Rasp
Senior Editor
Nazi race policies based on US scientific models
Hitler’s hero: Heinrich Ford
Philip Roth, in his novel ”�’The Plot Against America’, imagined what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had been elected president of the United States in 1940, since the aviator was an antisemite and Nazi sympathiser. But there was nothing fictitious about the influence of Nazism in the US; in fact Hitler was inspired by US proponents of eugenics and racism
By Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas
The historian Daniel Goldhagen has tried to explain Nazism as an exclusively German antisemitic perversion. Other historians, including Ernst Nolte, refer to “Asian"� behaviour and possible emulation of the Bolsheviks. But what if Hannah Arendt’s early perception was right and the roots of Nazi
racism and antisemitism really were in the West (1), even perhaps in the United States? One of Hitler’s favourite books was written by Henry Ford, a highly representative American, while the scientific doctrines and political and judicial racist practices of the US made an appreciable impact on currents of thought in Germany.
The connection is based on a long US tradition of formulating the idea of race in legal terms. That tradition fascinated the Nazi movement from the start. The US, for historical reasons connected with the practice of slavery, is the unique example of a power that used an official racial classification as the basis of citizenship. The US had successive, though shifting, definitions of “whiteness"� and “blackness"� that served as legal categories for 350 years; some of its states practised forced sterilisation decades before the rise of Nazism in Germany; and Adolf Hitler was envious of US immigration policies of the 1920s. So the US connection is a good place from which to
reassess the modern sources of Nazism and its continuation through certain political practices in western societies, including some democracies.
Political culture in the US rightfully denounces antisemitism and the Holocaust. But there is an embarrassed silence about the links and affinities between Nazi Germany and some important members of the US economic and scientific establishment. Only recently have books been published that tackle these sensitive issues; they notably include The Nazi Connection by Stefan Kühl, a German sociologist and historian who researched in the US, (2) and The American Axis by Max Wallace, a US journalist who has lived in Canada for many years. (3)
“There is today one country in which the beginnings of a better conception of citizenship are noticeable,"� Hitler wrote in 1924. He was referring to the US effort to maintain “the preponderance of Nordic stock"� through its immigration and naturalisation policy. Hitler’s plans for “racial hygiene
"� set out in Mein Kampf were modelled on the US Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which prohibited admission to people suffering from hereditary diseases and to immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. When the Nazis established their programme in 1933 for the “improvement"� of the German population through forced sterilisation and the regulation of marriages, they openly based it on the US, where a number of states had been sterilising “defectives"� for decades. The practice had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.
Close links
Kühl’s study traces the close links that developed between German and US eugenicists in the interwar period and the transfer of scientific ideas and legal and medical practice. His main thesis, well-documented and rigorously argued, is that the continued support of US eugenicists for their German colleagues before the entry of the US into the second world war in December 1941, and their endorsement of most aspects of Nazi rac
ial policy, were crucial sources of scientific legitimacy for Hitler’s “racial state"�.
Contrary to the dominant historiography, Kühl proves that it was not just a few extremists and marginalised US eugenicists who were impressed by the rhetoric of Nazi race hygienists, but a substantial group of scientists whose enthusiasm did not wane when rhetoric became reality. Kühl’s analysis of the changes in relations between the scientific communities exposes the influence of the “achievements"� of US eugenics on the proponents of racial hygiene, especially the efficiency of an immigration policy that “combined ethnic and eugenic selection"� and the US eugenics movement’s success in passing laws forcing sterilisation.
Social workers and public health officials in the Weimar Republic wanted to cut the costs of social protection, so German racial hygiene specialists turned towards forced sterilisation measures practised in several US states to reduce the economic burden of “defectives"�
"�. There are many references to the US, the first country to institutionalise forced sterilisation, in German medical theses of the period. One of the explanations for the advanced status of US eugenics was the presence of blacks, which “forced the white population to adopt a systematic programme of race improvement very early on"�. The same explanation was later made by US apologists for the Nazi regime, such as the geneticist Tage Ellinger, who likened persecution of the Jews to the treatment of blacks in the US.
With the rise of Nazism, US eugenicists, such as Joseph Deadnettle, a member of the Virginia sterilisation movement, discovered that “the Germans are beating us at our own game"�. That did not stop them from actively supporting the Nazis’ racist policies; most of them stayed silent in response to the persecution of the Third Reich’s own “blacks"�, the Jews and gypsies.
Different voices
The eugenics community was not unanimous. Socialist eugenicists
such as Herman Muller and Walter Landaulet, the progressive geneticist L C Dunn and the anthropologist Franz Boas, vociferously condemned the Nazis. The latter two were critical of eugenics as such, yet Muller and Landaulet’s “scientific"� critique of Nazism denied the existence of a hierarchy of races while agreeing on the need to improve humanity by promoting the reproduction of “capable"� individuals and prohibiting that of “inferiors"�.
Kühl’s chapter on science and racism, and the influence of different concepts of race on attitudes toward Nazi race policies, refutes the conventional wisdom that the pseudo-scientific tendencies in US eugenics, which were responsible for the racist Immigration Act of 1924, gave way in the 1930s to a more scientific progressive eugenics that broke with “racial hygiene"�.
Kühl shows that differentiations in the US eugenics movements were not the result of “more scientific"� ideas. The struggle within the international scientific community
over Nazi racial policy was a conflict between divergent positions on racial improvement and the scientific, economic and political means of achieving it.
Kühl proposes two concepts, “ethnic racism"� and “genetic racism"�, necessary for a proper understanding of the eugenics movement. The first was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946. The second was a more difficult matter. Most German racial hygienists were not tried for the forced sterilisation of 400,000 people; recent research has shown that the Nuremberg prosecution tried, in part, to show that the mass murders and experiments in the camps were practices distinct from “authentic eugenics"�.
Tage Ellinger published an article in the American Genetic Association’s Journal of Heredity in April 1942, claiming that the deliberate eradication of the Jews had nothing to do with religious persecution but was “a large-scale breeding project with the objective of eliminating from the nation the hereditary attributes of t
he Semitic race"�. He concluded that “when the problem arises as to how the breeding project may be carried out most effectively, after the politicians have decided upon its desirability, biological science could even assist the Nazis"�. A few years later Karl Brandt, the head of the Nazi programme for the elimination of the handicapped, declared to his judges that the programme had been based on US experiments, some of which dated from 1907. He cited in his defence Alexis Carel, in whose honour the medicine faculty of the University of Lyon1 was named until recently. (4)
Wallace’s book investigates the relationship that two 20th century US icons, the car manufacturer Henry Ford and the aviator Charles Lindbergh, had with Nazism.
Lindbergh, who became a hero after making the first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, played a major political role in the 1930s as a US sympathiser with the Third Reich. From 1939 on, he was one of the organisers (together with Ford) of the campaign agains
t FD Roosevelt, who was accused of planning to intervene in Europe against the Axis powers.
”�’America’s leader of the fascist movement’
Ford’s contribution is less well known. Max Wallace shows convincingly that Ford’s book The International Jew (1920) (see ”�’Conspiracy theories couched in “science"� ’, below), inspired by the most brutal antisemitism, had a considerable impact in Germany. It was translated into German as early as 1921, and was one of the main sources of Nazi antisemitism and Hitler’s own ideas. In December 1922 a journalist from The New York Times visiting Germany reported that “the wall behind the desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford"�. A table in the waiting room was covered with copies in German of The International Jew. In February 1923 an article in the same paper reported a statement by Erhard Auer, vice-president of the Bavarian Diet, accusing Ford of funding Hitler bec
ause he was in favour of Hitler’s programme for “the extermination of Jews in Germany"�.
Wallace points out that this article is one of the first known references to Hitler’s intentions. On 8 March 1923, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Hitler declared: “We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy, which is the Bavarian Fascist platform."� (5) Two years later, in Mein Kampf, Hitler paid tribute to Ford as the only man resisting the Jews in the US, but his debt to Ford is much greater. The ideas of The International Jew are omnipresent in Mein Kampf, and some passages, especially those concerning the role of Jewish conspirators in the German and Russian revolutions, are taken from it almost verbatim.
In 1933, after the Nazi party had come to power, Edmund Heine, manager of Ford’s German subsidiary, wrote to Ford’s secretary, Ernest Liebold, that The Internatio
nal Jew was used by the new Nazi government to educate the German nation “to understand the Jewish problem as it should be understood."� (6) The documents collected by Wallace prove incontrovertibly that Ford was a major source of Nazi antisemitism.
Wallace points out that in 1938 Hitler awarded Ford, via the German consul in the US, the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, a medal created the previous year to honour distinguished foreigners. The same medal, a Maltese Cross surrounded by swastikas, had previously been awarded to Mussolini. But Wallace does not explain why, given so much European antisemitic writing, much of it of German origin, Hitler was so fascinated by Ford’s book. Why did he have a portrait of Ford in his office, rather than one of Paul Lagarde, Moeller van der Bruck, or other German ideologists of antisemitism? Apart from the prestige attached to Ford’s name, three factors would appear to explain Hitler’s interest in The International Jew: the
modern “biological"�, “medical"� and “hygienic"� terminology; its synthetic approach, embracing all the antisemitic diatribes in a coherent, grandiose discourse; and its international perspective.
Wallace provides documentary proof that Hitler was not the only Nazi leader influenced by the book. Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and later Gauleiter of Vienna, testified at his trial in 1946 that: “The decisive antisemitic book which I read at that time, and the book which influenced my comrades, was Henry Ford’s book The International Jew. I read it and became antisemitic."� Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg also mentioned it as a major reference for Nazi party ideology. (7)
In July 1927, under threat of a libel action and worried by the drop in sales of his vehicles, Ford issued a full retraction. In a press release he claimed that he had not been informed of the content of the antisemitic articles that had appeared in his company newspaper, The Dearborn
Independent, and asked Jews to forgive him for the “harm unintentionally committed"� by The International Jew. (8) His apology was judged insincere by a large section of the US press, but it enabled him to avoid legal proceedings. It did not prevent him from continuing to provide covert support for a series of antisemitic activities and publications. (9)
Ford’s role as a forerunner of Nazism has been hidden in the US in favour of the image of the modern industrialist who promoted the cheap, mass-produced motor car. Ford is the man whom Aldous Huxley depicted as a god in Brave New World, 1932, where the Lord’s Prayer was replaced by a prayer to “Our Ford"�.
The long, embarrassed silence is understandable. The case of Ford raises difficult issues about the role of racism in US culture and the relationship between “western civilisation"� and the Third Reich, between modernity and antisemitism, and between economic progress and social regression. Regression is not quit
e the right word: a book like The International Jew could not have been written before the 20th century, and Nazi antisemitism was a radically new phenomenon. The Ford case illuminates what Norbert Elias called the “process of civilisation"�.
Translated by Barry Smerin
------------------------
Notes: (1) See Hannah Arendt’s discussion of European colonialism, imperialism and antisemitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The argument is updated and amplified in Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi violence (New Press, New York and London, 2003).
(2) Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection. Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (OUP, Oxford and New York, 1994).
(3) Max Wallace, The American Axis. Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich (St Martin’s Press, New York, 2003).
(4) In May 1995 the Palais des CongrÃԚ¨s of Lyon hosted a conference on Carrel and scientific racism at which several particip
ants accused the inquiry commission of whitewashing him. In 1996, after five years of embarrassing publicity, the University of Lyon decided to rename its school of medicine after Rene LaÃԚÔ�šÃ”š«nnec, inventor of the stethoscope.
(5) Max Wallace, The American Axis.
(6) Ibid, p. 130.
(7) Ibid, pp. 42 and 57
(8) Ibid, pp. 31-33.
(9) On Ford’s antisemitic and pro-Nazi connections in the 1930s and his alliance with Lindbergh, see ibid.
Hitler’s hero: Heinrich Ford
Philip Roth, in his novel ”�’The Plot Against America’, imagined what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had been elected president of the United States in 1940, since the aviator was an antisemite and Nazi sympathiser. But there was nothing fictitious about the influence of Nazism in the US; in fact Hitler was inspired by US proponents of eugenics and racism
By Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas
The historian Daniel Goldhagen has tried to explain Nazism as an exclusively German antisemitic perversion. Other historians, including Ernst Nolte, refer to “Asian"� behaviour and possible emulation of the Bolsheviks. But what if Hannah Arendt’s early perception was right and the roots of Nazi
racism and antisemitism really were in the West (1), even perhaps in the United States? One of Hitler’s favourite books was written by Henry Ford, a highly representative American, while the scientific doctrines and political and judicial racist practices of the US made an appreciable impact on currents of thought in Germany.
The connection is based on a long US tradition of formulating the idea of race in legal terms. That tradition fascinated the Nazi movement from the start. The US, for historical reasons connected with the practice of slavery, is the unique example of a power that used an official racial classification as the basis of citizenship. The US had successive, though shifting, definitions of “whiteness"� and “blackness"� that served as legal categories for 350 years; some of its states practised forced sterilisation decades before the rise of Nazism in Germany; and Adolf Hitler was envious of US immigration policies of the 1920s. So the US connection is a good place from which to
reassess the modern sources of Nazism and its continuation through certain political practices in western societies, including some democracies.
Political culture in the US rightfully denounces antisemitism and the Holocaust. But there is an embarrassed silence about the links and affinities between Nazi Germany and some important members of the US economic and scientific establishment. Only recently have books been published that tackle these sensitive issues; they notably include The Nazi Connection by Stefan Kühl, a German sociologist and historian who researched in the US, (2) and The American Axis by Max Wallace, a US journalist who has lived in Canada for many years. (3)
“There is today one country in which the beginnings of a better conception of citizenship are noticeable,"� Hitler wrote in 1924. He was referring to the US effort to maintain “the preponderance of Nordic stock"� through its immigration and naturalisation policy. Hitler’s plans for “racial hygiene
"� set out in Mein Kampf were modelled on the US Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which prohibited admission to people suffering from hereditary diseases and to immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. When the Nazis established their programme in 1933 for the “improvement"� of the German population through forced sterilisation and the regulation of marriages, they openly based it on the US, where a number of states had been sterilising “defectives"� for decades. The practice had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.
Close links
Kühl’s study traces the close links that developed between German and US eugenicists in the interwar period and the transfer of scientific ideas and legal and medical practice. His main thesis, well-documented and rigorously argued, is that the continued support of US eugenicists for their German colleagues before the entry of the US into the second world war in December 1941, and their endorsement of most aspects of Nazi rac
ial policy, were crucial sources of scientific legitimacy for Hitler’s “racial state"�.
Contrary to the dominant historiography, Kühl proves that it was not just a few extremists and marginalised US eugenicists who were impressed by the rhetoric of Nazi race hygienists, but a substantial group of scientists whose enthusiasm did not wane when rhetoric became reality. Kühl’s analysis of the changes in relations between the scientific communities exposes the influence of the “achievements"� of US eugenics on the proponents of racial hygiene, especially the efficiency of an immigration policy that “combined ethnic and eugenic selection"� and the US eugenics movement’s success in passing laws forcing sterilisation.
Social workers and public health officials in the Weimar Republic wanted to cut the costs of social protection, so German racial hygiene specialists turned towards forced sterilisation measures practised in several US states to reduce the economic burden of “defectives"�
"�. There are many references to the US, the first country to institutionalise forced sterilisation, in German medical theses of the period. One of the explanations for the advanced status of US eugenics was the presence of blacks, which “forced the white population to adopt a systematic programme of race improvement very early on"�. The same explanation was later made by US apologists for the Nazi regime, such as the geneticist Tage Ellinger, who likened persecution of the Jews to the treatment of blacks in the US.
With the rise of Nazism, US eugenicists, such as Joseph Deadnettle, a member of the Virginia sterilisation movement, discovered that “the Germans are beating us at our own game"�. That did not stop them from actively supporting the Nazis’ racist policies; most of them stayed silent in response to the persecution of the Third Reich’s own “blacks"�, the Jews and gypsies.
Different voices
The eugenics community was not unanimous. Socialist eugenicists
such as Herman Muller and Walter Landaulet, the progressive geneticist L C Dunn and the anthropologist Franz Boas, vociferously condemned the Nazis. The latter two were critical of eugenics as such, yet Muller and Landaulet’s “scientific"� critique of Nazism denied the existence of a hierarchy of races while agreeing on the need to improve humanity by promoting the reproduction of “capable"� individuals and prohibiting that of “inferiors"�.
Kühl’s chapter on science and racism, and the influence of different concepts of race on attitudes toward Nazi race policies, refutes the conventional wisdom that the pseudo-scientific tendencies in US eugenics, which were responsible for the racist Immigration Act of 1924, gave way in the 1930s to a more scientific progressive eugenics that broke with “racial hygiene"�.
Kühl shows that differentiations in the US eugenics movements were not the result of “more scientific"� ideas. The struggle within the international scientific community
over Nazi racial policy was a conflict between divergent positions on racial improvement and the scientific, economic and political means of achieving it.
Kühl proposes two concepts, “ethnic racism"� and “genetic racism"�, necessary for a proper understanding of the eugenics movement. The first was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946. The second was a more difficult matter. Most German racial hygienists were not tried for the forced sterilisation of 400,000 people; recent research has shown that the Nuremberg prosecution tried, in part, to show that the mass murders and experiments in the camps were practices distinct from “authentic eugenics"�.
Tage Ellinger published an article in the American Genetic Association’s Journal of Heredity in April 1942, claiming that the deliberate eradication of the Jews had nothing to do with religious persecution but was “a large-scale breeding project with the objective of eliminating from the nation the hereditary attributes of t
he Semitic race"�. He concluded that “when the problem arises as to how the breeding project may be carried out most effectively, after the politicians have decided upon its desirability, biological science could even assist the Nazis"�. A few years later Karl Brandt, the head of the Nazi programme for the elimination of the handicapped, declared to his judges that the programme had been based on US experiments, some of which dated from 1907. He cited in his defence Alexis Carel, in whose honour the medicine faculty of the University of Lyon1 was named until recently. (4)
Wallace’s book investigates the relationship that two 20th century US icons, the car manufacturer Henry Ford and the aviator Charles Lindbergh, had with Nazism.
Lindbergh, who became a hero after making the first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, played a major political role in the 1930s as a US sympathiser with the Third Reich. From 1939 on, he was one of the organisers (together with Ford) of the campaign agains
t FD Roosevelt, who was accused of planning to intervene in Europe against the Axis powers.
”�’America’s leader of the fascist movement’
Ford’s contribution is less well known. Max Wallace shows convincingly that Ford’s book The International Jew (1920) (see ”�’Conspiracy theories couched in “science"� ’, below), inspired by the most brutal antisemitism, had a considerable impact in Germany. It was translated into German as early as 1921, and was one of the main sources of Nazi antisemitism and Hitler’s own ideas. In December 1922 a journalist from The New York Times visiting Germany reported that “the wall behind the desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford"�. A table in the waiting room was covered with copies in German of The International Jew. In February 1923 an article in the same paper reported a statement by Erhard Auer, vice-president of the Bavarian Diet, accusing Ford of funding Hitler bec
ause he was in favour of Hitler’s programme for “the extermination of Jews in Germany"�.
Wallace points out that this article is one of the first known references to Hitler’s intentions. On 8 March 1923, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Hitler declared: “We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy, which is the Bavarian Fascist platform."� (5) Two years later, in Mein Kampf, Hitler paid tribute to Ford as the only man resisting the Jews in the US, but his debt to Ford is much greater. The ideas of The International Jew are omnipresent in Mein Kampf, and some passages, especially those concerning the role of Jewish conspirators in the German and Russian revolutions, are taken from it almost verbatim.
In 1933, after the Nazi party had come to power, Edmund Heine, manager of Ford’s German subsidiary, wrote to Ford’s secretary, Ernest Liebold, that The Internatio
nal Jew was used by the new Nazi government to educate the German nation “to understand the Jewish problem as it should be understood."� (6) The documents collected by Wallace prove incontrovertibly that Ford was a major source of Nazi antisemitism.
Wallace points out that in 1938 Hitler awarded Ford, via the German consul in the US, the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, a medal created the previous year to honour distinguished foreigners. The same medal, a Maltese Cross surrounded by swastikas, had previously been awarded to Mussolini. But Wallace does not explain why, given so much European antisemitic writing, much of it of German origin, Hitler was so fascinated by Ford’s book. Why did he have a portrait of Ford in his office, rather than one of Paul Lagarde, Moeller van der Bruck, or other German ideologists of antisemitism? Apart from the prestige attached to Ford’s name, three factors would appear to explain Hitler’s interest in The International Jew: the
modern “biological"�, “medical"� and “hygienic"� terminology; its synthetic approach, embracing all the antisemitic diatribes in a coherent, grandiose discourse; and its international perspective.
Wallace provides documentary proof that Hitler was not the only Nazi leader influenced by the book. Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and later Gauleiter of Vienna, testified at his trial in 1946 that: “The decisive antisemitic book which I read at that time, and the book which influenced my comrades, was Henry Ford’s book The International Jew. I read it and became antisemitic."� Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg also mentioned it as a major reference for Nazi party ideology. (7)
In July 1927, under threat of a libel action and worried by the drop in sales of his vehicles, Ford issued a full retraction. In a press release he claimed that he had not been informed of the content of the antisemitic articles that had appeared in his company newspaper, The Dearborn
Independent, and asked Jews to forgive him for the “harm unintentionally committed"� by The International Jew. (8) His apology was judged insincere by a large section of the US press, but it enabled him to avoid legal proceedings. It did not prevent him from continuing to provide covert support for a series of antisemitic activities and publications. (9)
Ford’s role as a forerunner of Nazism has been hidden in the US in favour of the image of the modern industrialist who promoted the cheap, mass-produced motor car. Ford is the man whom Aldous Huxley depicted as a god in Brave New World, 1932, where the Lord’s Prayer was replaced by a prayer to “Our Ford"�.
The long, embarrassed silence is understandable. The case of Ford raises difficult issues about the role of racism in US culture and the relationship between “western civilisation"� and the Third Reich, between modernity and antisemitism, and between economic progress and social regression. Regression is not quit
e the right word: a book like The International Jew could not have been written before the 20th century, and Nazi antisemitism was a radically new phenomenon. The Ford case illuminates what Norbert Elias called the “process of civilisation"�.
Translated by Barry Smerin
------------------------
Notes: (1) See Hannah Arendt’s discussion of European colonialism, imperialism and antisemitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The argument is updated and amplified in Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi violence (New Press, New York and London, 2003).
(2) Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection. Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (OUP, Oxford and New York, 1994).
(3) Max Wallace, The American Axis. Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich (St Martin’s Press, New York, 2003).
(4) In May 1995 the Palais des CongrÃԚ¨s of Lyon hosted a conference on Carrel and scientific racism at which several particip
ants accused the inquiry commission of whitewashing him. In 1996, after five years of embarrassing publicity, the University of Lyon decided to rename its school of medicine after Rene LaÃԚÔ�šÃ”š«nnec, inventor of the stethoscope.
(5) Max Wallace, The American Axis.
(6) Ibid, p. 130.
(7) Ibid, pp. 42 and 57
(8) Ibid, pp. 31-33.
(9) On Ford’s antisemitic and pro-Nazi connections in the 1930s and his alliance with Lindbergh, see ibid.