★★★★★ 5
Documents the influence of American Eugenics on the Holocaust
Format: Hardcover
American Court decisions, and what some call the genocide of Native Americans, was one major source of inspiration behind Nazi policy against both the Jews and people that the eugenic scientists considered inferior races. American policy also was very influential in inspiring the Nazi goal of lebensraum, expanding the Germanic population and reducing, and making slaves, of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians and other Eastern populations). Following Hitler's rise to power, Lebensraum became an ideological goal of Nazism and provided for them justification for the German territorial expansion into East-Central Europe. After all, the Americans decimated the naïve population of America so, the Nazis reasoned, how is that different from the decimation the native population of Eastern Europe? Some even referred to Ukrainians and other Slavic people as "Indians."
Reservations for Native Americans was a factor justifying the concentration camps for Jews, only a few of which were death camps, and this is one reason why the Nazis got away with the Holocaust for so long. It was not until after the war when the Soviets liberated the death camps that we knew for certain the extent of the genocide goal of the Nazis. The main extermination camps were Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, which served as "death factories." Auschwitz II–Birkenau was a combination concentration/extermination camp.
Anti-Semites, eugenicists and racists inspired by Darwinism in the U.S. helped inspire those in Germany, and vice versa. The US was “a global leader in ‘scientific’ eugenics,” so naturally the German scientists would have to rely on American research and law (page 8). The author covered only briefly the well-documented important influence of Darwin and mentioned evolution only in connection with the evolution of racism (p, 114). Conversely, the eugenics idea and movement was discussed 28 times, such as page 8 where the author documents that eugenics was the basis of both the Nazi Germany and American discrimination laws and policy.
The support of the U.S. to Nazi German went well beyond that. U.S. bankers and industry, even the weapons industry, invested heavily in the Nazis war machine. Nazis borrowed ideas from U.S. books, such as the 1916 American best seller racist book titled The Passing of the Great Race and other propaganda, such as that developed in World War I. The U.S. refused to admit significant numbers of Jewish refugees, such as in 1939 the United States refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the St. Louis to the West. Denied permission to land in the United States, the ship was forced to return to Europe where many died in Nazi German camps. The most famous example is the State Department rejected Anne Frank's attempt to enter the United States (pages 53,116, 149).
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Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2017
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