FREE ESSAY ON HOLOCAUST

HOLOCAUST

The Lebensborn Project
The topic of eugenics cannot be discussed without encountering the Holocaust, but this is
as it should be. When contemporary geneticists, genetics counselors and clinical
geneticists wonder why it is that genetics receives special attention from those
concerned with ethics, the answer is simple and can be found in history. 
The events which led to the sterilization, torture and murder of millions of Jews,
Gypsies, Slavs and children of mixed racial heritage in the years just before and during
the era of the Third Reich in Germany were rooted firmly in the science of genetics
(Muller-Hill, 1988). Rooted not in fringe, lunatic science but in the mainstream of
reputable genetics in what was indisputably the most advanced scientific and
technological society of its day. The pursuit of genetic purity in the name of public
health led directly to Dachau, Treblinka, Ravensbruck and Auschwitz. 
As early as 1931 influential geneticists such as Fritz Lenz were referring to National
Socialism as applied biology in their textbooks (Caplan, 1992). As difficult as it is for
many contemporary scientists to accept (Caplan, 1992; Kater, 1992), mainstream science
provided a good deal of enthusiastic scientific support for the virulent racism that
fueled the killing machine of the Third Reich. 
When the Nazis came to power they were obsessed with securing the racial purity of the
German people. The medical and biomedical communities in Germany not only endorsed this
concern with negative eugenics, they had fostered it. Racial hygiene swept through German
biology, public health, medicine and anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, long before the
Nazis came to power (Weiss, 1987, Muller-Hill, 1988; Proctor, 1988; Kater, 1992). Many in
the medical profession urged the Nazi leadership to undertake social policies that might
lead to enhancing or increasing the genetic fitness of the German people (Kater, 1992). 
Eugenics consumed the German medical, biological and social scientific communities in the
decade before World War II. Many physicians and scientists were frantic about threats
they saw to the genetic health of the nation posed by the presence of inferior
populations such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, with a lesser extent a distant threat which
was, African peoples (Adams, 1990). The steps they took to protect against the public
health disaster of a 'polluted' racial stock were so 
awful, so immoral, and so heinous that they have rightly, shaped all subsequent
discussion of the ethics of both human genetics and eugenics. 
Steps to eliminate unfit or undesirable genes by prohibitions on sexual relations,
restrictions on marriage, sterilization or killing, are all forms of negative population
eugenics (Kevles, 1995). Nazi judges and scientists ordered children killed or sterilized
who had parents of different racial backgrounds or were thought to have genetic
predispositions toward mental illness, alcoholism, retardation or other disabilities.
This was done to remove the threat such children posed to the genetic stock of the nation
and to avoid having to pay the costs associated with institutionalization and
hospitalization (Caplan, 1992). Laws were enacted prohibiting marriages between those
whom Nazi race hygiene theory held were likely to produce degenerate offspring. 
Conversely, on a smaller scale, the Nazis tried to encourage those who satisfied Nazi
racial ideals to have more children. The most extreme form of encouraging eugenic mating
was the Lebensborn program which gave money, medals, housing and other rewards to
persuade ideal mothers and fathers to have large numbers of children in order to create a
super-race of Aryan children (Proctor, 1988). The provision of rewards, incentives and
benefits to encourage the increased representation of certain genes in the gene pool of
future generations constitutes positive population eugenics (Kevles, 1995). 
Nazi race hygiene theories were false. There is no evidence to support the biological
views of the inherent inferiority of races or the biological superiority of specific
ethnic groups, which underlay the eugenics efforts of the Third Reich. There is not even
any firm basis for differentiating groups into races on the basis of genetics (Harding,
1993). The negative eugenics programs race hygiene spawned were not only patently
unethical, since they were completely involuntary and coercive they were also based upon
assumptions about genes and race that are not true. The Nazi drive to design future
generations based on what can now be understood as invalid science skewed by racism led
to concentration camps, forced sterilization, infanticide and genocide. 
Ethical debates about eugenics must acknowledge the horrors perpetrated in the name of
eugenics in this century. But, despite the evil that has been done in the name of
eugenics the debate cannot end there. The moral permissibility of eugenic goals must be
addressed, in its own terms. For while arguments based upon history are instructive and
important, those who see no analogies between our times and earlier times are unlikely to
find warnings about the past sufficiently forceful to shape future behavior or public
policy (Caplan, 1992; 1994). And while the fear of the imposition of eugenic programs by
a totalitarian regime must be taken seriously it is not the only path eugenics might
follow. 
Improvement of the genetic makeup of a population can be sought through negative or
positive eugenics. What is less widely noted is that either strategy can 
be pursued at the level of individuals and their direct, lineal offspring or for large
groups or populations. Efforts aimed at improving or enhancing the properties of
large-scale populations such as by providing incentives for large numbers of individuals
with particular traits or abilities to marry and have many children or encouraging public
health testing for neural tube defects constitute versions of population eugenics. The
goals of such activities are to shift the makeup of the gene pool of future generations
in particular directions. 
Positive and negative eugenics can also be carried out by individual couples who are not
interested in nor motivated by the overall effect of their actions may have on the
societal gene pool. Population eugenics need not be coercive but, historically, it almost
always has been. A great deal of social pressure was applied in the German Lebensborn
programs of the 1940s. More recent efforts to shift the genetic norms of populations
exemplified by the attempt to encourage those with the 'right' racial makeup to reproduce
as is evident in the ethnically selective pronatalist policies espoused by governments in
many parts of the world are less obviously coercive but still involve a great deal of
cultural and societal pressure. The stated policies of some religious bodies such as
certain Orthodox Jewish sects or some elements of the Greek Orthodox church that they
will not bless marriages where no genetic testing for diseases has been done constitute
examples of possible coercion for population eugenic goals by non-governmental powers. 
The day when we need to decide whether it is wrong to choose the genetic makeup of our
children is not very far off. Some argue that we lack the wisdom to choose well
(Lewontin, 1992). But, that hardly stops parents today from seeking to better the lot of
their children through environmentally mediated efforts at enhancement. In a society that
places so much emphasis on maximizing opportunities and achieving the most efficient use
of resources it is hard to believe that pressures will not quickly arise on prospective
parents to use genetic information and techniques for manipulating genes to better the
lot of their children or of future generations of children. 
For some, the historical abuses committed in this century in the name of eugenics are
sufficient grounds for prohibiting or banning any efforts at any form of eugenics;
positive or negative; individual or group. However, negative population eugenics is not
individual positive eugenics. If most people agree that parents have a right if not a
duty to try and maximize the well-being and happiness of their offspring, then it is not
likely that the record of historical abuses carried out in the name of negative
population eugenics will hinder efforts to incorporate genetic information into
procreative decisions about our children and their immediate descendants. As it stands
today, most parents, particularly those in the middle and upper classes, would probably
be more troubled by failing to use genetic information to try and improve the lot of
their offspring then they would by doing so.
Eugenics sprang from the philosophy known as social Darwinism, which envisioned human
society in terms of natural selection and suggested that science could engineer progress
by attacking supposedly hereditary problems including moral decadence, crime, venereal
disease, tuberculosis and alcoholism. German and American eugenics advocates both
believed science could solve social problems, tended to measure the worth of the
individual in economic terms and felt mental illness a threat to society grave enough to
warrant compulsive sterilization. And while Nazi Germany's claims of Aryan superiority
are well known, researchers said U.S. advocates of sterilization worried that the
survival of old-stock America was being threatened by the influx of lower races from
southern and eastern Europe.
If you have ever had anything wrong with any of your relatives, which would include just
about all of us, then you must talk to the genetic counselor. Genetic counseling
guarantees only perfect children should be born, if we are going to have a master race,
the rest must never see the light of day.
Hitler did not invent the ideas of eugenics and a master race. Margaret Sanger, eugenics
pioneer, and her followers made no secret about their desire to eliminate persons with
disabilities and to combat those racial and religious groups she deemed unfit. 
The first Lebensborn home opened was in 1936 in Steinhoering, a tiny village not far from
Munich. Furnishings for the home were supplied from the best of the loot from the homes
of Jews who had been sent to Dachau. Ultimately, there were ten Lebensborn homes
established in Germany, nine in Norway, two in Austria, one in Belgium, Holland, France,
Luxembourg, and Denmark. Himmler himself took a special interest in the choosing not only
the mothers, but also attending to the decor and even paying special attention to
children born on his birthday, which was October 7th.
By 1939, the program had not produced the results Himmler had hoped. 
He issued a direct order to all SS and police to father as many children as possible to
compensate for war casualties. The order created a large controversy among the people.
Many Germans felt the acceptance of unwed mothers encouraged immorality. Eventually,
Himmler backpedaled, but never condemned illegitimacy outright. Himmler himself had two
illegitimate children. 
The Lebensborn soon expanded to welcome non-German mothers. In a policy formalized by
Hitler in 1942, German soldiers were encouraged to fraternize with native women, with the
understanding that any children they produced would be provided for. Racially fit women,
most often the girlfriends or one-night stands of SS officers, were invaded to Lebensborn
homes to have their child in privacy and safety.
Germans resorted to stealing racially acceptable children from occupied territories. Up
to 100,000 children may have been stolen from just Poland alone. Some of these children
were war orphans, but it is well documented that many were stolen right from their
parents' arms. The criterion as stated before was blond hair and blue eyes (green eyes
were also acceptable). This was one of the most horrible sides of the Lebensborn policy.
Kidnapping of children racially goods in the eastern occupied countries. These children
were forced to reject and forget their birth parents; they were told that their parents
deliberately abandoned them. The children who refused Nazi education were often beaten
and then transferred to concentration camps.
As the allies began to advance, the children who were in the various Lebensborn homes
were withdrawn to interior homes. On May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler's death American
troops marched into Steinhoering. They found 300 children from the ages of six months to
six years. Most of the mothers and the staff had fled. The British and Russians also
found children at Lebensborn homes near Bremen and Leipzig. The majority of these
children were either put up for adoption or sent back to their birth families. Some of
the children that were kidnapped in other countries who were living with families
throughout Germany, were repatriated to their native countries, but most of them were too
German, to fit in. 
Most of the children who were born in the Lebensborn program are still alive and many
continue to suffer from their deep psychological scars. The Lebensborn children are now
55 to 65 years old. For many of them, their parents' identities remained a mystery and
their journeys and rediscovery have revealed horrible truths about their origins.
Searching for love, they have found heartache - they were victims on the other side of a
twisted scheme to produce a Nazi super race.
The lesson might be that the creation of a super race as planned by Himmler and Hitler
was a terribly demented idea, indicative of the extent of their obsession with Aryan
superiority and Nazi supremacy. The terrible results of Nazi Germany continue to
reverberate even today, the evidence can be found in the shattered lives of the
Lebensborn children.
Despite modern assumptions that, American interest in eugenics waned during the 1920s,
researchers said sterilization laws had authorized the neutering of more than 40,000
people classified as insane ore feebleminded in thirty states by 1944. Another 22,000
underwent sterilization between the mid - 1940s and 1963, despite weakening public
support and revelations of Nazi atrocities. Forced sterilization was once legal in
eighteen U.S. states, and most states with eugenics allowed people to be sterilized
without their consent by leaving the decision to a third party.