Epilogue:
Schallmayer, Aryan Racism, and the Logic of German Eugenics
On October 4, 1919, after many years of suffering from various heart ailments and a severe case of asthma, the sixty-two-year-old Schallmayer succumbed to a heart attack. At the time of his death, in addition to his major prizewinning work and two other lesser known treatises, the intellectual father of the German eugenics movement had published forty-two articles in some of Germany's most prestigious medical, social science, and eugenics journals. His unquestionable intellectual importance for the development of German race hygiene was not unrecognized by his fellow eugenicists. For Hermann Siemens, Schallmayer was a "pioneer for race hygiene in our fatherland";[1] Gruber called the Bavarian physician "the first German to fully comprehend the enormous import . . . of Darwin's . . . laws for the human species."[2] But it was Lenz, one of the most influential race hygienists during the Weimar and Nazi years, who offered the most complementary assessment: "no one has accomplished more [than Schallmayer]"; his Vererbung und Auslese remains the "classical masterpiece of German race hygiene" and its author "enjoys a world-wide reputation, especially in England and America."[3]
Despite their sincere respect for Schallmayer's contribution to the field, Gruber's and Lenz's appraisals were not completely frank. Although during the last years of the Wilhelmine period both men stressed the same general concerns as Schallmayer, one important issue separated them from the man they eulogized: the issue of Aryan supremacy. Schallmayer, of course, was adamantly opposed to the racist connotation of Rassenhygiene—so much so that he never employed the word himself. In his view, race hygiene neither presupposed the absolute superiority of any so-called anthropological race, nor did it strive to improve one "race" at the expense of another. Though Schallmayer was certainly not without personal prejudices concerning the relative value of the three major races, he made no attempt to rank-order the various "racial groups" within the white race, for he believed the differences to be meaningless, or at best superficial. Even in cases where he felt that something approaching "racial superiority" could be discerned (e.g., in examining differences between whites and blacks), racial differences always remained less significant than class differences among individuals of the same race.[4] However, owing to their sympathies for Germanentum , others like Gruber, Lenz, and Ploetz found the double connotation of Rassenhygiene both expedient and desirable, and did nothing to prevent Aryan ideologues from joining the movement.[5]
Not only did Ploetz and his like-minded colleagues tolerate Aryan enthusiasts, they even catered to them. In 1911, only six years after the creation of Germany's first professional eugenics society, Ploetz, Lenz, and a physician named Arthur Wollny founded a secret "Nordic Ring" within the German Society for Race Hygiene. Its aim was the improvement of the Nordic race. As an unpublished pamphlet entitled Unser Weg (Our Way) points out, Ploetz and his sympathizers in the Nordic Ring harbored plans for a "Nordic-Germanic race hygiene"—if only as a part of a much broader eugenics program—which would direct its attention to saving the allegedly culturally superior Nordic elements in Western civilization.[6] In addition, these same men
helped establish other similar, though not secret, völkisch organizations, including the little-known and totally insignificant Munich-based Bogenklub (1912) and the Deutsche Widar-Bund (1919). The latter, created in the aftermath of Germany's humiliating defeat, was not only pro-Aryan but also anti-Semitic and extremely nationalistic.[7] Although unsuccessful, these völkisch organizations and subgroups, to which Schallmayer never belonged, were in large measure responsible for the growing tendency, especially after the war, to equate race hygiene with the aims of "racial anthropology."
Ploetz and Lenz's defense of the ambiguous term Rassenhygiene and their decision to keep the movement open to Aryan enthusiasts were decidedly self-serving. Their own sympathies for the Nordic race notwithstanding, they were willing to do anything to attract the greatest number of qualified individuals to the movement, and that included capitalizing on the inroads made by the social anthropologists and other völkisch thinkers. Yet it cannot be stressed enough that even those eugenicists who sympathized with Aryan ideologies were concerned first and foremost with promoting the purely meritocratic, class-based eugenics so visible in Schallmayer's writings. Ploetz, one of the founders of the society, did not equate "fitness" with any particular race, but rather tended to view it, as did Schallmayer, in terms of social and cultural productivity. Lenz echoed Ploetz's understanding of the term: "Productivity and success in social life serve as a measure of the worth of individuals and families."[8] The Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie , Germany's major eugenics journal founded in 1904, was all but free of any völkisch articles, even after 1933. The concerns articulated in the Archiv were the same as those of Schallmayer and other nonracist German eugenicists. Prior to the Nazi period most of the entries were concerned with so-called degenerative phenomena, the dysgenic effects of certain social institutions, the social and economic costs of protecting the weak, and the "population problem." Moreover, throughout the Wilhelmine and Weimar
periods Aufnordung (Nordification) was never a preoccupation of any German eugenicist; nor was a Nordic or Germanic heritage a prerequisite for joining the society. Physical, ethical, intellectual, and economic "fitness," however, were criteria for membership, at least during the society's early days.[9]
The overriding importance of the meritocratic tendency throughout the pre-Nazi period can perhaps best be seen in a statement made by Gruber on the occasion of Schallmayer's death:
Even if one were convinced that Nordic blood is something particularly precious [ein ganz besonders kostbarer Saft ], one must agree with Schallmayer that it would be a futile beginning, and more than that, a dangerous mistake leading to new discord, to want to one-sidedly select out the Nordic race from the racial mixture represented by Germans as well as other European peoples. . . . The desired goal of race hygiene can only be the unprejudiced promotion of the reproduction of the fittest and most valuable, and the limitation of reproduction of the least valuable and unfit—in a word individual selection within separate peoples (i.e., historically developed linguistic and cultural groups), without allowing external characteristics of anthropological races to be the sole deciding factor.[10]
Despite the preoccupation of some prominent German eugenicists with the "Aryan cause," it would be wrong to speak of two separate subdivisions within race hygiene, one meritocratic, and one racist or völkisch. Even during the politically troubled Weimar years, when differences over the race question were at their height, there was no official split in the society.[11] Instead the entire movement prior to the Nazi takeover was meritocratic, with some eugenicists and some chapters of the society also entertaining the possibility of a more limited "Aryan race hygiene." Nor should one think that Schallmayer's nonracist race hygiene was atypical, even among those in the vanguard of the movement. During the Wilhelmine period it was shared by one of Germany's most prominent eugenicists, Alfred Grotjahn. Throughout the Weimar Republic, Schallmayer's antiracist stance was continued by prominent eugenicists such as Hermann Muckermann (1877–1962), director of the Eugenics Department
of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik in Berlin, and Artur Ostermann (1876–?), senior health official in the Prussian Ministry of Welfare and editor of the popular Berlin-based eugenics journal, Zeitschrift für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde , founded in 1926.
Yet even if one wishes to stress the differences between individuals on the compatibility of Aryanism and the goals of race hygiene, the technocratic logic underlying German eugenics remains the same for all adherents. The degree to which the logic so clearly articulated by Schallmayer had permeated the thinking of other race hygienists, indeed the society as a whole, can be seen in a statement made by the geneticist and eugenicist Erwin Baur, chairman of the Berlin chapter, together with two others, in a form letter written during World War I. In what was a clear attempt to elicit contributions for the creation of eugenics research institute, Baur appealed to the patriotic sentiment and good economic sense of those Germans in a financial position to help their cause:
Will there be enough German men who recognize the hour of fate and who are ready to make sacrifices for the health of the national body [Volkskörper ]? Huge sums are offered for private welfare; but would it not be more expedient to prevent invalidism and [hereditary] inferiority by means of an energetic race hygiene? In the future we will have to economize our resources in all areas. Race hygiene is the prototype of a prudent rational management of human life .[12]
The language of efficiency and the logic of managerial control over population to reduce future social costs is unmistakable.
The openness with which this logic was advanced was further strengthened during the late Weimar years. The harsh realities of the 1929 Great Depression and the constant demand to dismantle the welfare state revealed, in the crassest terms, the relationship between race hygiene and other forms of rationalization, and the cost-benefit analysis underlying both:
Civilization has eliminated natural selection. Public welfare and social assistance contribute, as an undesired side effect of a necessary duty, to the preservation and further reproduction of hereditarily
diseased individuals. A crushing and ever-growing burden of useless individuals unworthy of life are maintained and taken care of in institutions at the expense of the healthy—of whom a hundred thousand are today without their own place to live and millions of whom starve from lack of work. Does not today's predicament cry out strongly enough for a "planned economy," that is, eugenics, in health policy?[13]
Appearing in the Preface to the Berlin-based race hygiene journal Eugenik ,[14] a publication with a circulation of over five thousand and an editorial board which included both racist society members (Lenz) and nonracists (Muckermann), this statement is testimony not only to the astute marketing strategy of its author but also to the real nature of eugenics. Race hygienists judged individuals according to their social productivity; those deemed to be a national liability—people who, in the words of Muckermann, "cannot be brought back to work and life,"[15] —must be institutionalized as cheaply as possible. Their tainted germplasm, however, should under no circumstances be passed on to future generations. Only Vorsorge (foresight) in the form of eugenics could prevent generations of increased Fürsorge (welfare).
The necessity for concerned bureaucrats and eugenicists to find alternatives to pouring ever-increasing sums of money into institutions for the insane, the feeble-minded, and the criminal resulted in an extensive lobbying campaign for a sterilization law. Although by 1930 many eugenicists desired mandatory sterilization for the "unfit," such a position was still seen as politically inopportune. In Prussia, a law was drafted in 1932 which sought to halt the tide of the unfit by permitting the "voluntary" sterilization of certain classes of genetically defective individuals. It was supported by both racist and nonracist eugenicists and made no mention of sterilization on racial grounds.[16] Unfortunately for its advocates the political turmoil following the deposition of the Prussian government by the Reich in July 1932 ensured that the draft never found its way into law under the Republic. This did not, however, stop the requests by officials of several of Germany's state governments and members of the
medical establishment for such a law. The Deutsche Ärztevereinsbund (German Physicians' Association League) specifically demanded a sterilization law not merely to prevent a deterioration of Germany's Erbgut (genetic wealth) but also to "relieve the public treasuries."[17]
Envious of American, and to a much lesser extent, Swiss and Danish achievements in the field, many German race hygiene enthusiasts undoubtedly wondered if their own efforts to create a coherent and effective eugenics policy (including, of course, a sterilization law) would ever be realized; political and economic conditions under the Weimar government had always seemed to preclude any large-scale legislative breakthrough.[18] It was for these reasons that at least some eugenicists, such as Lenz, turned to the National Socialists as the only party capable of translating eugenic rhetoric into action. The NSDAP, as Lenz pointed out in an article written even before Hitler came to power, was the first political party to make race hygiene "a central demand of their program."[19] Lenz quoted several passages from Hitler's Mein Kampf to show that the latter, although possessing only a high school education, understood the necessity of embarking on a program of both negative and positive eugenics. While it is impossible to know just how many German eugenicists shared Lenz's general, if not unqualified,[20] enthusiasm for Hitler's plans, the Führer wasted little time once he seized power in 1933 in making sure that "whoever is not physically and mentally healthy and deserving" refrain from "perpetuating his misfortune in the body of his children."[21]
In July 1933, a little less than six months after Hitler took office, the Nazi government wrote into law the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring).[22] Based on the 1932 Prussian proposal initiated by Muckermann and others, the Gesetz allowed for the mandatory sterilization of those individuals who, in the opinion of an Erbgesundheitsgericht (genetic health court), were afflicted with any of a number of "genetically determined" ailments including "feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic
depressive insanity, genetic epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, genetic blindness, deafness, or even 'serious alcoholism.'"[23] Although it is not known for certain who composed the law, the Gesetz was hammered out in the Sachverständigenbeirat für Bevölkerungs- unds Rassenpolitik (Expert Committee for Population and Racial Policy), a government appointed committee comprised of the eugenicists Ploetz, Lenz, and Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952), head of the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, as well as a number of racial theorists and members of the party. Rüdin, who chaired the Sachverständigenbeirat, and two Nazi officials, Arthur Gütt and Falk Ruttke, wrote the well-publicized interpretive commentary on the law.[24]
Like the earlier unsuccessful proposal to establish a sterilization law, the Gesetz was designed to ensure that a wide variety of "unfit" (i.e., "unproductive") persons did not pass on their defective hereditary substance to future generations. In Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick's assessment, the Gesetz was necessary to prevent an otherwise inevitable decline of "fitness and German culture."[25] Mandatory sterilization of the "unfit" was hence a racial imperative. But it was also seen, at least in part, as a "legal answer" to the medical establishment's growing criticism of the "welfare state mentality." A five million dollar investment in sterilization, it was argued, could save the Reich an estimated $385 million in welfare costs and "charity support of future generations."[26] For physicians and, above all, psychiatrists trained in the hereditarian tradition of German medicine, there could be little doubt that a sterilization law would result in a significant long-term reduction in the amount of money spent on the upkeep of the "defective." In short, to the medical managers of national efficiency, it promised to be a viable cost-effective technology.
That these medical managers were singularly unconcerned with the individual fate or feelings of the "managed" hardly needs to be stressed. Although the human cost — especially the cost to women — of the Nazi state's program to prevent "undesired births" can scarcely be evaluated by mere statistics, suf-
fice it to say that from 1934 until the beginning of the war roughly 360,000 people were sterilized — more than thirty-five times the number reported as having occurred in the United States between 1907 to 1930 — the overwhelming majority against the will of the individual involved.[27] Since the physicians and judges manning the approximately 250 Genetic Health Courts employed Lebensbewährung (social worth), at least after 1936, as the overriding criterion in their decision for or (rarely) against sterilization, it is hardly surprising that a large majority of the victims were poor and/or deviant from the bourgeois norm.[28] Embracing as it did the same logic as Schallmayer's eugenics, the Gesetz was a measure that the Bavarian physician, had he been alive, might well have endorsed. Since the Gesetz made absolutely no provisions for sterilization on racial grounds, Schallmayer could not have rejected it for its Aryanism.
During their twelve years in power the Nazis succeeded in passing several other antinatal measures intended to "improve national health." The 1935 "Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People" required couples to undergo a medical examination prior to marriage, and forbade marriage between people suffering from venereal disease and certain genetic disorders[29] and differed little from measures demanded by many Wilhelmine and Weimar eugenicists. The 1933 law against "habitual criminals" was somewhat more draconian than any pre-Nazi proposals insofar as it called for the forced castration of certain categories of male "sex criminals."[30] Pronatal strategies designed to save "valuable births" included a far stricter enforcement of the antiabortion law (whereby after 1943 the death penalty could be applied in "extreme cases"), the introduction of marriage loans and child allowances to "valuable" couples, as well as the bestowing of the nonmonetary "Mother Cross" award.[31] The new guardians of the germ-plasm of the Reich were aided in their task by the creation of a centralized system of State Health Offices; the approximately 12,000 officials working in the various regional offices set themselves the task of creating a national card index of the genetic worth of all Germans to
serve as data for future state population policy decisions.[32] In this the Nazi government was taking Schallmayer's long-forgotten plea for a comprehensive set of medical statistics to its logical extreme. Heredity, as Schallmayer long-ago demanded, was finally and firmly "taken into account."
For the Nazis, however, nonracist measures such as the sterilization and antiabortion laws, and more ambiguous strategies such as marriage loans and child allowances were by no means the only or even the most important steps that needed to be taken. Hitler and his confidants now had the chance to translate their Aryan ideologies and anti-Semitic rhetoric into action, and "race hygiene" was often used as a convenient label to cover all Nazi racial policies. Consistent with the Aryan worldview of the new Reich, race hygiene as practiced and preached by the eugenicists in the newly "co-ordinated" society[33] not only had to make room for the "Nordic ideal" (which people like Ploetz, Lenz, and Rüdin were only too anxious to do) but indeed set itself the goal of "improving the Nordic race." Those like Muckermann and Ostermann who were unwilling or not trusted to follow the new official line were ousted from their positions. Jewish eugenicists such as the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt were expelled from the now wholly "German" eugenics movement.[34] As a sign of the times the nonracist journal Eugenik was terminated. In addition, the word Eugenik —often associated with left-wing tendencies in the Weimar movement and tacked on to the name of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene in 1931 as a means of placating the movement's nonracists—was eliminated as part of the society's official title.[35]
Although a new blatantly Aryan (and sometimes explicitly anti-Semitic) line is clearly discernible even among professional eugenicists such as Lenz, Rüdin, and Eugen Fischer (1874–1967), anthropologist and Director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut in Berlin, this did not eliminate the older concerns of race hygiene. In addition to the various nonracist laws previously mentioned, eugenics textbooks published or used in the Third Reich differed
little from those written earlier by pro-Aryan race hygienists except in emphasis and in the mandatory lip-service paid to anti-Semitism. If anything, eugenics under the swastika witnessed an even larger preoccupation with population policy and the procreation of the fit than had been the case earlier. One has only to examine the flood of pamphlets and books devoted to increasing the birth-rate in the "fitter" classes and reducing the number of the nonproductive to demonstrate the continuity with the past.[36] Hence during the Third Reich the definition of "fitness" became broader than had previously been the case. Whereas the race hygiene movement had heretofore always harbored many secret and not-so-secret Aryan enthusiasts, yet continued by and large to favor a purely meritocratic eugenics, post-1933 race hygiene contained not only a meritocratic component, Erbpflege (genetic care) but also a clearly articulated racial component, Rassenpflege (racial care).[37] It would thus be incorrect to assume that even Nazi eugenics was obsessed solely with Aryan themes.
But the most important continuity between pre- and post-1933 eugenics is the logic. Race hygiene presupposes a relationship between population and power. Behind Schallmayer or any other eugenicist's intention to apply "human reason to human selection" lay a technocratic conception of population as a natural resource that, in the interest of national efficiency and state power, should become subject to some form of rational control. It is quite easy to see the applicability of this logic to the creation of a stronger Nazi völkisch state. To convince the "fitter" (that is, more productive) elements in the nation to increase their number and to discourage the "unfit"—in Nazi terms not only the nonproductive but also non-Aryan population—from reproducing was to lay the biological foundations for the Thousand-Year-Reich. And to embark on a "euthanasia" action which sent over 100,000 "useless eaters" (primarily mentally ill and retarded patients) to their deaths between 1939 and 1941 was logical from the standpoint of national efficiency, as morally perverse as this logic may appear.[38]
Finally, one might add, to categorize people as "valuable" and "valueless," to view people as little more than variables amenable to manipulation for some "higher end," as Schallmayer and all German eugenicists did, was to embrace an outlook that led, after many twists and turns, to the slave-labor and death camps of Auschwitz. Most historians of the Nazi period and the Holocaust have come to recognize that despite the archaic, mystical, or otherwise irrational discourse of Nazi völkisch thought, Nazi racial practices ranging from marriage and sterilization laws to genocide presupposed highly scientific, technological, and bureaucratic methods for their execution.[39] By labeling individuals "defective" or "valueless" eugenicists in effect created a "surplus population" that could then be controlled, physically and mentally abused (as were individuals forced to undergo sterilization), and even exterminated. Of course there were also institutional links between eugenics and the "final solution" (such as the eugenicists' use of organs extracted from concentration camp victims for their "scientific research").[40] Although it would be wrong to hold Schallmayer personally responsible for the Holocaust in any way, the logic underlying his eugenics was one amenable to a project which, had he lived to witness it, would probably have caused him to question his life's work.