Customer Reviews

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism

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This is a valuable book that explores the role of American intellectual and psuedo-scientific policies and how the played an important role in the maturation of Nazi Germany. A must read.

I find the focus of this book and other recent books that are primarily focused on the eugenics movement in the U.S. as being the cause of World War Two Germany's extermination policy, problematic. The author stated that Germany dominated the eugenics movement early on and was the first to hold an international conference on it before World War One. He also stated that he worked in a German facility for the handicapped that claimed to have not harmed the handicapped during World War Two, something that later research of his led him to doubt. Although the U.S, as did other countries have laws regarding sterilization of the handicapped, that could be applied, in fact they rarely were. The laws and attitudes in the U.S. that led to this are problematic, however they have been covered before and were fully public then and since. HOwever, what was missing in the author's book that was deeply disturbing, was any mention of what the German government was engaged in during World War Two. During World War Two, the German government exterminated approximately 800,000 handicapped Europeans. This is something that has received so little attention that it is disturbing that this was another book that portrayed the US as the "cause of all of Germany's actions" rather than Germany itself and a book and author who might have shed some light on why Germany and German institutions secretly exterminated hundreds of thousands of people because they were handicapped. As well it could have been a book, given the author's background, that explored why both the German government and institutions that might have been culpable, have been so unwilling to be open and honest about their actons in World War Two. Instead it's just another book that serves not to explain how and why the German government in World War Two turned to exterminating human beings for no reason at all.