How did the American scientists work influence Nazi “racial hygiene” and genocide?
It would be a mistake to see a simple cause-and-effect nexus at work. Eugenics is, however, an Anglo-American idea, and the United States was indeed the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs of better breeding, which included forced sterilization, antimiscegenation, and immigration restriction. Germany had its own history of eugenic research, which dated back to the late 19th century, and many of its eugenic programs rose out German research. But eugenics had been an international movement with international conferences and collaborations, and global research played the same kind of role it usually does in the scientific community, with innovations being picked up, imitated, and revised by scientists in different countries. Having said this, in the early 20th century many American eugenicists had already suggested, however subtly, that euthanasia could be one “solution” for the problem of “mental defectives,” while conceding that it was “probably” against current social mores. While a f
