Nazeem Ahmed presents the history of Eugenics because this debunked concept has arisen as a weaponized tool to threaten the majority of the world’s population.

Even before the emergence of Nazism as a dominant political force in Germany, the United States and Britain were pioneers of eugenics ideology. Eugenics, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute, is the ‘scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations’. It is based on the assumption that human capabilities, including intelligence and social behaviours, are largely the outcome of genetic inheritance. In the early twentieth century, the eugenics-based ideas of ‘racial improvement’ and ‘planned breeding’ were commonplace. Eugenicists believed human beings could be perfected through social exclusion, segregation and involuntary sterilisation to eliminate unfit individuals and the social ills associated with them.2

Today, most of us assume that the ideologies underlying eugenics are obsolete. As scientific research has progressed, a robust scientific consensus has emerged concluding that eugenics and the ideas associated with it have no solid foundation. But the ideologies that exploded during the Second World War are far from dead. In fact, they remain astonishingly influential in ways that would have shocked those who fought to defeat the Nazis some 85 years ago. In recent years, they have experienced such a remarkable resurgence they now threaten the very fabric of our democracies. But to truly understand this, we need to go back to the beginning.

From book, ‘Alt Reich’

I have created a timeline of the roots of eugenics ‘research’ and propaganda, using the ‘Alt Reich’ book:

1910 Charles Davenport, a renowned Harvard eugenicist, founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO)

1914 An appointee by Davenport to the ERO, Hamilton Laughlin, published the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law designed ‘to prevent the procreation of … degenerate persons … with inferior hereditary potentialities’.

1920, the US Congress appointed Laughlin as its ‘expert eugenics agent’, in which capacity he testified about his research on ‘dysgenesis’ – or patterns of bad heredity – afflicting immigrants in jails and prisons. 

1920, for instance, Laughlin corresponded with German eugenicist Erwin Baur, the lead author of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, a leading German text on genetics and eugenics that was read by Adolf Hitler during his 1924 incarceration. Later, Baur’s work would become a primary reference source for the authors of the Nazi racial laws.

Baur wrote to the ERO requesting information on American sterilisation practices that he could distribute to ‘his committee of eugenic advisers for the German Government’. Baur’s co-authors were also avid Nazis. Fritz Lenz, who held the first German University chair in race-hygiene at the University of Munich, corresponded regularly with Laughlin, as did the third co-author, Eugen Fischer, who created the ideological foundation for the Nuremberg racial laws prohibiting ‘Aryans’ from marrying Jews.5

1924  Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act in 1924 to block Jewish and Italian immigrants from entering the US.

Also 1924 Laughlin provided expert testimony leading to the US Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision endorsing compulsory sterilisation throughout the US of the ‘unfit’, including the ‘intellectually disabled … for the protection and health of the state’.4

1925 Hitler, impressed with the above, wrote Mein Kampf.

he condemned the automatic grant of citizenship to ‘every Jewish or Polish, African or Asiatic child’ born in Germany as ‘thoughtless’ and ‘hare-brained’. In contrast, he praised America for ‘simply excluding certain races from naturalisation’.

Later

1932, Laughlin corresponded with fellow eugenicist Madison Grant in discussions about the American ‘race’, which they defined as being of ‘Nordic’ origin. He wrote: ‘Whether we like it or not, a Jew must be assimilated or deported. The deportation of four million Jews would be many times more difficult than the repatriation of three times as many Negroes. The Jew is doubtless here to stay and the Nordics’ job is to prevent more of them from coming.’ Grant’s work on eugenics would be made use of extensively by policymakers in Nazi Germany.6 As American historian Edwin Black documented in his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, after the First World War American and German eugenicists were in close contact, often working together in international organisations.

The Germans borrowed much of their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring from Laughlin’s model sterilisation law. In turn, leading American eugenicists took great inspiration from Nazi eugenics laws after 1933.

Today, these ideas seem fringe and bizarre. But in the 1930s, they were a respected lens through which many in Western societies viewed the world. That lens, however, far from being rejected, remains massively influential in surprising ways. One of its key promoters is an obscure American foundation with direct links to the Nazis.

In August 1935, New York textiles magnate Wickliffe Draper, an ardent eugenicist and one-time funder of the American Eugenics Society, travelled to Berlin to attend the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems, chaired by Wilhelm Frick, Hitler’s Reich Minister of the Interior. Frick played a major role in the Nazis’ antisemitic measures, including the notorious Nuremberg Laws designed to protect German ‘purity of blood’ from Jewish ‘degeneracy’, and the euthanasia of institutionalised people, for which killing techniques were developed that were eventually used in the death camps. Frick would later become a convicted war criminal.

2 years later

In 1937, he established the Pioneer Fund in New York, primarily to support research into ‘race betterment’ through eugenics. He appointed Harry Laughlin as its president. Laughlin’s first project at the Pioneer Fund was to distribute two eugenicist Nazi propaganda films in the US. The Pioneer Fund’s antisemitism dovetailed with anti-black racism. That year, Draper secretly funded the publication of White America, a book by white supremacist and racial segregation advocate Earnest Sevier Cox. He arranged for a personal copy to be delivered to Nazi Cabinet minister Wilhelm Frick the following year. Cox’s book claimed that the ‘superior’ white race had been undermined by interbreeding with the ‘inferior’ race of the blacks. The only solution to the problems arising from people of different races living together was to deport blacks to Africa. At the time, American and German eugenicists firmly believed that their racist views of biology and humanity were about to become dominant. They were wrong. The military defeat of the Nazis decapitated the main supporter of eugenics within Europe. In the US, eugenics increasingly lost credibility in light of both new scientific research and widespread revulsion at Nazi atrocities. Yet this was not the end. On the contrary, it represented a twisted new beginning.

1939 Davenport contributed to the Festriche for Otto Reche, a Nazi party member who later would openly advocate for the genocide of ethnic Poles.

Update from a July 18th, 2025 piece from The Intercept which concerned opposition mischief meant to discredit Mamdani with Black voters:

The story was more remarkable for how it came to be: a hack of Columbia’s records, intended to show that the school was still pursuing race-based affirmative action admissions. The information was then fed to the Times reporters through Jordan Lasker, who has supported eugenics, to whom the Times granted anonymity and described merely as “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.”