Even in parts of polite society in the United States in the early to mid-1930s, talk about gas-chamber “euthanasia” was becoming quite casual and respectable. Around the same time that Zinsser’s book about rats and lice appeared, the best-selling nonfiction book in the world was Man, the Unknown (1935, written in 1933), by Dr. Alexis Carrel, a French-American Nobel Prize–winning medical researcher from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and “father of human vessel and organ transplantation.” Carrel was strongly profascist. So was his laboratory assistant at the time, Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator whose first crossing of the Atlantic had made him one of the world’s most famous men (and who, in 1936, like McCloy, had also visited Hitler’s box at the Olympics). A fervent eugenicist, Carrel in his book championed an expanded use of the gas chamber for executions. “Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, [or] misled the public in important matters,” he wrote, “should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gases.” Echoing a long line of distinguished writers going back to W. D. McKim, the esteemed surgeon and author added, “A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.”24
In 1939 Carrel left the United States to return to his native France, where he subsequently joined the profascist Vichy government, but he died before he could be brought to trial as a Nazi collaborator. Lindbergh also remained supportive of the Nazis; his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also published a controversial book, Wave of the Future (1940), in which she argued that democracy was dead and fascism was the “wave of the future.” But by 1941 the couple’s profascist activities suddenly caused them problems in the United States.
From the time that Hitler assumed power as German chancellor on January 30, 1933, he never left much doubt about his repressive intentions. He instituted laws to exclude Jews and Gypsies from German life and utilized the most brutal measures to destroy his opponents. He smashed dissent, initiated sweeping compulsory sterilization and prohibitions against racial mixing, began building concentration camps, and ruled by terror. The only question was, how far would he go?
The Germans had been closely following developments in the U.S. criminal justice system for years. In Weimar days, many leading German jurists had expressed shock over such high-profile cases as Sacco and Vanzetti, in part because of the protracted delay between the time of their trial and their execution, which many saw as an inexplicable flaw in American judicial methods.25 Under Nazi influence, the Germans had also closely examined such American criminal justice issues as the “third degree” (the use of police brutality and torture to extract confessions), corruption, the “war on crime,” intelligence-gathering and crime-fighting approaches by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, criminal identification techniques, centralized police operations, sentencing policies, and racial laws. American policies of racial exclusion, for example, were approvingly detailed in Heinrich Krieger’s book Das Rassenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten, published in Berlin in 1936.26
Immediately prior to the rise of the Nazis, Germany had not been considered a highly punitive state; during the Weimar Republic, for example, the number of executions had dropped to only two or three a year between 1928 and 1932. Austria and Germany had virtually abolished capital punishment and rejected calls for a euthanasia law.27 But the National Socialists brought back the death penalty with a vengeance. Before 1933 the only capital crimes were murder and high treason, punishable in Berlin by beheading with the axe; other German states used the axe or the guillotine. But Hitler changed all that. In 1932, when President Paul von Hindenburg’s administration adopted new antiterrorist decrees that resulted in five Nazi storm troopers being sentenced to death for murdering a Communist worker near the Polish border, the Nazis rioted in protest.28 But upon taking power in 1933 they reinstituted capital punishment in Austria and Germany for “treason” and other offenses, seeking the death penalty in the prosecution of two American Communist organizers.29 Spurred by the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in America, they also adopted the death penalty for kidnapping. In April 1935 the Nazis declared they would expand executions in time of war or danger of war to exterminate pacifism and antimilitary organizations. The German Board of Jurisdiction announced that persons arranging such meetings as well as those attending them would be punished accordingly. At first, the number of known executions amounted to only sixty-four in 1933, seventy-nine in 1934, ninety-four in 1935, and sixty-eight in 1936. It would not be until the war started that the German nation would carry out capital punishment on such a massive scale. And it was not until the war that Hitler would order his aides to begin seriously pursuing various gassing options.30
When Hitler’s regime began persecuting Jews, Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York and other prominent Jewish Americans responded by pleading for the United States to relax its tight immigration restrictions to allow more endangered German Jews into the country. One of their harshest opponents was retired general Fries, former head of the Chemical Warfare Service, who insisted the Nazis were merely persecuting known Communists and Communist sympathizers. Instead of backing loosened immigration quotas to admit more refugees, Fries urged that countless undesirable immigrants already residing in the country should be deported, in order to return America “to that homogeneity that we had in 1860, in 1776.” Once again, Fries rallied veterans groups to his banner.31 And in large measure, they prevailed. Aiding the Jews was not a priority for Roosevelt or the Congress.
Prior to the late 1930s, many prominent American eugenicists, rather than being ignorant of the Nazis’ increasingly radical racist actions, were keenly interested in and wholly supportive of what the Nazis were doing. Some of the Americans had been in frequent communication with their German counterparts for decades. The Germans were credited with achieving preeminence in the fields of genetic research and racial biology, and they cultivated especially close ties with the American foundations and researchers, who often reciprocated. German racial science, meanwhile, was said to have originated in the United States.32 In August 1932 the Third International Congress on Eugenics, held at New York’s fabled American Museum of Natural History, rammed home the theme that progress made by eugenicists was ushering in the “era of Supermen.”33 Racist themes dominated many of the exhibits and discussions.
In August and September 1935, several German organizations held the World Population Congress in Berlin, showcasing recent moves by the “Fiihrer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler, whose far-seeing population policy based on racial hygiene and principles of heredity,” its hosts proclaimed, “will secure the future of the German Volk.” Several top Americans were among the honored attendees. They included Dr. Harry H. Laughlin of Long Island, the leading authority on eugenic sterilization, and Dr. Clarence G. Campbell of New York, honorary president of the Eugenics Research Institute. Campbell stood up and hailed “that great leader, Adolf Hitler,” and his racial policies. Afterward Laughlin returned to the United States to distribute Nazi propaganda films and received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg.34