| | THE SOUND OF THE MACHINE
by Mike W. Perry
Everything they saw that day, from the vast fields of ripening
grain to the numerous children, spoke of fertility. Nothing, it seemed,
could change the vitality of these people. As Martin and Karl drove from
village to village their faces grew increasingly grave.
In the evening the men returned. Martin told of all the children he
had seen and warned that, "someday they may give us a lot of trouble"
because they were "brought up in a much more rugged way than our people."
Alarm spread through the group until the group's leader began to speak.
Obviously peeved, he pointed out that someone had suggested that
abortion and contraceptives should be illegal here. He continued, "If
any such idiot tried to put into practice such an order . . . he would
personally shoot him up. In view of the large families of the native
population, it could only suit us if girls and women there had as many
abortions as possible. Active trade in contraceptives ought to actually
be encouraged." [1]
The date was July 22, 1942. The place was the "Werewolf"
headquarters in the Soviet Ukraine. The group's leader and abortion
advocate was Adolf Hitler. The two men were Martin Bormann, his
Secretary and Karl Brandt, his personal physician.
Operation Blue, the 1942 German offensive in the East, had been
underway for almost a month and already its success was assumed. At
Hitler's headquarters thoughts turned to what should be done with the
occupied territories. Some wanted a lenient policy to gain Ukrainian
support in the war against the Soviet Union. Others wanted to eliminate
the Slavic population to make room for Germans. [2]
As Bormann hoped, that evening Hitler chose the second policy and
the next day he told Bormann to issue population control measures for the
occupied territories. Bormann developed an eight-paragraph secret order
which included the following:
"When girls and women in the Occupied Territories of the East
have abortions, we can only be in favor of it; in any case we
should not oppose it. The Fuhrer believes that we should
authorize the development of a thriving trade in contraceptives.
We are not interested in seeing the non-German population
multiply." [3]
This was not the first such policy. On November 25, 1939, shortly
after the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Commission for Strengthening of
Germandom issued a circular containing the following:
"All measures which have the tendency to limit the births are to
be tolerated or to be supported. Abortion in the remaining area
(of Poland) must be declared free from punishment. The means for
abortion and contraceptive means may be offered publicly without
police restriction. Homosexuality is always to be declared legal.
The institutions and persons involved professionally in abortion
practices are not to be interfered with by police." [4]
This policy was confirmed on May 27, 1941 at a Ministry of the
Interior conference in Berlin. There a group of experts recommended
population control measures for Poland that included authorization of
abortion whenever the mother requested it. [5] On October 19, 1941 a
decree applied the measures to the Polish population. Hitler's July 23,
1942 decree extended it to other parts of Eastern Europe.
German experts also worked out practical ways to control population.
On April 27, 1942 in Berlin, Professor Wetzel issued a memorandum
suggesting ways to deceive people. It included the following:
"Every propaganda means, especially the press, radio, and movies,
as well as pamphlets, booklets, and lectures, must be used to
instill in the Russian population the idea that it is harmful to
have several children. We must emphasize the expenses that
children cause, the good things that people could have had with
the money spent on them. We could also hint at the dangerous
effect of child-bearing on a woman's health. Paralleling such
propaganda, a large-scale campaign would be launched in favor of
contraceptive devices. A contraceptive industry must be
established. Neither the circulation and sale of contraceptives
nor abortions must be prosecuted.
"It will even be necessary to open special institutions for
abortion, and to train midwives and nurses for this purpose. The
population will practice abortion all the more willingly if these
institutions are competently operated. The doctors must be able
to help out there being any question of this being a breach of
their professional ethics. Voluntary sterilization must also be
recommended by propaganda." [6]
The planning for this goes back still further. In the summer of
1932, almost a year before the Nazi Party took power in Germany, a
conference took place at the party headquarters in Munich. It discussed
Eastern Europe and assumed Germany would someday conquer the region.
Agricultural experts pointed out that controlling Eastern Europe
would make Germany self-sufficient in food but warned that the region's
"tremendous biological fertility" must be offset with a well-planned
depopulation policy. Speaking to the assembled experts Hitler warned,
"what we have discussed here must remain confidential."
Not all Nazi insiders remained silent though. Hermann Rauschning, a
prominent Nazi in the early thirties, defected in the mid-thirties and
tried to warn of Hitler's plans. In The Voice of Destruction he
described a 1934 conversation with Hitler about the Slavs.
"We are obliged to depopulate," he went on emphatically, ". . .
We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. . . . And
by remove I don't necessarily mean destroy; I shall simply take
systematic measures to dam their great natural fertility . . .
"The French complained after the war that there were twenty
million Germans too many. We accept the criticism. We favor the
planned control of population movements. But our friends will
have to excuse us if we subtract the twenty millions elsewhere."
[7]
Within Germany itself, Hitler also advocated government-supported
birth control to weed out those deemed "unfit." In his 1924 Mein Kempf,
Hitler wrote that one of the seven major responsibilities for government
was, "to maintain the practice of modern birth control. No diseased or
weak person should be allowed to have children." [8]
Once in power, Hitler wasted no time in legalizing eugenic
sterilization and abortion. Gitta Sereny describes what happened this
way. "The 1933 law for compulsory sterilization of those suffering from
hereditary disease was followed two years later, on October 8, 1935 by
the Erbgesundheitsgestz- the law to 'safeguard the hereditary health of
the German people.'" This expanded the original law by legalizing
abortion in cases of pregnancy where either of the partners suffered from
hereditary disease. [9]
Within Germany, however, these "negative eugenic" policies were
paralleled by positive programs to encourage births among the fit. Laws
were passed limiting access to birth control and prohibiting abortion.
Government programs encouraged large families.
These positive programs, along with the need to keep secret why
Germany was so willing to help Slavs limit their births, created a
confusion about Nazi policy that led the Hitler's remark about "shooting
up" anyone who tried to ban abortions in the Ukraine.
For instance, in the Spring of 1942, SS Reichsfuhrer Himmler had to
get the chief of German police in Poland, SS-General Krueger, to
intervene so the courts would no longer punish Poles for having
abortions. Similar court behavior in Byelorussia led SS-General Berger
to remark that some German administrators, "have no idea what the German
Eastern policy really means." [10]
From beginning to end, Nazi population policies expressed not only
their peculiar views of race but a consistency demanded by the logic of
the socialism itself. Hitler explained it to Rauschning this way:
"At its most revolutionary, Nazi policy aimed to socialize
people, not property. Hitler once commented, "Our socialism is
much deeper than Marxism . . . It does not change the external
order of things, but it orders solely the relationship of man to
the state . . . What do we care about income? Why should we
need to socialize the banks and factories? We are socializing
the people." [11]
Society as a Machine
Socialists see human society as a machine not a living organism. At
first, their machine may engulf only the larger elements of the society,
the "banks and factories." But with time it takes over more and more
until the people themselves are swallowed up. Human reproduction, like
factory production, must come under state control. As Hitler noted,
Nazism merely skipped the preliminary stages for the critical one.
In spite of worldwide condemnation of Nazi atrocities, some people
in the United States found their population control policies attractive.
Given it's socialist underpinnings, it isn't surprising that the ideas
would especially appeal to those ideologically closest to socialism, New
Deal liberals.
President Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, found Hitler's ideas on
birth control amusing. In "Allies of a Kind" the British historian
Christopher Thorne describes what happened this way:
"Subjects to do with breeding and race seem, indeed, to have held
a certain fascination for the President .... Thus, for example,
Roosevelt felt it in order to talk, jokingly, of dealing with
Puerto Rico's excessive birth rate by employing, in his own
words, 'the methods which Hitler used effectively.' He said to
Charles Taussig and William Hassett, as the former recorded it,
'that is all very simple and painless -- you have people pass
through a narrow passage and then there is a brrrrr of an
electrical apparatus. They stay there for twenty seconds and
from then on they are sterile.'" [12]
Fortunately, FDR's information was inaccurate. The Nazis had hoped
to sterilize people while they filled out forms at a counter, not while
passing through a narrow passage. But they found that the dose required
to sterilize also left obvious burns, making it impossible to keep the
sterilization secret.
Nazi attempts to secretly sterilize large populations indicate how
population controllers often begin with measures that allow "freedom of
choice." But if their goals aren't met, they won't hesitate to use as
much coercion as necessary. FDR's comments show that coercive birth
control can be attractive even to those who, in general, believe in
democracy. The crucial factor is an ideological commitment to a
controlled, planned society.
In the United States, the idea that the state should control human
reproduction was first promoted by the birth control groups of the 1920s
and 30s. Like Nazism, these groups broke society into two major groups,
the "fit" (generally equated with the affluent) and the "unfit" (the
poor). The only real difference lay in emphasis. Nazism wanted to raise
the birth rate of the fit and lower that of the unfit. The birth control
groups wanted only to "stop the multiplication of the unfit." [13]
Birth controllers hope to "socialize people" to the machine. For
instance, in 1935 a sociologist named James Bossard wrote in The Birth
Control Review:
"The demand for unskilled labor has been declining . . . but it
is in this group . . . that the reproductive rates are highest
. . . As the demand for unskilled, low intelligence labor
decreases, corresponding readjustments must be made in the supply
of this type of labor, if we are to avoid the crystallization of
a large element in the population who are destined to become
permanent public charges. This points again directly to birth
control on a scale which we have not yet fully visioned." [14]
In March 1939 Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control
League, wrote a letter describing what her group was doing. She tells
what Bossard's "not yet fully visioned" plans mean, massive government
involvement in birth control through the social welfare and public health
system:
". . . statisticians and population experts as well as members of
the medical profession had courage to attack the basic problem at
the roots: That is not asking or suggesting a cradle competition
between the intelligent and the ignorant, but a drastic
curtailment of the birth rate at the source of the unfit, the
diseased and the incompetent . . . The birth control clinics all
over the country are doing their utmost to reach the lower strata
of our population, but as we must depend upon people coming to
the Clinics, we must realize that there are hundreds of thousands
of women who never leave their own vicinity . . . but the way to
approach these people is through the social workers, visiting
nurses and midwives." [15]
During the war, public outrage at Nazi ideology forced American
birth control groups to stop talking about the "unfit." By 1942 the
various birth control groups had merged to form the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America. The new name, however, didn't mean that these
groups had abandoned their plans. Linda Gordon explains it this way:
"Planned parenthood" seemed a more positive concept than "birth
control" especially to those who were general advocates of the
importance of planning. Presumably "birth control" left matters
such as population size and quality to the anarchism of
individual, arbitrary decision. The propaganda of the
birth-control organizations from the late 1930s through the late
1940s increasingly emphasized the importance of over-all social
planning. A Birth Control Federation of America poster read:
'MODERN LIFE IS BASED ON CONTROL AND SCIENCE. We control the
speed of our automobile. We control machines. We endeavor
to control disease and death. Let us control the size of our
family to insure health and happiness.'" [16]
As the poster notes, these people believed that family size, like
highway speed limits, should be a matter of law and public policy.
"Planned parenthood" is thus similar to the planned economies of
socialist countries and "family planning" to urban planning.
The poster's reference to "modern life" being based on "science"
refers to the other aspect of the family planning groups, their use of
pseudo-science (especially statistics) to promote their programs.
During the twenties and thirties, eugenic fears were common among
the educated classes of the industrialized nations. Modern medicine, it
was believed, enabled the unfit to live and reproduce in large numbers.
Birth control groups used these fears to get support for their clinics.
Birth control would provide "quality control" for the human factory.
After Nazism discredited these eugenic arguments the same people
(now with "family planning agencies") dropped their language about unfit
genes and began talking about a poor environment. By the sixties they
had adopted another machine analogy, production control, to justify
themselves. As birth control curtailed the birth rate of the unfit, so
family planning would advert a "population explosion."
Like the earlier arguments, the warning about a population
explosion, while totally wrong, had the appearance of truth. The
children of the postwar baby boom were creating social unrest on the
campuses and in inner cities. It really did look like we were having too
many children.
In reality, with the arrival of the birth control pill in 1960, the
nation's birth rate nosedived. By the late sixties when rhetoric about a
"population bomb" hit its peak, it was obvious that the nation was
actually in the midst of a birth dearth. In 1972 the nation's birth rate
dropped below the replacement level and a decade and a half later it
shows no sign of rising.
The fears of a population explosion in this country were unfounded
but they made an excellent argument to get federal funding for family
planning programs and to legalize abortion. These programs helped target
one of the main groups in the country with above-average birth rates, the
poor underclass. (The other is conservative religious groups.)
Because Catholic immigrants were an early target of birth
controllers, Catholic leaders understood this better than anyone else.
In August 1965 William Ball, General Counsel of the Pennsylvania Catholic
Conference, testified to a Senate subcommittee considering government
funding for family planning services and warned that:
"We have a particular concern over this because we believe that if
the power and prestige of government is placed behind programs
aimed at providing birth control services to the poor, coercion
necessarily results and violations of human privacy become
inevitable." [17]
William Ball's warnings have proved correct. In a news article in
the June 6, 1969 issue of "Medical World News," Dr. Alan Guttmacher,
president of Planned Parenthood -- World Population, used the same word,
coercion, to describe what he felt would be necessary if voluntary means
failed. He noted that:
"Each country will have to decide its own form of coercion, and
determine when and how it should be employed. At present, the
means available are compulsory sterilization and compulsory
abortion. Perhaps some day a way of enforcing compulsory birth
control will be feasible." [18]
One of the countries where Dr. Guttmacher felt coercion would be
needed was mainland China. In the past decade Planned Parenthood, often
assisted by American money, has been helping the Chinese government set
up a population control program. A 1985 article in the Washington Post
described the result:
". . . China, to be sure, is curbing its population growth, but
its success is rooted in widespread coercion, wanton abortion and
intrusion by the state into the most intimate of human affairs.
"'The size of the family is too important to be left to the
personal decision of a couple,' Minister of Family Planning Qian
Xinzhong explained before resigning last year.
"'Births are a matter of state planning, just like other economic
and social activities, because they are a matter of strategic
concern,' he said. 'A couple cannot have a baby just because it
wants to.'" [19]
In 1979 China's Vice Premier Chen Muhua explained the relationship
between his country's socialism and coercive population control this way:
"Socialism should make it possible to regulate the reproduction of
human beings so that population growth keeps in step with the
growth of material production." [20]
Such open socialism has never been popular in the United States and
our laws make it almost impossible to use the degree of coercion used by
mainline China. However, as William Ball warned this doesn't mean that
government and family planning agencies can't use other means to coerce
women into abortion.
For instance, a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical
Association featured an exchange of letters about whether Center for
Disease Control guidelines should recommend abortion when the mother was
carrying the AIDS virus. Louise Tyrer of Planned Parenthood, among
others, wanted the proabortion guidelines. Others objected for the
following reason:
"Some of their objections were based on the fact that since not
all children born of AIDS-infected women are afflicted with AIDS,
some women might wish to carry pregnancy to term and should not
be pressured toward another course of action by the federal
government. Vigorous object was made because of the belief,
based on past practice, that minority women in public clinic
settings would be coerced into have abortions using these
guidelines as the basis." [21]
There is a warning here. In comparison to the limited resources of
any individual, the power of the government (and quasi-government
agencies) is immense. When that individual is young, poor, minority, and
female that power is multiplied many times. As the CDC consultants
noted, abortion for these women is often coerced, not chosen.
It matters little that these coercive planners believe they can
create a perfect world. As Charles Frankel, Old Dominion professor of
philosophy and public affairs at Columbia University wrote in Commentary:
"The partisans of large-scale eugenic planning, the Nazis aside,
have usually been people of notable humanitarian sentiments.
They seem not to hear themselves. It is that other music that
they hear, the music that says that there shall be nothing random
in the world, nothing independent, nothing moved by its own
vitality, not out of keeping with some Idea; even our children
must be not our progeny but our creations." [22]
Their music is the music of a machine; a machine made from the
bodies of each of us.
REFERENCES
[1] Clarissa Henry and Marc Hillel, Of Pure Blood. Translated by Eric
Mossbacher. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976) 148. See also: Henry
Picker, ed., Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier, 1941-2 (Bonn,
1951) and Josef Ackerman, Himmler als Ideologe (Gottingen, 1970).
[2] For more details see: Jochen von Lang with Claus Sibyll, The
Secretary, Martin Bormann: The Man Who Manipulated Hitler, Trans.
Christa Armstrong and Peter White, (New York: Random House, 1979)
209-11. David Irving. Hitler's War. (New York: Viking Press,
1977) 402-03.
[3] Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1954) 272-74. Nuremberg document: NO-1878.
[4] Quoted in Ihor Kamenetsky, "German Lebensraum Policy in Eastern
Europe During World War II" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Illinois, 1957) (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilm, # 25,236)
171.
[5] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews. (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1961) 642. Nuremberg document: NG-844.
[6] Thoughts and suggestions on "Plan East" prepared for the SS
Reichsfuhrer by Professor Wetzel. Berlin, April 27, 1942.
Nuremberg document: NG-2325. In Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate,
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1954) 272-74.
[7] Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1940) 137-8.
[8] Louis L. Snyder ed., Hitler's Third Reich: A Documentary History
(Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1981) 46.
[9] Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness, (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1974), 62.
[10] Ihor Kamenetsky, "German Lebensraum Policy in Eastern Europe During
World War II" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1957)
(Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilm, # 25,236) 173. From
Himmler's File #1302, Folder H. 11 and Nuremberg document: NO- 3134
[11] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, Political Conversations with
Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims (London: Gollancz, 1939), 27. Quoted
in Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland. (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1987) 179.
[12] Annex to memo. of 15 March 1945, Taussig Papers, Box 52. In
Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain
and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978) 158-59.
[13] Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right. (New York: Grossman
Publishers, 1974,1976) 287. The quote is from Margaret Sanger's
autobiography. See also Mike Perry, "How Planned Parenthood Got
Its Name" International Review of Natural Family Planning (Fall,
1986) Vol. X, No. 3. 234-42.
[14] James Bossard, "Population and National Security," Birth Control
Review, September 1935, 4. Quoted in Linda Gordon, Woman's Body,
Woman's Right. (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974, 1976) 339.
[15] Sanger to Frank G. Boudreau, March 12, 1939 in the Sanger Papers at
Smith College Library. In Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's
Right (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974, 1976) 359.
[16] Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right. (New York: Grossman
Publishers, 1974, 1976), 345.
[17] Stephen P. Strickland, ed. Population Crisis (Washington, DC:
Socio-Dynamics Publ., 1970) 99.
[18] "Outlook" Medical World News (June 6, 1969) 11.
[19] Michael Weisskopf, "Abortion Policy Tears at Fabric of China's
Society" (January 7, 1985) A1.
[20] Stephen W. Mosher, "China's Coercive Population Control Program
Continues" National Right to Life News (Dec. 3, 1987) 9.
[21] Albert E. Gunn, "The CDC and Abortion in HIV-Positive Women"
Journal of the American Medical Association (January 8, 1988) Vol.
259 No. 2. 217.
[22] Charles Frankel, "The Specter of Eugenics" Commentary (March, 1974)
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