of Europe
and the United States in Asia (especially Japan),42 Australia,43 Latin America44 and
Africa45 adopted eugenic concepts. They applied them to traditional marriage con-
straints and birth control practices, which themselves acquired new significance and
potency.46
Had they been asked whether they would be able to present a clear-cut analysis
of the dynamics of heredity, most of the members of the scientific community of the
1920s and 1930s would have admitted that there was not sufficient knowledge available in order to prove any significant interconnection between public health, heredity and eugenic measures. As a matter of fact, the international rise of eugenics in
the public sphere was paralleled by a weakening of the scientific basis of the eugenic movement (in terms of its contemporary self-evaluation).
Eugenics was never the outcome of experimentally tested biological models, but it was on the other hand propelled by scientific discoveries and assumptions of how heredity works among populations. Thus the connection between eugenics and genetics was emphasised already at the time when William Bateson coined the term
«genetics». What was changing was the assessment of the «eugenics as science»
argument by advanced scientists themselves. In this regard, disillusionment about the possibility of a scientifically accurate and dispositive eugenics runs rampant.
The more the NS regime linked eugenics with the «Aryan myth» and a megaloma-
niac racist and anti-Semitic project of rebuilding a «racially pure» society, the more doubts were also exacerbated in scientific and epistemic communities.
The process of internationalization was therefore not paralleled by converging scientific concepts but rather by an intensified popularization of behavioural norms and mental attitudes. Eugenic arguments merged in a new way with everyday
preoccupations with family, marriage, childrearing, sexual behaviour and many other aspects of popular beliefs and demographic developments. Eugenic pop science intermingled with the rise of mass culture in the interwar period. With the as-
cent of new media – including newspapers, novels, comic strips, posters, cinema
and museum exhibits – public opinion and entertainment united to create a «cul-
tural industry».47
Eugenic ideas literally had sex appeal: popular advisors were «Explaining Sexual
Life to Your Daughter» and horror films brought the «Eugenics of Dracula and Frankenstein» to the screen. A wave of popular writing was accompanied by new methods of «Drilling Eugenics into Peopleʼs Minds». The visual aesthetics of US
popular culture and mass entertainment during the 1930s provided a new touchstone for the eugenics of identity formation, linking concepts of economic efficiency and success in the marketplace with biological fitness and outstanding
health.48 Alternative avenues for popularization were also developed in Nazi Germany and other European countries. One striking example was the eugenics exhibit prepared by the Deutsches Hygiene Museum of Dresden and funded by the American Public Health Association in 1933, shortly after the Nazi party had gained
power.49 In other countries – and especially in France – «negative eugenics» stand
in the shadow of a widely discussed problem of declining birth rates and a pervasive fear of depopulation. Marriage counselling and premarital physical examination were propagated through popular media and eventually, under the Vichy regime, became law.50
5. Racial Hygiene and Aryan Myth in Germany
One feature of interwar-eugenics was the move towards more authoritarian and state-enforced concepts, especially in those countries that abolished the liberal-democratic trajectory and became dictatorships or «authoritarian democracies». In the process of the politicisation of eugenics, the fear of degeneration as well as heredity produced phantasmagorical hopes, were linked with a mythical narrative of consan-
guinity and pedigreed descent. In many countries, a shift towards decidedly right-wing eugenics was under way. As Peter Weingart et al. have pointed out, the more aggressive, anti-Semitic and xenophobic the milieus were that propagated the purity of race, the more hostile or indifferent they were towards scientific knowledge.51
Nonetheless, eugenic and racial hygiene propaganda was based on the permanent
popularization and vulgarization of scientific knowledge. It intervened with discrim-
inatory campaigns against handicapped persons and «inferior races». The symbolic capital of science was used to promote «national biology», «racial politics», and the persecution of the «Jews» (defined in terms of race).
In Germany, the idea of eugenic engineering became closely bound with the notion «racial hygiene», introduced by Alfred Ploetz in 1895.52 In that year, Ploetz pub-lished Part I of his «Baselines of a racial hygiene». In the book entitled The efficiency of our race and the protection of the weak he postulated that a policy of racial hygiene
aims at enhancing happiness and health.53 Ploetz coupled this secular doctrine of
redemption with the aspirations of the nation-state, thereby instilling universal aims
with particular national interests and a social-Darwinian meaning. Since the early 1890s, he had denigrated both the ideas of the Enlightenment and the chance-equal-ity postulates of the German Social Democrats. He denounced public assistance and state benefits for the «weak» members of society as ominous «sentimentalism» and proposed a «smooth death» for deformed or feeble newborns by the application of a
«small dose of morphine». In 1904, he founded the journal Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie with Fritz Lenz as chief editor, and a year later the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene.54 Looking for political leverage for the promotion of his ideas of a racially healthy society, he became a supporter of the NSDAP and eventually a party member in 1937. Already in 1933 he expressed his hope that Adolf
Hitler would give racial hygiene a new and decisive momentum. He became a member of the «expert advisory committee for population and racial policy» which was charged with proposing and implementing Nazi legislation in the field of racial politics and eugenic issues. In this function and also as a professor, he propagated the idea of the supremacy of the Aryan race.
Racial hygiene is often used as a synonym for eugenics, and it was in fact inspired by the concept of eugenics. Nonetheless «hygiene» had a different semantic connotation than «eugenics». Since the «hygienic revolution» in the 1850s and the
«bacteriological» paradigm-shift in aetiology in the 1880s, hygiene became synonymous with a purity-based power of resistance. It was related to the lethal threat for-eign bodies posed to organic systems. There was a wide variety of propaganda terms attached to the concept of hygiene which could be used to defend the «völkisch» com-
munity against both national enemies and hereditary burdens.
Politically, the notion «hygiene» retained two conflicting meanings, one relating
to social hygiene, the other to hereditary fitness. Whereas the latter notion under-stood the improvement of «phenotypes» to be a fallacious concept that made no sense in the long run and even (concealed) an indifferent view on the state of the «German race», the former was tied to reform movements which tried to ameliorate
the living conditions of broader strata of the population. To a certain degree, the
«social» concept was related to social-democratic programmes aimed at improving the living conditions of the broad «working» population at the bottom of the industrial society. Alfred Grotjahn, who acquired the first chair for «Social Hygiene» at
Berlin University in 1920 and was a member of the SPD and a Reichstag deputy from 1921 to 1924, was a decided proponent of such a programme. The new «genotype»-based strategies were a response to the relative success of this social-
hygiene approach.
Opponents contended that the «social» approach worked against the mechanism of natural selection by preserving rather than eliminating the weak. They insisted that such a policy would in fact end up ruining the race in terms of its genetic value.
In this regard, the propaganda in favour of racial hygiene was against the politics of social hygiene. Whereas the concept of «racial hygiene» corresponded to the social-Darwinist anxieties of nationalist, xenophobic and racist right-wing movements, «social hygiene» was supported by left-wing parties and also transformed ideologi-
cally into a welfare-state concept. It was also integrated into the missions of organizations, often lead by women, advocating birth control and sexual reform.55 Apart from their clear-cut differences, social and racial hygiene were interwoven, and
many social hygienists turned out to be strong supporters of racial-hygiene measures, as was the case with Grotjahn, whose call for the forced sterilization of «imbeciles, cripples and alcoholics» and permanent asylum for about one per cent of the population fit well with the objectives of «racial hygiene».56 The scientific ideology of progress in the labour movement was based on a strong belief in the interrelationship between – as Reinhart Mocek puts it – «biology and social emancipation».57
Thus there was a broad tradition of left-wing, socialist eugenics.58
After 1933, the Nazi state forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people
(approximately one per cent of Germany’s population).
59 The declaration of «racial purity» as the superior national value already led in 1933 to the persecution of Jews, ,gypsies (Roma and Sinti) and homosexuals. In order to protect the German body
politic, the regime relied more and more upon medical killing and the «euthanasia»
programmes may be seen as the first deliberate step towards the extermination camps and the Holocaust.
6. Eugenics in Democratic Countries
From the 1920s to the 1940s, this positive association between emancipation and
eugenics, which was quite strong before the First World War, either faded away or was replaced by a collectivist and authoritarian understanding of «social liberation».
The democratic states were themselves not free of such influences, as there, too,
increasingly coercive elements were now being introduced. Sterilization, which was formally «voluntary» but in fact compulsory in many cases, became a forceful instrument used to reach eugenic and public health goals. The United States
and Switzerland were among the first countries to test this surgical procedure. Although no exact number can be established for Switzerland, it can be said nonetheless that several thousand women were sterilized in the interwar period. Unlike
the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland did not introduce any national legislation beyond the discriminatory articles in the Civil Code of 1912. To be sure, the canton of Vaud introduced a law in 1928 that allowed the sterilization of the «mentally ill» – the first of its kind in Europe. This legalization, however, had a dampening effect on these surgical interventions, as it was feared that treated individuals might decide to take legal action. Thus operations were carried out in a legal grey zone –
especially in Zurich, where most of the sterilization cases were recorded. The doctors and psychiatrists preferred to act without a legal foundation. When the new Swiss penal code came into force in 1942, only sterilizations for medical indications were allowed. This made those social and medical indications that would always allow for eugenic motives all the more important. Generally speaking, the example of Switzerland shows particularly well that in most cases medical, social, political and eugenic reasons were interchanged and combined and that the psychiatrists were able to draw from a range of conceptual «registers» in making their
assessments.
60
In the US, more than 64.000 sterilizations tookplace between the turn of the century and the 1960s.61 In the case of Sweden, it can be shown that the proponents of eugenics already had an effective lobby in the 1920s, using the members of parlia-
ment as multipliers to «sell eugenics».62 Under the social-democratic government since 1934, there was a strong welfare-state motivation behind the sterilization pro-grammes. Between 1935 and 1975, 63.000 Swedes were sterilized, in accordance
with a law passed by the parliament in 1934 and modified in 1941.63 Analogous figures may be discovered for other countries.
After 1945, racial hygiene was finally discredited by its association with the racist and anti-Semitic ideology of Nazi Germany. As already mentioned, however, in countries like the United States, Switzerland and Sweden, there was – judged against the backdrop of Nazi-related eugenics – an astonishing continuity in eugenic thinking and related practices. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s when the new tenden-cies in eugenics came to the fore. In many countries, the impact of the movements of 1968 disrupted this continuity with the interwar period, causing political conflicts
and a strong anti-psychiatric movement. Although there was a fundamental change
in these years, it is nonetheless important to recognise that the «old eugenics» did not simply disappear. In Canada, for example, it was not until 1972 that sterilization legislation was nullified in Alberta and British Columbia. Just the same, it was discovered in 1978 that in the absence of any legislation hundreds of such operations
were still being carried out each year in Ontario.64
7. Religious Contexts, Gender Relations, National Identities
There are two critical objections to the traditional mainstream of comparative work:
the first questions the «nation» as the given «unit» for making comparisons; the second looks at the presence of cultural exchange and the ongoing transmission of knowledge and concepts between different regions of the globe, undermining the
idea that relatively independent nations might be evaluated with a view to their differences and similarities. Concepts like «histoire croisée» or «entangled history» support the assumption that the «units» of any comparison are shaped by constant and intensive knowledge transfers in trans-national networks. Eugenics is a transna-
tional phenomenon and eugenicists always aimed to express their concerns at an international level. As shown equally in the cases of the US, Sweden and Switzerland, these countries maintained close scientific relationships with Germany. Propo-
nents of eugenics like the Swede Herman Lundborg (professor and head of the newly established National Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala in 1921) and the Swiss Ernst Rüdin (who played a leading role in the drafting of the «Law for the
Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring» in 1933 and was appointed judge a year later on the «Hereditary Health Court») are examples of this close-knit collaboration. The German historian Stefan Kühl states in his book The Nazi Connection
that even if nationalist tendencies may be observed in the eugenic movement, the leading scientific exponents had an international vision that primarily concerned the improvement of the white, «europoid» race and aimed at the construction of an international network. Although the title of the study is somewhat misleading, Kühl’s approach opened a new way to analyze whole variety of transnational factors – religion, gender, political orientations, etc.
One focus of recent research was the role of religion and confessional divisions in regard to eugenic and racial hygiene. A new study by Monika Lötscher centres on this issue, examining the Catholic eugenics in Austria before 1938.65 The author shows that the Catholic Church made an official statement regarding eugenics in 1930 in the papal encyclical «Casti connubii». While eugenic efforts were accepted in principle, sterilization, abortion and euthanasia were nevertheless rejected as methods for achieving eugenic goals. The Church was primarily interested in preserving
large families. In the language of the experts, this reflected a «positive eugenics». It was moreover aimed at strengthening Catholic marriage counselling positions, which were generally understood as a means of promoting Catholic religiosity. In such a historical analysis, confession serves as an explanatory variable. In Protestant
Prussia and in northern Germany in general, before 1933, there was a high acceptance of eugenic measures and the Nazi state could rely on cooperative medical and social policy experts. In southern Germany and Austria, this kind of support was far less in evidence.
Another interesting and revealing aspect is the gender ratio in sterilization prac-tices. From a strict eugenic standpoint, the distinction between men and women makes no sense. Any individual who did not meet the normative expectation of the
racial collective was targeted by public health agencies, charged with the task of executing the measures of racial hygiene. It is therefore no surprise that the sterilization and castration programmes of the National Socialists were to a high degree gender blind, hitting men and women in about the same proportion.66 From a comparative perspective, it is striking to see that in Sweden 90 per cent of the 63.000 sterilizations concerned women.67 The same is the case for other democratic countries, in particular Switzerland where the high ratio of women was curbed after
the new federal penal code was introduced in 1942 from 90 to 75 per cent.68 This gender bias can be explained by looking at the indications and also the sterilization-abortion plan, which was often proposed by medical doctors inclined towards a
«social indication» and worried about the financial and moral capacity of the examined pregnant women. Although there is a strong interrelationship between social concerns and eugenic commitments from the side of the medical authorities, they were open to additional rationalisations. As a result, women who already had a number of children were sterilized without any eugenic justification, whereas woman
without offspring but diagnosed as hereditarily problematic were not. The results of many studies can be summarized by the conclusion that where racial hygiene in Nazi Germany constituted a violent approach aimed at strengthening the Aryan race along strict «biological» criteria, sterilization practices in democratic countries were situated at the crossroads of medical, social, psychic and also eugenic concerns.69
The gender perspective is also conceptually linked with that of race and nation.
Nancy Stepan has analyzed the analogous concerns that arise in both the concepts
of «race» and «gender». The idea of a biologically determined social entity that has inherited and unchangeable traits is thus equally present in both. The cultural effect depends nonetheless largely on specific social situations, which means that a broad spectrum of variations may be observed in regard to the same basic assumption.70
In a similar vein, Christian Geulen has identified an «elective affinity» between race and nation. They constitute congenial imaginative communities and defend their «harmony», «purity» and «homogeneity» by denigrating «the other» or «the foreign». The power to include and exclude discriminatory violence are therefore man-
ifested in about the same way.71 Apart from this similarity between concepts that organize political spaces, eugenics should also be analyzed in terms of a left-right/democracy-dictatorship matrix. Stepan demonstrates that the eugenicists of Latin
America diverged considerably from their counterparts in Britain and the United States in their ideological approaches and their interpretation of key texts concerning heredity.
Examining how eugenics was understood and implemented by scientists and (mainly leftist) social reformers in Latin America, the author analyses the eugenic movements in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina and shows that scientific circles and
others were influenced by neo-Lamarckian theories of heredity. It was the Latin Americansʼ long-standing reliance on French scientific definitions that provided one basis for their emphasis on what since the end of the nineteenth century had come to be recognised as an unscientific theory of inheritance.72 The appeal at that time of the hypothesis about the inheritance of acquired features and traits is also shown in Mark B. Adamsʼ study The wellborn science, which looks at France, Brazil and Russia from a comparative and, at the same time, relational perspective. Another
study, published by Richard Cleminson, examines the reception and the controversial science of eugenics in Catalan and Valencian anarchist reviews in the early twentieth century. The result – not surprisingly – is that «anarchist eugenics […]
was not stable and shifted focus and scientific rationale over time as new ideas came
to fore». By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the intersection between progressive science, eugenics and revolutionary change came under increasing criticism. The negative and impractical aspects of eugenics were highlighted and there was a growing awareness of the authoritarian and abusive uses to which eugenics was being put, especially in the eyes of the anarchists.73 To sum up this point, Stepan correctly emphasises that «eugenics was embedded in local value systems of communication and value» and that «the meanings and social uses of eugenics cannot be under-
stood without reference to these various contexts».74
8. Eugenics as a Multifarious Project of Modernity
The preceding historical overview has shown that the notion «eugenics» had different meanings for a great variety of supporters and opponents from the start. It was associated with compulsory and coercive policies, especially against women, as well as programmes of social promotion appealing to voluntary participation. It also comprised «private» and «utilitarian» motives for eugenic «improvements». As a politically ambivalent and ideologically adaptable project eugenics was entangled with the history of public and reproductive health, social reform and population
control. It was propagated by defenders of a superior race, reactionary critics of hu-)man rights, socially engaged scientists, progressive anarchists, revolutionary Bolsheviks and reform-oriented Social Democrats.
After the Nazi regime collapsed in 1945, «social welfare» became a political keyword in Western European societies, combining the ideals of inclusive consumerism and democratic participation. Eugenic aspirations therefore gained new momentum after 1945 within the framework of a «Keynesian State».75
A wide array .of measures was introduced to improve both the general state of health and the
overall degree of genetic fitness of the (mainly national) population. The case of France is of special interest, because, as William H. Schneider elucidates, the continuity of eugenics there was much stronger than in Germany or the United States:
«The survival of eugenics in the post-war period was more than simply the carry-over of old ideas […] It also depended on the introduction of new ideas and the attraction of new followers.» It was the «persistent desire by governments to use that scientific knowledge to correct the biological problems» which made it possible for
«eugenic thought in France (to survive) even so traumatic an episode as the Second
World War».76
The new context of the after-war period was also rooted in century-old traditions.
Not only the political project of Social democracy, but the welfare state in general has also stood for «more insurance for more people» since its origins in the nineteenth century.77
Controlling the primary causes of expanding costs became a major goal of all political forces involved in the development of social security and modern medicine. Especially in small European countries, a healthy state budget, a sound currency, improved public health and social solidarity were often mentioned in the same breath.78
All these developments fit into a broader picture of the rationalization of social relations.
In the after-war period, applied science permeated nearly all areas of modern society with an unprecedented intensity. The acceleration of social processes, the cost degression for consumer goods through standardized mass production and the normalization of human involvement in medicine and social policy converged in a
widely accepted and deliberately supported effort to improve living conditions, most notably expressed in a sustained increase in life expectancy and the Gross National Product (GNP) per capita. Under such circumstances, the idea to reduce medical costs and social problems by influencing mate selection, marital attitudes and reproductive behaviour through education, counselling and even coercive programmes
for «problematic» minorities found public resonance and political support. Whereas
any semantic reference to the new genetic research and counselling with eugenics was suppressed in Germany and also in the United States, European countries that did not undergo a period of dictatorship continued their eugenic programmes. They were integrated into the fabric of everyday life and corresponded with widely shared
opinions about the foundations of heredity with regard to private and public health.
In the 1960s, however, criticism against thoseapproaches also intensified in these societies. The more «individual fulfilment» and «self-determination» became catch phrases of a movement, which was later labelled «68», and the more moral changes gave rise to a permissive society, the more difficult it became to continue a
programme of «top down» eugenics, enforced by law (as in the case of the Scandinavian countries) or executed in a legal grey-zone by medical or psychiatric experts ;(as in the case of Switzerland).
For some decades now, the constellation has changed again and some salient new features have come to the foreground. On the one hand, the traditional model of the welfare state is challenged by political parties and social forces looking to foster the value of individual self-responsibility as a panacea against hypertrophic social insurance costs. The idea that social groups considered to be problematic have to be controlled and disciplined has returned. On the other hand, genetics, reproductive medicine, in-vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic diagnosis open a new space for family-planning aspirations. These can easily be identified as «eugenic», as they track down genetic defects, phenotypical anomalies or severe diseases of human beings to a phase of the growth of an embryo, which can then be eliminated.
But this «liberal eugenics»79 or «eugenics from below»80 is based on a new political-judicial paradigm.81 Explicitly criticising any form of coercion in the name of collectivist rights, it operates by the free choice of individuals or families. This individualisation of eugenics, which is tantamount with the atomization of decisive
power, produces nonetheless important and formative consequences on a social level. By establishing new standards for health, perfection and happiness, these aggregated effects can be analyzed in their impact on further individual decisions.
The «freedom of choice» is subverted by a stigmatization of deviant social behaviour or human beings. Social constraints strike back in the utilitarian practices deliberately designed to overcome them.82 Simultaneously, the choice of individuals is not politically circumventable in a way that can prevent or prohibit the use of reproduc-
tive medicine.
3
The notion of «biopower», as proposed by Michel Foucault, may help in understanding the long-term problem associated with eugenics. Foucault introduced the concept in 1979 in his lectures at the Collège de France in order to denote a third
«dispositive» besides the disciplinary techniques and judicial power. Biopower is a technology of power that allows for the control of entire populations by governing individual bodies. In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault observes that since the enlightenment of the eighteenth century there has been «an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations».83 From this perspective, eugenics is not just an aberration of public health in the three-decades-long «age of catastrophe» before 1945. On the contrary, it is,
even in its recent transformation into a «bottom up» concern of individuals and parents, an expression of a «liberal governmentality» which aims not at exhausting or «consuming», but at producing and multiplying life.84 It is deeply rooted in the normality of a modern society, with its ongoing inequalities and hierarchies, governed by scientific knowledge, democratic procedures and expanding dispositives of prevention in order to make people happy, sound and safe.
ABSTRACTS
Eugenics before 1945
An appropriate understanding of eugenics before 1945 implies that this break is
questioned and put into perspective. The article conceives eugenics as a multifari-
ous project of modernity that derived from the biopolitical aspiration to improve
public health and enhance human capabilities. Consequently, it was supported
across the political spectrum. In the course of the Twentieth Century, an interna-
tional eugenics movement took shape and found widespread and transnational
resonance in the public opinion. However, the conflation of the Aryan myth, racial
purity and medical coercive measures in Nazi-Germany discredited the concept
of eugenics after 1945. Nonetheless, such measures, often combined with ele-
ments of soft coercion, were applied in many countries, particularly in the U.S.,
the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland up to the 1970s. Meanwhile, the
feasibility of Reproductive Medicine gave rise to a «liberal eugenics» which is
entrenched in the promises of health and happiness descending from the Nine-
teenth Century.
Eugenik vor 1945
Ein angemessenes Verständnis der Eugenik vor 1945 setzt voraus, dass genau
infrage gestellt und relativiert wird, dass es 1945 einen Bruch gegeben habe. Viel-
mehr wird die Eugenik als facettenreiches Modernitätsprojekt begriffen, das biopo-
litischen Bestrebungen entstammt, mithilfe derer die «Volksgesundheit» verbes-
sert und menschliche Fähigkeiten gefördert werden sollten. Demzufolge erhielt es
die Unterstützung des gesamten politischen Spektrums. Im Laufe des 20. Jahrhun-
derts bildete sich eine internationale Eugenik-Bewegung, die in der transnationalen
Öffentlichkeit großen Anklang fand. Nach der Vermischung von Eugenik mit dem
Ariermythos, der Rassenreinheit und medizinischen Zwangsmaßnahmen im Natio-
nalsozialismus waren Eugenik-Konzepte nach 1945 diskreditiert. Gleichwohl wur-
den eugenische Maßnahmen bis in die 1970er Jahre in zahlreichen Ländern prakti-
ziert und oft mit subtilen Zwangsmaßnahmen kombiniert: insbesondere in den USA,
den skandinavischen Ländern und der Schweiz. Unterdessen ebneten die Möglich-
keiten der Reproduktionsmedizin den Weg für eine «liberale Eugenik», die untrenn-
bar mit den aus dem 19. Jahrhundert stammenden Gesundheits- und Glücksverhei-
ßungen verbunden sind.
Eugénisme avant 1945
Une bonne compréhension de l’eugénisme avant 1945 exige une interrogation et
une mise en perspective de cette rupture. L’article conçoit l’eugénisme comme un
projet de modernité multiforme provenant d’aspirations biopolitiques visant à
améliorer la santé publique et à renforcer les capacités humaines. Par conséquent,
il reçut le soutien de l’ensemble de la classe politique. Au cours du XXème siècle
apparut un mouvement eugénique international qui fut fort bien accueilli par
l’opinion publique transnationale. La confusion entre eugénisme, mythe aryen,
pureté raciale et mesures médicales coercitives qu’eut lieu dans l’Allemagne natio-
nal-socialiste conduisit néanmoins au discrédit du concept de l’eugénisme après
1945. Toutefois, de telles mesures furent appliquées dans de nombreux pays
jusqu’aux années 1970 et furent souvent combinées à des dispositifs de coercition
subtile: en particulier aux Etats-Unis, dans les pays scandinaves et en Suisse. En
attendant, les possibilités de la médecine de la reproduction défrichèrent le terrain
pour un «eugénisme libéral» s’inscrivant dans le sillage des promesses de santé et
de bonheur héritées du XIXème siècle.
Jakob Tanner
Forschungsstelle für Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte
Universität Zürich
Rämistraße 64
CH-8001 Zürich
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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in: Wecker et al., What is National Socialist about
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