Hitler Made Eugenics Famous, But He Took It From United States

Hitler victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called “Master Race.”The world thought Hitler was mad and barely understood his rationales. But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Adolf Hitler’s.

The Idea was created in the United States at least two decades before Hitler came to power.

It was the product of the American eugenics movement.

Eugenics was the racist American pseudoscience designed to wipe out all human beings except those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. The philosophy was enshrined into national policy by forced sterilization, segregation laws and marriage restrictions that were enacted in 27 states.

Ultimately, eugenics coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands more in colonies and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning.

Only after eugenics and race biology became entrenched as an American ideal was the campaign transplanted to Germany, where it came to Hitler’s attention.

Hitler studied American eugenic laws and rationales and sought to legitimize his innate race hatred and anti-Semitism by medicalizing it and wrapping it in a pseudoscientific facade. Indeed, Hitler was able to attract many reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side.

While Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were strictly American.

Eugenics would have been little more than bizarre parlor talk had it not been for massive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune.

(more…)

PHP Freelancer