After weighing his options with McCloy and others, Douglas decided to go into the chemical industry. From 1934 to 1938 he was vice president and board member of American Cyanamid, America’s fourth-largest chemical company, which was secretly allied with Farben through a web of trade agreements. American Cyanamid’s president, the ultraconservative Quaker lawyer William B. Bell, served as chairman of the Republican National Finance Committee. A harsh critic of Roosevelt’s policies, Bell was also a stickler for formality. Peggy Zinsser privately referred to Bell as “Buttonshoes,” but her husband and his new boss never reached a first-name basis. After relocating to the corporation’s headquarters in New York’s Rockefeller Center, Douglas also became affiliated with several organizations, including the American Museum of Natural History and the Rockefeller Foundation, both of which were major players in the eugenics movement and other causes.14
During Douglas’s tenure at American Cyanamid, while McCloy was serving as a lawyer for investment banking interests involving Nazi Germany and other clients, and as states throughout America were adopting lethal gas as their official means of execution and building gas chambers to carry out the death penalty, American Cyanamid was making cyanide. It manufactured Zyklon under license from the patent holders, DEGUSSA, and secretly made business pacts with IG Farben. Until 1938 the bulk of the Germans’ profits from distributing Zyklon came from abroad, particularly from the United States, and American Cyanamid was one of the fastest growing chemical concerns that thrived during the Great Depression.15
Douglas served mainly as a troubleshooter and economic analyst for American Cyanamid, frequently traveling to inspect the company’s various operations and meeting with stockholders. In Great Britain he obtained audiences with Neville Chamberlain (the chancellor of the exchequer) and often met with his friend Winston Churchill. In the course of his professional and social activities Douglas also maintained close relations with many Nazi businessmen, some of whom were doubtless agents of the Gestapo. He traveled extensively in Germany and also widened his social and political connections at home, hoping someday to win national political office. An advocate for laissez-faire policies, he also continued to lash out against FDR’s programs, claiming they had unleashed forces that could lead to socialism.16 After one such speech that Douglas made at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, President Roosevelt drafted a response calling Douglas’s comments “reprehensible,” saying they came “very close to the kind of lack of patriotism which tends to the destruction of government. In time of war, that kind of lack of patriotism goes under the word ‘treason.’” Roosevelt opted not to make his comments public, however, and left it to Harold Ickes to assail the speech. Douglas also supported the radical American Liberty League, which had been organized by the du Ponts and other FDR adversaries, but he declined membership as the group was plotting a coup to overthrow the administration.17 Although Douglas was a contender for the 1936 U.S. vice presidential nomination under Alfred M. Landon, a bout of poor health hindered his campaign, and he failed to win the nomination.
In the mid-1930s neither McCloy nor Douglas was as famous as their wives’ uncle, Dr. Hans Zinsser, a celebrated bacteriologist at Columbia and Harvard who was best known for authoring the best-selling book Rats, Lice and History, in 1935.18 In it the popular professor presented information about his study of typhus, still regarded as one of the world’s deadliest diseases, particularly in places where there were high concentrations of people, such as in army barracks and prison camps. Zinsser’s fascinating account explained that typhus was spread by rodent-borne lice.19
A focal point of Zinsser’s study of typhus involved its outbreak among immigrants, especially Mexicans. Other observers were also following the subject very closely. The German military had begun using Prussic acid for delousing during the Great War. In Poland and other parts of Europe during the war’s immediate aftermath, efforts to thwart further typhus epidemics had increasingly involved the use of HCN gas to disinfect trains and other places where refugees had congregated, along with their clothes and other personal effects.20 The use of Zyklon-B on the United States–Mexico border was already a matter of intense interest to DEGESCH, the subsidiary of IG Farben’s DEGUSSA that controlled the licensing for Zyklon-B. In 1938 Dr. Gerhard Peters, DEGESCH’s general manager and the leading proponent of Zyklon-B, wrote an article in a German pest science journal, Anzeiger für Schädlingskunde, in which he called for its use in German Desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers), citing its extensive use in the United States and featuring photos of El Paso’s delousing chambers. In Germany on June 7, 1938, and in the United States on May 26, 1939, Peters applied for a patent for a new “exterminating agent for vermin,” explaining, “My invention relates to the extermination of animal pest-life of the most varied kinds, for instance, warm-blooded obnoxious animals and insects.” He also made a German-language film extolling the benefits of using Zyklon-B for pest extermination. In 1940–41 he also wrote an article recommending its use to kill typhus-bearing insects. (Peters went on to supply much of the Zyklon-B to Nazi death camps. As a result, he was subsequently tried and convicted at Nuremberg, but later retried and found not guilty.)21
The Nazis seized upon the typhus-related work by scientists such as Charles Nicolle and Zinsser to use in their argument equating Jews with vermin that needed to be exterminated. In August of 1935 thousands of Germans gathered at a Nazi rally in Berlin to hear anti-Semitic speeches calling for a future Germany “cleansed” of Jews. Such rhetoric was becoming more commonplace among Hitler’s followers.
This notion of disinfection was demonstrated most graphically in the famous 1940 Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), directed by Fritz Hippler, who worked under propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Amplifying on a book and an exhibit of the same name, their presentation marshaled the persuasive emotional force of film to spread hysterical anti-Semitic ideas. A Nazi reviewer said the movie showed Jews as filthy, lazy, ugly, corrupt, vicious, and perverse subhuman creatures that lived like vile parasites.22 Shot partly in the squalid Lódź ghetto the Nazis had created, using some scenes of actual squalor and filthy living conditions (which, again, the Nazis had helped to construct), the film purported to show the Jews in their “natural habitat” without the “mask of civilization.” Images of repulsive-looking Jews were juxtaposed with footage of swarms of rats, said to be vectors of typhus and other diseases, suggesting that both pests needed to be eliminated from civilized society. The Jewish race was depicted as a sanitation problem, not a social or political problem, and thus requiring a hygienic solution. The film culminated in Hitler’s chilling warning to the Reichstag in 1939: “If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again,” he raged, “then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” The “documentary” helped turn ordinary Germans into Hitler’s willing executioners.
The Jews were not the Nazis’ only target. Fed by the crackpot social science of Dr. Robert Ritter, the German psychiatrist and “race” expert, the Nazis also stereotyped European Gypsies (Roma) as biologically inferior, antisocial, and criminal. Starting in 1935 they incorporated Gypsies of mixed ancestry (Zigeunermischlinge) into Germany’s racial laws and decrees. As far as the Nazis were concerned, any classification of Gypsy had to be “scientific”—the catchall label of “nomadism” used by some American eugenicists such as Charles Benedict Davenport wasn’t sufficient—but once that determination was made, the subject was considered subhuman.23