- PORT ST. LUCIE - The
goal of creating a "master race" originated not with Adolph Hitler
and the Nazis of World War II, but with the intellectual and financial
elite of the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, a best-selling
author says.
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- "American eugenics funded and founded Nazi eugenics,"
said Edwin Black, an investigative reporter and author of the newly released
"War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a
Master Race."
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- Black, who is Jewish and whose parents were Holocaust
survivors, is best known for writing the 2001 international bestseller
"IBM and the Holocaust," which uncovered the Nazi government's
use of IBM punch-card technology to efficiently execute its "final
solution" of genocide of the Jews.
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- The author will lecture on the findings of his latest
book, as well as other topics, during a three-day tenure as scholar-in-residence
Nov. 7-9 at Temple Beth El Israel in Port St. Lucie.
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- Eugenics is the study of hereditary improvements through
genetic controls. It flourished in the United States at the turn of the
century because that was a period of "racial and demographic upheaval,"
Black said, caused by increased immigration from Eastern Europe, the emancipation
of black slaves, Hispanics annexed by war and the continuing integration
of Native Americans into society.
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- Funded by American philanthropic organizations such as
the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, and backed by
some major universities, eugenics was used to justify government policies
of coerced sterilization, birth control and other methods to stem the birthrate
among impoverished Americans, immigrants and other "mongrel"
populations in the United States, Black said.
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- "They felt that mankind could be bred like you would
breed a better herd of cattle or a better field of wheat," he said.
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- During the first three decades of the century, about
60,000 Americans were sterilized, some forcibly, in 27 states that adopted
laws that required sterilization, marriage restrictions and annulment,
Black said. Florida never adopted such laws.
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- "Their idea was to eliminate all other racial and
ethnic groups and those considered medically or socially or psychologically
unacceptable," Black said in a telephone interview from his office
in Washington, D.C. "Their idea of utopia was where no one would exist
but themselves."
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- After Hitler came to power in the 1930s, his existing
anti-Semitic ideology became infused with American eugenics ideas, methods
and money, leading ultimately to the now-infamous Nazi gas chambers and
human medical experiments by war criminals such as Joseph Mengele, Black
said.
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- He said his talks at the temple - and at other stops
on his 40-city tour - will be dramatic events.
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- "It will be a far more sad and disconsolate presentation,
where people will be shocked and have to come to grips with the unhappy
truth about America's role in ethnic cleansing," he said.
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- - jeff.brumley@scripps.com
-
- © 2002 - The E.W. Scripps Co.
- http://www.tcpalm.com/tcp/faith_and_values/article/0,1651,TCP_1155_2391925,00.html
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