Hidden From History
Written by Stuart Ewen to
The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2006.

To the Editor:
Your story on Lebensborn, the human breeding program designed to procreate children of the Aryan “race,” was chilling to read. Like the forced sterilization and extermination programs that were implemented to extinguish the bloodlines of those the Nazis deemed degenerate, Lebensborn was part of the German High Command’s commitment to the so-called science of Eugenics, which sought to increase the birthrate among people of “superior” stock through a program of arranged sexual relations, and to forcefully impede or cut off the birthrate of “inferior” peoples. All of this remains horrifying, but history has taught us to expect such systematic cruelties from the Nazis.

Perhaps more chilling, however, is the extent to which the Nazis imported much of their Eugenics doctrine from the United States. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, and continuing into the 1930s, the United States was the world’s most active center for Eugenic theory and practice, and many of the nation’s most prominent figures and institutions (among them were Alexander Graham Bell; John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal king; Andrew Carnegie; Margaret Sanger; Calvin Coolidge and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Also the American Museum of Natural History and the genetic research laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor) embraced it as a necessary tool to stop the onslaught of immigrants and free blacks, and to rescue the “old stock” of Anglo-America from what Francis Amasa Walker, president of MIT, termed “racial suicide.”

For decades the Eugenics movement was enormously powerful in the United States, and was the not-so-hidden hand behind anti-immigration and forced sterilization legislation that became laws of the land in the 1920s. While the formal breeding of people of pure “Nordic Stock” was never implemented, the American Eugenics Society lionized the Nordic ideal and held popular “Fitter Family” contests in “Human Stock Pavilions” at state and county fairs throughout the country, awarding medals to those families and individual children who were deemed to have a “Goodly Heritage.”

While American enthusiasm for Eugenics waned as the Nazis came to power, the National Socialists continued to honor American activists who had scripted eugenics doctrine in the U.S. For Hitler, Madison Grant’s 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” was a major inspiration, as was Lothrop Stoddard’s “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” (1920). In 1938, as darkness fell over Europe, Harry Laughlin, who had authored an appeal-proof forced sterilization law that became the template for state legislation in the U.S., was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. His accomplishment: providing the legal framework that inspired the Third Reich’s sterilization laws.

In light of this little known history Americans must always remain watchful of our own capacity to perpetrate organized cruelties.

— Stuart Ewen, Distinguished Professor,
— Hunter College and
— The CUNY Graduate Center
— New York

EDITOR’S NOTE
This was a response to “Results of Secret Breeding Program: Ordinary Folks” The article described a recent reunion of the offspring of a human breeding plan deployed by the Nazis.

Re: “History Claims Her Artwork,
But She Wants It Back.”
Written by Gail Levin to The New York Times, August 30, 2006.

To the Editors:
Since Dina Babbitt produced the art works in question under conditions of slave labor in a Nazi concentration camp, how can the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland dare to claim that it has “clear title” to these paintings? The artist was neither willing to part with her work nor paid for it. Legal considerations aside, museums, because of their “important educational functions” (ironically cited by this museum’s director) need to maintain ethical standards if their work is to have any cultural significance.

These pictures should be restored at once to their maker, who might agree to allow the museum to have and display a set of mechanical reproductions of the works in question. A video taped interview with the artist would be far more meaningful to the public than the chance to see the originals.

—Professor Gail Levin, Art History
—The City University of New York

EDITOR’S NOTE:
Animator Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, former wife of famous Disney animator Art Babbitt, survived internment at Auschiwitz by coming to the attention of Dr. Joseph Mengele, who used her artistic skills to portray Gypsies in the camp as part of his ongoing “research” into racial types. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, where Babbitt’s portraits are currently displayed, claims her artwork belongs to history and to the world. Babbitt believes the artworks are her personal property.

For more information on Dina Babbit, visit the website of Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, who introduced a bill in 1999 to “retrieve Holocaust survivor Dina Babbitt’s paintings from Auschwitz.”

See Rep. Shelley Berkley’s (Nevada)
Press Release.