A Time Track of Eugenics

8 May, 1945 (quote from Murderous Science by Benno Muller-Hill) "The war comes to an end. The survivors of the concentration camps are saved. Five to six million European Jews are dead. The number of European Gypsies who have been murdered is unknown. In German mental hospitals, the fifteen per cent of patients who have survived continue to suffer from hunger. The number of murdered psychopaths, asocial individuals, and homosexuals is unknown. The anthropologists and psychiatrists involved will say that they had not known anything about it. Some are sentenced by courts, others commit suicide. The rest go back to work rebuilding their science. The world goes on its way." (At the German surrender, a Dr. Ewald hides some 50 psychiatrists in his hospital who were implicated in the killing program, letting them work there under low profile.)

1946 Doctor's trial at Nuremburg. Dr. Pfannmuller, psychiatrist and director of the state institution in Germany where many children were starved to death testifies "...euthanasia... had, in my view, nothing to do with National Socialism ....the ideas from which (euthanasia) arose are centuries old."

1947 Karl Brandt testifies at Nuremberg that many of the Nazi ideas regarding sterilization were based on writings from the United States, and France (i.e., Alexis Carrel's Man the Unknown) and points out that from 1899 to 1907 176 mentally deficient people were sterilized in a prison in Indiana.

1947 Psychiatrist Edwin Katzenellenbogen, a former member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School, is convicted and sentenced to life for war crimes he committed as a doctor at Buchenwald. During the Nuremburg trials, he testifies he "drafted for the governor the law for sterilization of epileptics, criminals and incurably insane for the state of New Jersey, following the state of Indiana which first introduced the law in 1910."

1947 Testimony at Nuremberg includes the following by Dr. Mennecke regarding procedures at Dachau and Buchenwald:

A. "I had to examine the prisoners brought before me to determine whether they were psychotic or psychopathological cases. Q. So at first it was a matter of people of unsound mind? A. It was a medical matter. Q. Then later it became a political and racial matter? A. Yes. But in addition to the political and racial aspects of the matter I had also, even at this later stage, to take purely medical decisions. Q. So at that time you had two kinds of cases to deal with, those of persons of unsound mind, who were judged on medical grounds, and those who were to be judged on political and racial grounds? A. It was not possible to make any distinction, learned Counsel. There was no question of any definite separation between the two. Q. Do you mean that when you examined a large number of Jews you certified them all as being of unsound mind? A. I have already expressed my view that they were neither at all sick nor of unsound mind either."

In an affidavit signed by psychiatrist Dr. Muthig, Senior doctor at Dachau, he states, "four psychiatrists occupied four separate tables in two huts and interviewed several hundred prisoners. The incapacity of the prisoners for work and their political activities were checked and they were registered accordingly....The examination consisted merely of checking their papers in their presence. The men registered during these proceedings were of German and other nationalities or else Jews. I can state with absolute certainty that (psychiatrist) Professor Heyde directed the proceedings and was present at them."

1947 The Chairman of the German Medical Committee of American Tribunal I at Nuremberg collects documentary evidence concerning doctors' involvement in medical atrocities in Nazi Germany. A pamphlet is published concerning this called The Cynical Dictatorship, of which 10,000 copies are printed and distributed to the medical/psychiatric profession. The only response to the pamphlet is from the World Health Organization, which found "(the) records showed German doctors as a profession to have been unconnected with the crimes committed by the dictatorship. The Organization therefore re-admitted them to its ranks." At these trials, Nazi racial hygienists are not tried for the forced sterilization of over 400,000 Germans. A group of prosecutors attempts to show the mass killings of handicapped people and concentration camp experiments were completely separate from "genuine eugenics" and that the US military tried to recruit some of the German doctors involved for military research.

1949 German psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer attempts to revive forced sterilization in Germany by calling for reestablishment of earlier German eugenics policy.

1953 U.S. officially adopts the Nuremberg Code forbidding medical research on humans without their informed consent.

Nov., 1959 Dr. Heyde (a psychiatrist who was instrumental in the killing of thousands of "mental patients" in Nazi Germany) is arrested. He had been living and conducting a practice at Flensburg for some years under the name of Dr. Sawade. (Heyde helped Martin Bormann escape from Germany at the end of the war.)

1965 Dr. Garrett, Chairman of the Dept. of Psychology at Columbia University and former President of the American Psychological Association, publishes a series of pamphlets justifying race segregation and the evils of interracial marriage. 500,000 copies of his pamphlets are given free to American teachers.

1967 In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Drs. Mark, Sweet and Ervin posit that certain slum dwellers (involved in the race riots of Detroit of this year) probably have a "focal brain lesion" that plays a significant role in "violent and assaultive behavior." (In 1970, they convince Congress to direct the NIMH to award them a $500,000 to carry on their research.)

1968 CIA team of doctors again goes to Saigon, this time to use Vietcong prisoners in experiments involving electrodes implanted in the brain. Psychologists give the prisoners knives and press buttons on remote control handsets in an effort to get the prisoners to attack each other (the experiment fails). The prisoners are shot and their bodies burned.

c 1968 Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker a doctor and psycho-analyst who had treated Nixon for a medical problem. submits a paper to the White House called "A Plan for Prevention of Violent Crime," in which he claims that the drive for violence can be detected as early as the age of six, and that "the Government should have mass testing done on all 6-8 year old children....to detect (those) who have violent and homicidal tendencies" (particularly slum children) and, if necessary, have these children receive "corrective treatment," including "Pavlovian methods which I have used effectively in the Soviet Union." On December 30, 1969 President Nixon requests the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to look into this plan.

1968 Dr. Ehrhardt, author of Euthanasia and the Destruction of Life-Unworthy Life is elected president of the World Federation of Mental Health.

1970s Psychiatrist Cammilla M. Anderson speaks at conferences on learning disabilities and states, among other things, that the problem of children who have "behavior syndromes" needs to be handled by eugenic means (sterilizing the victims of these syndromes). She says "We have failed to challenge the assumption of people's inalienable right to procreate...They (people in poverty pockets, e.g., ghettos, prisons) ought not be permitted to bring children into the world to perpetuate their own misery and inner and outer poverty....There will still be plenty of children with MBD (minimal brain dysfunction, i.e., behavior syndromes) born to more normal and adequate parents to keep all of the rehabilitation programs busy and going strong."

1970 Psychologist James V. McConnell, in an article called "Criminals Can be Brainwashed Now" in Psychology Today, writes "...I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior. It should be possible to achieve a very rapid and highly effective type of positive brainwashing that would allow us to make dramatic changes in a person's behavior and personality..."

1970 Psychologist Joseph M. R. Delgado (inventor of the "stimoceiver," which both stimulates and records to and from the brain and is fashioned after telemetry devices used to communicate with astronauts) is quoted in an interview as saying, "The human race is at an evolutionary turning point. We're very close to having the power to construct our own mental functions ....through a knowledge of the cerebral mechanisms which underlie our behavior. The question is what sort of humans would we like, ideally, to construct?" He states in his book Physical Control of the Mind - Toward a Psychocivilized Society, "...the soul exists in the human mind as a concept which should not be ignored...the emotional and rational elements leading to acceptance or rejection of the concept of the soul are manifestations of the mind. As such they are dependent on cerebral physiology and thus become part of the scientist's domain subject to experimental research." He goes on to state that "The newborn baby never smiles. He is unable to comprehend the loving phrases of his mother or to be aware of the environment. We must conclude that there are no detectable signs of mental activity at birth and that human beings are born without minds." Further, "The origin of memories, emotional reactivity, motor skills, words, ideas and behavioral patterns which constitute our personal self can be traced to outside the individual. Each person is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment...." Delgado has done experiments in which computers send stimulating signals to the brains of monkeys. (Experiments have also been done on rats, cats, crickets, roosters, dolphins and bulls. He says, "unwanted patterns of brain activity -- for instance those correlated with assaultive or antisocial activity -- could be recognized by the computer before they ever reached consciousness in order to trigger pacification of the subject." "It is reasonable to speculate that in the near future the stimoceiver may provide the essential link from man to computer to man, with a reciprocal feedback between neurons and instruments and instruments which represents a new orientation for the medical control of neurophysiological functions....In the past the progress of civilization has tremendously magnified the power of our senses, muscles, and skills. Now we are adding a new dimension: the direct interface between brains and machines." "We may conclude that ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain) can activate and influence some of the cerebral mechanisms involved in willful behavior. In this way we are able to investigate the neuronal functions related to the so-called will, and in the near future this experimental approach should permit clarification of such highly controversial subjects as "freedom," "individuality," and "spontaneity" in factual terms rather than in elusive semantic discussions." "(research into cerebral mechanisms of mental activity) ...must be promoted and organized by governmental action declaring "conquering of the human mind" a national goal at parity with conquering of poverty or landing a man on the moon." "The project of conquering the human mind could be a central theme for international cooperation and understanding..." "...a plan designed to modify the orientation of civilization and to improve the balance between mechanization and mentalization must be based on suitable education of youth, beginning with elementary schools and continuing through the highest levels."

1970 Psychologist James McConnell writes in Psychology Today .".we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior. It should be possible then to achieve a very rapid and highly effective type of positive brain- washing....we should reshape society so that we all would be trained from birth to do what society wants us to do,...No one owns his own personality...you had no say about what kind of personality you acquired, and there's no reason to believe you should have the right to refuse to acquire a new personality if your old one is antisocial."

1970 At least one experiment in "behavioral genetics" is underway in an attempt to locate the gene that causes "learning disabilities."

1971 Sixty years after the eugenics fad which resulted in thousands of sterilizations in the U.S. and millions of murders in Nazi Germany, Professor Richard Herrnstein of Harvard writes in the Atlantic Monthly, "...the tendency to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as certainly as bad teeth...As the wealth and complexity of human society grow, there will be precipitated out of the mass of humanity a low capacity (intellectual and otherwise) residue that may be unable to master the common occupations, cannot compete for success and achievement, and are most likely to be born to parents who have similarly failed...The troubles...have already caught the attention of alert social scientists...(who have described) the increasingly chronic lower class in America's central cities."

1971 Editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer conduct a telephone poll on the question "Should the US Encourage Sterilization among low IQ Groups?" 69.2% of those polled voted in favor of forced sterilization.

1972 Arthur Jensen states in Genetics and Education. "...the rate of occurrence of mental retardation...is six to eight times higher in our Negro population than in the rest of the population."

1972 Nobel Prize winning Professor William Shockley proposes a voluntary sterilization program in an address before the American Psychological Association. His plan would have the government pay $1,000 for each IQ point below 100 to welfare recipients willing to be sterilized. When his plan is criticized, he says, "...the lesson to be learned from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable."

1974 Ronald Reagan is encouraged by Louis Jolyon West and other psychiatrists and brain surgeons to open a "violence center" in an abandoned nuclear weapons test site in the Santa Monica mountains. The center is intended to study genetic, biochemical and neurophysiological reasons why certain people display antisocial behavior or impulsive aggression, i.e., "violent individuals, including prisoners and hyperkinetic children." Other research would include study on drugs to curb violence. Dr. West foresees the day when people with violent tendencies would be monitored by people at central control stations who view screens containing read-outs from brain implants. At the first sign of a violent impulse, attendants would rush to administer the appropriate drugs. Qualified doctors are considered to run the center's electroshock center (operating on a 24 hour-per-day basis, seven days a week) and the psychosurgery operating area. Reagan lobbies President Nixon, the Secretary of Defense and other federal agencies to support the center.

1974 US District Court Judge Gesell states, "Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs."

1975 The federal government sponsors "predelinquency" projects in some U.S. communities for five year old children in an attempt to locate "violence prone" and "learning disabled" children. The government and drug companies also finance research into areas such as psychosurgery, chromosome irregularities, brain implantation, hormone and chemical imbalances, and even phrenological indications (physical deformities that would indicate violent tendencies).

1975 Dr. Garrett, Chairman of the Dept. of Psychology at Columbia University and former President of the American Psychological Association, writes a book entitled IQ and Racial Differences. An advertisement in the Boston Globe urges purchase of the book to "...demolish...arguments for school integration point by point."

1975 Edward Wilson publishes Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, defining sociobiology as "the systemic study of the biological basis of all social behavior." He states, "Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized...The second contribution of evolutionary sociobiology will be to monitor the genetic basis of social behavior..."

1979 The Repository of Germinal Choice is set up in Escondido, California to "make available the sperm of Nobel prize winners and other creative, intelligent people." (The first baby born from this repository is in 1982.)

1980 New York Times reports that 40,000 men, women and children have been sterilized over a 50 year period, the bulk of them in the 30s and 40s. 8,300 women had undergone sterilization in Virginia from 1927 to 1972 under a law which still permitted it when doctors thought a "patient" was "afflicted with any hereditary form of mental illness or retardation and the procedures is in the best interest of said patient and society."

1981 A California neurologist, in an article called "Psychiatric Drug Deaths" (in a publication called On the Edge), describes 10 ways in which psychiatric drugs cause death: "1. Disordered body temperature regulation. The drugs interfere with sweating, the body's basic cooling process, the regulation of blood flow to the skin and one's perception of temperature fluctuations. Thus extreme weather conditions increase risk, while the mixture of anti-psychotic drugs with other drugs raises the risk of heat stroke. 2. The neuroleptic malignant syndrome. "...a person suddenly comes down with a very high fever, becomes mute and tremulous with excessive sweating, muscle rigidity, rapid heartbeat, difficulty in breathing, swallowing, etc. The person becomes disoriented, delirious (sic), and finally stuporous. In about 20% of these cases death is the outcome." 3. Bone marrow poisoning. 4. Drug-induced epileptic seizures leading to death. 5. Drug-induced blood clots. 6. Paralysis of the intestines. 7. Death after surgery of people on psychiatric drugs. 8. Drug-induced suicidal state. 9. Death secondary to severe tardive dyskinesia. 10. Sudden death phenomenon (apparently due to cardiac arrest or asphyxia due to failure of the cough reflex).

1982 Indiana Supreme Court rules that doctors and parents can allow the starvation death of a retarded infant.

1983 Psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West states in a speech that, "I have employed definitions that are good enough to distinguish cults from genuine religious sects, but rather than undertaking a semantic discussion of it beyond what I've already given you, I prefer to ask myself within the medical model (Dr. West developed a medical model to protect the public from the "epidemic" of "cults") how one distinguishes malignant cells from healthy ones in the human body for the purpose of treatment. A good approach if you were interested in curing a cancer is to find a chemical that kills the malignant cells and spares those that are healthy. What would be the effect of a device or technique which, when applied by society to any organization calling itself religious would have no untoward effect upon bonafide religions, but would be deadly to the fakes."

1986 Arnold Mandell, a psychiatrist, uses non-linear mathematics to demonstrate that psychopharmacology (the use of drugs to treat every form of mental disorder from insomnia to "schizophrenia" and "psychosis") is a failure. Phenothiazines make the condition worse, and tricyclic antidepressants "increase the rate of mood cycling, leading to long-term increases in numbers of relapsing psychopathological episodes." (This is in addition to the fact that many of the side effects listed by the drug companies in the warning labels on the packaging are the very things viewed by psychiatrists as symptoms of "mental illness," leading to a vicious cycle of mis-diagnosis and increased dosage, bringing about stupification of the victim and dangerously toxic levels of the drugs, to say nothing of brain and central nervous system damage).

1986 Robert Gordon presents a paper to the American Psychological Association, wherein he states that intelligence is more of a key factor in providing and explanation as to the difference in crime rates between blacks and whites than the factors of income, education or occupation.

1988 Gansu Province in China adopts a eugenics law. At least 5,000 people, supposedly retarded, are sterilized.

1989 In Vienna, Austria, three hospital orderlies are arrested and charged with killing at least 44 patients. They cite "mercy killing" as the reason and confess to including as their victims patients who were a nuisance.

Aug. 15, 1991 New York Times reports "China Pushes Sterilizing the 'Retarded'." "Eugenics Laws in Provinces may Grow into National Legislation. "The Premier of China supports the adoption of laws in various Chinese provinces requiring that retarded people be sterilized. A national eugenics law is being drafted. Peasants Daily, an official newspaper, states "Idiots produce idiots," expressing the viewpoint of eugenics supporters. In an effort to head off international protest (there is virtually no opposition in China), it is proposed that the term "eugenics" be replaced with something like "the good baby, good mother law." Shanghai province adopts a provision which states, "Couples who have serious hereditary diseases including psychosis, mental deficiency and deformity must not be allowed to bear children. Those who are already pregnant must terminate the pregnancy." Henan province calls for the sterilization of any married person with "serious hereditary diseases including mental disease, hereditary mental incapability, hereditary deformity, and so on." Gansu province uses a guideline of an IQ of 40 or lower. The other provinces give no such guidelines. It is apparently left up to local doctors with not much more than a high school education. (Gansu first adopted a eugenics law in 1988.)

1992 The Board of Directors of the American Medical Association are informed that the president elect of the World Medical Association, Dr. Hans Joachim Sewering, is a past member of the SS and there is evidence of his having participated in the Nazi euthanasia program. Sewering resigns, protesting that there is a "world Jewish conspiracy" against him. (In 1946, Sewering was convicted of being an SS member and fined 1,500 German marks.) Dr. Sewering alleges he knew nothing of any killing taking place at Elfging-Haar or other sanitoria in Germany during the Nazi regime. However, his signature is on a 1943 transfer order sending an epileptic child to Elfging-Haar where, three weeks later, the child died. Nuns at Schoenbrunn Sanatorium say (in 1992) that everyone at Schoenbrunn knew euthanasia was carried out at Elfging-Haar, and that 900 children had been transferred there.

December 30, 1993 San Francisco Chronicle reports that China denies its plan to use abortion and sterilization to prevent children with "defects" is akin to Nazi eugenics. "The essence of China's better births policy is totally different from the racist 'eugenics' policy pursued by Adolf Hitler during his Third Reich," the Chinese Public Health Ministry stated. According to the report, the word "defect" in China includes harelips, transmittable diseases, the mentally handicapped and others. Under the law, "Doctors would be required to recommend abortions when a fetus is seriously deformed or if one of the parents has a serious disease or hereditary illness that could disable the baby, or when they have been exposed to a toxic substance." Chinese officials are quoted as saying that 20 percent of new babies in China have congenital defects.