User talk:AZS0118/Eugenics in the United States

After the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague:"You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought ... I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws. In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany (scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty), to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the "science of racial cleansing". Due to financial limitations, Laughlin was unable to attend the ceremony and had to pick it up from the Rockefeller Institute. Afterward, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics."

After the introduction of the Eugenics movement to Hitler and the Nazi organization this concept was taken to an extreme with what we now know as the holocaust and in the hands of a group of medical doctors under the leadership of Dr. Josef Mengele lead to horrendous experiments on a variety of people, from twins, to Aryan looking Jewish men, women, and children, and many other minority groups to come up with an explication on how not only what would be the best way to create the ideal Aryan man and women to serve and continue on the true and right superior race, but those who did not fit this very specific box were put through horrendous tortures all in an effort to prove that they were less than based off the core beliefs of eugenics with more narrow and disastrous results. However, this is reflective of many of the same lanes of thought that the doctors and great thinkers of the United States tried to prove of those of African, Indigenous, and South American descent all based on the incontrollable genetic lottery that is our creation and what features that we may inherit from those before us.

Henry Friedlander wrote that although the German and American eugenics movements were similar, the U.S. did not follow the same slippery slope as Nazi eugenics because American "federalism and political heterogeneity encouraged diversity even with a single movement." In contrast, the German eugenics movement was more centralized and had fewer diverse ideas. Unlike the American movement, one publication and one society, the German Society for Racial Hygiene, represented all German eugenicists in the early 20th century.

After 1945, however, historians began to try to portray the U.S. eugenics movement as distinct and distant from Nazi eugenics. Jon Entine wrote that eugenics simply means "good genes" and using it as synonym for genocide is an "all-too-common distortion of the social history of genetics policy in the United States." According to Entine, eugenics developed out of the Progressive Era and not "Hitler's twisted Final Solution."

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