Osservatorio PanGea ringrazia W. Engdahl per la gentile concessione a pubblicare un significativo estratto di "Agri-Business, i semi della distruzione. Dal controllo del cibo al controllo del mondo" edito in Italia da Arianna Editrice.
Una lettura fondamentale che sovverte la convinzione secondo cui una Nazione progredita non debba occuparsi della terra e dei suoi frutti.
Engdahl ricostruisce in maniera incontrovertibile, attraverso una accurata ricostruzione storica chi e cosa abbia condotto la produzione agricola di intere nazioni a dipendere da poche imprese transnazionali private orientate al controllo della popolazione mondiale attraverso la genetica, evoluzione 'accettabile' dell'eugenetica.
Attraverso questo link è possibile rimanere aggiornati sulle pubblicazioni dell'autore e ordinarle,
The Brotherhood of Death
Una lettura fondamentale che sovverte la convinzione secondo cui una Nazione progredita non debba occuparsi della terra e dei suoi frutti.
Engdahl ricostruisce in maniera incontrovertibile, attraverso una accurata ricostruzione storica chi e cosa abbia condotto la produzione agricola di intere nazioni a dipendere da poche imprese transnazionali private orientate al controllo della popolazione mondiale attraverso la genetica, evoluzione 'accettabile' dell'eugenetica.
Attraverso questo link è possibile rimanere aggiornati sulle pubblicazioni dell'autore e ordinarle,
The Brotherhood of Death
Human guinea pigs
Years before Henry Kissinger
and Brent Scowcroft made population reduction the official foreign policy of
the United States Government, the Rockefeller brothers, most especially John D
Rockefeller III, or JDR III as he was affectionately known, were busy experimenting
on human guinea pigs.
![]() |
| I fratelli Rockefeller |
At the time, Nelson was Under
Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and a shadowy and
highly influential figure in the Eisenhower Administration.
In Nelson’s version of
Operation Bootstrap, the boots were owned by the Rockefeller family and their
business friends. The only straps were those used by sweatshop owners on the
island to force a higher level of productivity.
While Nelson was thus busy
encouraging the spirit of free enterprise among Puerto Ricans, brother John D.
III, was running human experiments in mass sterilization on the poorer citizens
of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was an unfortunate island whose sovereignty got
lost somewhere in the shuffle of American diplomacy. It was a de facto US
colony, with ultimate legal control decided far away in Washington, making it
an ideal experiment station. Through his newly founded Population Council, JDR
III first ran some of the experiments in population reduction which would later
become global State Department policy under Henry Kissinger’s NSSM 200.
JDR III made Puerto Rico into
a huge laboratory to test his ideas on mass population control beginning in the
1950’s. By 1965, an estimated 35% of Puerto Rico’s women of childbearing age
had been permanently sterilized, according to a study made that year by the
island’s Public Health Department. The Rockefeller Population Council, and the
US Government Department of Health Education and Welfare—where brother Nelson
was Under-Secretary—packaged the sterilization campaign. They used the spurious
argument that it would protect women’s health and stabilize incomes if there
were fewer mouths to feed.
Poor Puerto Rican peasant
women were encouraged to give birth in sanitary new US-built hospitals where
doctors were under orders to sterilize mothers after two children by tying
their tubes, usually without the mother’s being aware of what was being done.
By 1965, Puerto Rico was a world leader in at least one category. It had the
highest percentage of sterilized women in the world. India lagged badly in
comparison, with a mere 3%. It made a difference when the Rockefeller family
could control the process directly without government meddling.
John D. III’s forced
sterilization was no radical departure for the family. The Rockefellers had
long regarded Puerto Rico as a convenient human laboratory. In 1931, the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, later renamed the Rockefeller
University, financed the cancer experiments of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads in Puerto
Rico.
Rhoads was no ordinary
scientist. It later came out that Rhoads had deliberately infected his subjects
with cancer cells to see what would happen. Eight of his subjects died.
The Rockefeller Institute pathologist, Rhoads, complained in November 1931,
‘Porto Ricans are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and
thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. What the island needs is not
public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the
population. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by
killing off 8…’ Initially written in a confidential letter to a fellow
researcher, Rhoads's boast of killing Puerto Ricans appeared in Time magazine
in February 1932 after Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist
Party, gained possession of the letter and publicized its contents
![]() |
| Pedro Albizu Campos - leader del Puerto Ricans Nationalist Party |
Rather than being tried for
murder, the Rockefeller Institute scientist was asked to establish the US Army
Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah and also Panama, and was later
named to the US Atomic Energy Commission, where radiation experiments were
secretly conducted on prisoners, hospital patients and US soldiers.[1]
![]() |
| I laboratori dell'US Army Biological Warfare in Maryland |
In 1961, more than a decade
before his policies were to become enshrined in NSSM 200, JDR III gave the
Second McDougall Lecture to the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization. Rockefeller told the listeners, ‘To my mind, population growth is
second only to control of atomic weapons as the paramount problem of the day.’
He spoke of a ‘cold inevitability, a certainty that is mathematical, that gives
the problems posed by too-rapid population growth a somber and chilling caste
indeed.’ The ‘grim fact’ of population growth, he warned, ‘cuts across all the
basic needs of mankind and…frustrates man's achievement of his higher needs.’[2]
Rockefeller eugenics support
JDR III grew up surrounded by
eugenicists and race theorists, Malthusians, at the Rockefeller Foundation such
as Frederick Osborn, Henry Fairchild and Alan Gregg. For John D. III, it seemed
only natural that he and others of his ‘class’ should decide which elements of
the human species survived, in order that they could have ‘life as we want it
to be.’ They saw it as being a bit like culling herds of sheep for the best of
breed.
The logic of human life for
the family was simple: supply and demand. As Jameson Taylor expressed it,
For Rockefeller, the proper
care of sheep…requires nothing more than an equalization of supply with demand.
If supply—i.e. food, water and space—cannot meet demand, supply must be
increased and demand must be decreased. The Rockefeller Foundation has used
this two pronged approach to great effect. The supply shortage has been
addressed by…advanced medical practices and increased crop yields. The demand problem
has been solved by culling the herd via birth control and abortion.[3]
For most Americans and for
most of the world, the idea that the leading policy circles of the United
States Government, acting on the behest of some of its wealthiest families and
most influential universities, would deliberately promote the mass covert
sterilization of entire population groups was too far-fetched to accept.
Few realized that individuals
with names such as Rockefeller, Harriman, banker J.P. Morgan Jr., Mary Duke
Biddle of the tobacco family, Cleveland Dodge, John Harvey Kellogg from the
breakfast cereal fortune, Clarence Gamble of Proctor & Gamble, that all
were quietly funding eugenics, most as members of the American Eugenics
Society, and financing experiments in forced sterilization of ‘inferior people’
and various forms of population control as early as World War I.
Their counterparts in the English Eugenics Society at the time included a British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, economist John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Lord Balfour and Julian Huxley, who went on to be the first head of UNESCO after the war.
Their counterparts in the English Eugenics Society at the time included a British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, economist John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Lord Balfour and Julian Huxley, who went on to be the first head of UNESCO after the war.
Most ordinary citizens simply
didn’t appreciate who was running such things, and how they really viewed the
majority of mankind behind all their noble rhetoric of democracy and
development.
Combating ‘The human cancer’
The population and related
food policies of the US Government of the early 1970’s emanated from the halls
of the Rockefeller Foundation, from their Population Council and the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and from a handful of similarly well-endowed private
foundations, such as the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. The true
history of those organizations was carefully buried behind a façade of
philanthropy. In reality, these tax-exempt foundations served as vehicles for
the advancement and domination of powerful elite families at the expense of the
welfare of most American citizens and of most of mankind.
One man served as head of the
Medical Division of the Rockefeller Foundation for more than 34 years. His name
was Alan Gregg. An all-but unknown person to the outside world, it is likely
that, in his 34 years at the Medical Division of the Rockefeller Foundation,
Gregg wielded more influence over life and death on the planet than Josef
Stalin and Adolf Hitler combined. He was Vice President of the Foundation on
his retirement in 1956, and his ideology pervaded the institute decades after.
It was an ideology of Malthusian brutality and racist finality.
Gregg once wrote in an article
for a scientific journal on population, ‘There is an alarming parallel between
the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the growth of human
population in the earth ecological economy.’ Gregg then asserted that
‘cancerous growths demand food, but so far as I know, they have never been
cured by getting it...The analogies can be found in our plundered planet.’
This was a formulation which
translated as, ‘people pollute, so eliminate pollution by eliminating people…’
Gregg then went on, in a paper commissioned by one of the most eminent
scientific journals in the US, to observe, ‘how nearly the slums of our great
cities resemble the necrosis of tumors.’ And this ‘raised the whimsical query:
Which is the more offensive to decency and beauty, slums or the fetid detritus
of a growing tumor?’
The Rockefellers’ darker
secrets
The role of the Rockefeller
Foundation in US and global population policy was not accidental, nor was it a
minor aspect of the mission of the institution. It was at the very heart of it.
This population policy role held the key to understanding the later engagement
of the Foundation in the revolution in biotechnology and plant genetics.
In 1913, the founder of the
Standard Oil trust, John D. Rockefeller Sr., was advised to hide his wealth
behind a tax-exempt foundation. That year Congress had passed the first federal
income tax, and the Rockefeller family and other wealthy Americans such as
steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, were enraged at what they deemed illegal theft
of justly-earned gains. As Carnegie put it at the time, ‘Wealth passing through
the hands of the few can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of
our race (sic) than if distributed in small sums to the people
themselves.’ [4] In so many
words, money should only belong to the very wealthy, who know best how to use
it.
The newly-established
Rockefeller Foundation’s stated mission was, ‘to promote the wellbeing of
mankind throughout the world.’ It went without saying that the foundation
alone, and the Rockefeller family, would decide just what ‘promoting the
wellbeing of mankind’ entailed.
From its inception, the
Rockefeller Foundation was focused on culling the herd, or systematically
reducing populations of ‘inferior’ breeds. One of the first Rockefeller
Foundation grants was to the Social Science Research Council for study of birth
control techniques in 1923. In 1936, the foundation created and endowed the
first Office of Population Research at Princeton University, headed by Eugenics
Society member Frank Notestein, to study the political aspects of population
change.
From its founding onwards, the
philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation was to deal with ‘causes rather than
symptoms.’ Clearly one of the ‘causes’ of world problems, as the family saw it,
was the persistent tendency of the human species, at least the less wealthy
portion of it, to reproduce and multiply itself. An increasing number of people
in the world meant a greater potential to cause trouble and to demand a bigger
slice of the Big Pie of Life, which the Rockefellers and their wealthy friends
regarded exclusively as their ‘God-given’ right.
Back in 1894, when the
family’s oil fortune was in its early days, JDR III’s father, John D., Junior,
wrote an essay as a student at Brown University entitled, ‘The Dangers to
America Arising from Unrestricted Immigration.’ In it he wrote about immigrants,
then mostly from Italy, Ireland and the rest of Europe, calling them, ‘the scum
of foreign cities, the vagabond, the tramp, the pauper, and the
indolent…ignorant and hardly better than beasts.’ [5]
One of the first philanthropic
projects undertaken by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920’s was to fund the
American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring
Harbor, New York where by 1917, John D. Rockefeller had become the office’s
second largest supporter after the Harriman family.
Eugenics was a pseudo-science.
The word was first coined in England in 1883 by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis
Galton, and it was founded on Darwin’s 1859 work, the Origin of Species. Darwin
had imposed what he termed, ‘the application of the theories of Malthus to the
entire vegetable and animal kingdom.’ Malthus, who shortly before his death had
repudiated his own theory of population, asserted in his 1798 tract, ‘Essay on
the Principles of Population,’ that populations tend to expand geometrically
while food supply grew only arithmetically, leading to periodic famine and
death to eliminate the ‘surplus’ populations..
During the latter 19th Century,
an explosion of population in Europe and North America was accompanied, thanks
to the application of science and technological improvements, by rising living
standards and increased food supply, thus discrediting Malthusianism as a
serious science. However, by the 1920’s, Rockefeller, Carnegie and other vastly
wealthy Americans embraced a Malthusian notion of what came to be called,
‘social Darwinism,’ which justified their accumulation of vast fortunes with
the argument that it was a kind of divine proof of their superior species’
survival traits over less fortunate mortals.
A related major Rockefeller
Foundation project in the 1920’s was the financing of Margaret Sanger’s Planned
Parenthood Federation of America, initially known as the American Birth Control
League, a racist association promoting eugenics in the form of population
control and forced sterilization, under the guise of rational ‘family
planning.’ She wrote: "Birth control is thus the entering wedge for the
Eugenic educator ... the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the
'fit' is admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization ...’
Sanger, portrayed as a
selfless woman of charity, was in reality a committed eugenicist, an outright
race supremacist, who remained a Rockefeller family intimate until her death.
She railed against ‘inferior classes’ and was obsessed with ‘how to limit and
discourage the over-fertility (sic) of the mentally and physically
defective.’ [6]
As it was defined by its
sponsors, eugenics was the study of improving the ‘quality’ of the human
species, while reducing the quantity of ‘inferior beings,’ or as Sanger put it,
the ‘qualitative factor over the quantitative factor…in dealing with the great
masses of humanity.’ The title page of the Eugenics Review, the
journal of the Eugenics Education Society, carried the original definition of
British eugenics founder, Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, who defined eugenics
as ‘the science of improvement of the human race germ plasm through better
breeding. Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may
improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether
physically or mentally.’
In her 1922 book, The
Pivot of Civilization, Sanger wrote, ‘Birth control…is really the greatest and
most truly eugenic program.’ Sanger was appreciated in international circles
for her population control zeal. In 1933, the head of the Nazi Physicians’
Association, Reichsärzteführer, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, praised Sanger for her
stringent racial policies asking fellow Germans to follow her model.
Contrary to popular belief,
the idea of a Nordic master race was not solely a Nazi Germany fantasy. It had
its early roots in the United States of America going back to the early years
of the 20th Century.
The President of the
prestigious Stanford University in California, David Starr Jordan, promoted the
idea of ‘race and blood’ in his 1902 book, ‘Blood of a Nation.’ He claimed that
poverty was an inherited genetic trait, as was talent. Education had no
influence; you either ‘had it’ or you didn’t.
Two years later, in 1904
Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Institute had founded the major laboratory at Cold
Spring Harbor, the Eugenics Record Office on wealthy Long Island, outside New
York City, where millions of index cards on the bloodlines of ordinary
Americans were gathered, to plan the possible removal of entire bloodlines
deemed inferior. The land for the institute was donated by railroad magnate, E.
H. Harriman, a firm supporter of eugenics. This was eugenics, American elite
style. Naturally, if the ideal was tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic types, that
meant dark-skinned Asians, Indians, blacks, Hispanics and others, including the
sick and retarded, were deemed inferior to the eugenics goal of ‘best of
breed.’ [7]
The aim of the index card
project was to map the inferior bloodlines and subject them to lifelong
segregation and sterilization to ‘kill their bloodlines.’ The sponsors were out
to eliminate those they deemed ‘unfit.’ As early as 1911, Carnegie was funding
an American Breeder’s Association study on the ‘Best Practical Means for
Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.’ [8]
One of the largest and most
significant financial contributors for various eugenics projects soon became
the Rockefeller Foundation. It poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into
various eugenics and population projects, from the American Eugenics Society to
Cold Spring Harbor, to the American Breeder’s Association.[9]
One of the more prominent
members of the American Eugenics Society in the early 1920’s was Dr. Paul
Bowman Popenoe, a US Army venereal disease specialist from World War I, who
wrote a textbook entitled, ‘Applied Eugenics.’ In sum, Popenoe said, ‘The first
method which presents itself is execution … Its value in keeping up the
standard of the race should not be underestimated.’ endnote He went on to
eloquently advocate the ‘destruction of the individual by some adverse feature
of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria or by bodily
deficiency.’ endnote In his book, Popenoe spoke of estimated five million
Americans who would, at one point or another, end up in mental hospitals, and
of ‘five million more who are so deficient intellectually with less than 70%
average intelligence, as to be in many cases, liabilities rather than assets to
the race.’ [10] The book was
aimed at a select, elite readership. It was an example of what the eugenics
movement termed ‘negative eugenics’—the systematic elimination of ‘inferior’
beings, whether mentally inferior, physically handicapped or racially
non-white.
![]() |
| Dr. Paul Bowman Popenoe |
Popenoe’s radical approach was
a bit too controversial for some, but by 1927, in Buck vs. Bell, the US Supreme
Court, in a decision by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ruled that the forced
sterilization program of the State of Virginia was Constitutional. In his
written decision, Holmes wrote, ‘It is better for all the world, if instead of
waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for
their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from
continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Holmes,
one of the most influential Supreme Court justices, was also one of its most
outspoken racists. In 1922, the ageing Holmes wrote to British economist and
Labour Partyleading figure, Harold J. Laski, ‘As I have said, no doubt often,
it seems to me that all society rests on the death of men. If you don’t kill
‘em one way you kill ‘em another—or prevent their being born. Is not the
present time an illustration of Malthus?’ The statement could have served as
the guiding slogan of the Rockefeller Foundation eugenics efforts. [11]
![]() |
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/analysis-californias-forced-sterilization-programs-once-harmed-thousands-especially-latinas |
This 1927 Supreme Court
decision opened the floodgates for thousands of American citizens to be
coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. One Illinois mental
hospital in Lincoln fed new patients milk from known tubercular cows, in the
conviction that a genetically strong human specimen would be immune.[12] The State of
California was the eugenics model state. Under its sweeping eugenics law,
passed in 1909, all feebleminded or other mental patients were sterilized
before discharge, and any criminal found guilty of any crime three times could
be sterilized at the discretion of a consulting physician. California
sterilized some 9,782 individuals, mostly women classified as ‘bad girls,’ many
of whom had been forced into prostitution.[13]
Years later, the Nazis at the
Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their own defense. In the postwar
world, not surprisingly, it was to no avail. The Rockefeller propaganda machine
buried the reference; the victors defined the terms of peace and the truth of
war.
‘Calling a spade a spade…’
![]() |
| http://aleph.humanities.ucla.edu/2015/07/13/revisiting-the-three-generations-of-imbeciles-the-impact-of-buck-v-bell-on-the-american-eugenics-movement/ |
The Rockefeller enthusiasm for
eugenics during the 1920’s did not stop at America’s own shores. Rockefeller
Foundation money played an instrumental role in financing German eugenics
during the 1920’s. From 1922 to 1926, the Rockefeller Foundation donated
through its Paris office a staggering $410,000 to a total of hundreds of German
eugenics researchers. In 1926, it awarded an impressive $250,000 for the
creation of the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. That was the
equivalent of some $26 millions in 2004 dollars, a sum especially unheard of in
a Germany devastated by Weimar hyperinflation and economic depression. During
the 1920’s, Rockefeller Foundation money dominated and steered German eugenics
research.[14]
As American researcher Edwin
Black and others later documented, the leading psychiatrist at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute at that time was Ernst Rüdin, a man who went on to a stellar
career as the architect of Adolf Hitler’s systematic program of medical eugenics.
The Rockefeller-financed Rüdin was named President of the world Eugenics
Federation in 1932. Their platform was openly advocating the killing or
sterilization of people whose heredity made them a ‘public burden.’
The Rockefeller Foundation
largesse for German research was apparently unbounded in those days. In 1929,
the year of the great Wall Street crash and extreme German economic crisis,
Rockefeller gave a grant of $310,000 to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain
Research, one of several subsequent Rockefeller grants.
The multi-talented Rüdin was
also head of brain research at that institute, where was employed Hermann J.
Muller, an American eugenicist also funded with Rockefeller money. Later it was
revealed that the institute received ‘brains in batches of 150-200’ from
victims of the Nazi euthanasia program in Brandenburg. The brain research was
directed towards the Nazi experiments on Jews, gypsies, the mentally
handicapped and other ‘defectives.’ In 1931, the Rockefeller Foundation approved
a further ten-year grant of a sizeable $89,000 to Rüdin’s Institute for
Psychiatry to research links between blood, neurology and mental illness.
Rockefeller money was funding eugenics in its purest form.[15]
Rüdin also led the Nazi
program of forced eugenic sterilization, and was a prime architect of the 1933
Nazi Sterilization Law. Rudin and his staff, as part of the Task Force of
Heredity Experts, chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the
sterilization law. Described as an ‘American Model’ law, it was adopted in July
1933 and proudly printed in the September 1933 Eugenical News (USA),
with Hitler's signature. Rüdin called for sterilizing all members of an
unfit individual’s extended family. Rüdin was twice honoured by Adolf
Hitler for his contribution to German eugenics and racial cleansing. Under his
Sterilization Law, some 400,000 Germans were diagnosed as manic-depressive or
schizophrenic and forcibly sterilized, and thousands of handicapped children
were simply killed. Declaring racial hygiene a ‘spiritual movement,’ Rüdin and
his associates found a willing collaborator in Adolf Hitler. ‘Only through [the
Führer] did our dream of over thirty years, that of applying racial hygiene to
society, become a reality,’ Rudin said.[16]
Hitler personally was a great
enthusiast of American eugenics, praising US eugenics efforts in 1924 in
his Mein Kampf. He wrote, ‘There is today one state in which at least weak
beginnings toward a better conception of immigration are noticeable. Of course,
it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.’[17] A few years
later, Hitler wrote the American eugenicist Madison Grant to personally praise
his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race. In it Grant had written
among other things that America had been ‘infested by a large and increasing
number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races…’ Grant
advocated as a eugenic remedy ‘a rigid system of selection through the
elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures
(sic).’[18] Hitler
clearly recognized a kindred soul in Grant, a co-founder of the American
Eugenics Society.
By 1940, thousands of Germans
from old age homes and mental institutions had been systematically gassed, as
had been advocated twenty years earlier in the United States by Popenoe, if
with limited success. In 1940, just back from a tour of the German eugenics
institutes, Leon Whitney, Executive Secretary of the Rockefeller-funded
American Eugenics Society, declared of the Nazi experiments, ‘While we were
pussy-footing around…the Germans were calling a spade a spade.’[19]
In May 1932, the Rockefeller
Foundation had sent a telegram to its Paris office, which quietly funnelled the
US Rockefeller funds into Germany. The telegram read: ‘JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE
COMMITTEE: NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE
ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF
SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.’ [20]Endnote O. That was
one year before Hitler became Chancellor. The ‘KWG’ was the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. The
germ-plasm research was to continue well into the Third Reich, financed with
Rockefeller Foundation money until at least 1939.[21]
![]() |
| Con il Kaiser Wilhelm-Institut fur Anthropologie ha collaborato Mengele |
The head of the German
eugenics institute in Berlin was Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. His research on
twins had long been a dream of American eugenics advocates in order to advance
their theories of heredity. In 1942, in the German Nazi eugenics journal Der
Erbarzt which he edited, von Verschuer advocated a ‘total solution to the
Jewish problem.’ In 1936, still receiving Rockefeller funds, Verschuer was
called to Frankfurt to head a newly established Institute of Genetics and
Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt. The largest of its kind, the
Frankfurt institute was responsible for the compulsory medical curriculum on
eugenics and racial hygiene.[22]
![]() |
| Mengele |
Von Verschuer’s long-time
assistant was Dr. Josef Mengele, who headed human experiments at the Auschwitz
concentration camp after May 1943. Von Verschuer was delighted when Mengele,
who won the name, ‘The Angel of Death’ for his deadly experiments on human
prisoners, was put in Auschwitz. Now their ‘scientific’ research could continue
uninhibited. He wrote at the time to the German Research Society that, ‘My
assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of
research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer (captain) and camp
physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the
most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with
permission of the SS Reichsführer (Himmler).’ [23]
Never one to place principle
before pragmatism, the Rockefeller Foundation ceased its funding of most Nazi
eugenics, but not until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. By that time, what
had been established with their money over a period of more than 15 years was
consolidated. Alan Gregg, the Foundation’s Director of the Medical Division,
was the man who was most intimately involved in the Nazi funding of eugenics at
every step of the way. His division was responsible for funding the various
Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes.
Another pivotal figure was
Raymond B. Fosdick, who became President of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1936,
and was by informed accounts, the leading figure in the American Eugenics
Society. Fosdick had earlier been general counsel to Sanger’s American Birth
Control League, and was the person who in 1924 first convinced John D.
Rockefeller Jr. of the importance of birth control and eugenics. He was the
brother of prominent eugenics advocate, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the
Rockefellers’ pastor for whom Rockefeller built the Riverside Church in the
mid-1920's. Raymond Fosdick had worked for the Rockefeller family since 1913.
He had been sent to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as part of Col. Edward
Mandell House's group, ‘The Inquiry,’ the secret team which ran the American
negotiators at Versailles. After Versailles Fosdick went on to become John D.
Rockefeller’s personal attorney and ran the Rockefeller Foundation for over
three decades.[24] Endnote In
1924, Fosdick had written a personal letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr., urging
foundation funding for Margaret Sanger’s eugenics work in birth control,
stating, ‘I believe that the problem of population constitutes one of the great
perils of the future and if something is not done along the lines these people
are suggesting, we shall hand down to our children a world in which the scramble
for food and the means of subsistence will be far more bitter than anything at
present.’ [25]
Leaving Mengele holding the
proverbial bag, Verschuer fled Berlin before the end of the war, and avoided a
Nuremburg trial. By 1946, he was writing to his old friend, the US Army
eugenicist, Paul Popenoe, in California, who had mailed cocoa and coffee to
Verschuer back in postwar Germany. Old Nazi friends managed to whitewash
Verschuer’s Auschwitz past, for which all records had been conveniently
destroyed.
In 1949, the Auschwitz doctor
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was named Corresponding Member of the American
Society of Human Genetics, a new organization founded in 1948 by leading
eugenicists hiding under the banner of the less-disgraced name, genetics. The
first president of the American Society of Human Genetics was Hermann Josef
Muller, a Rockefeller University Fellow who had worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Brain Research in 1932. [26]
Von Verschuer got his
membership in the American Society of Human Genetics from another German, an
old eugenics colleague, Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who had worked with Ernst Rüdin
on ‘genetic psychiatry.’ Part of von Verschuer’s re-packaged identity was a
position he got after the war with the newly-created Bureau of Human Heredity
in Copenhagen. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the money to found the new
Danish office where the same eugenics activities could be more quietly
advanced. The Bureau of Human Heredity, received a letter from von Verschuer
mentioning that he had the results of Auschwitz ‘research’ moved to Copenhagen
in 1947, to the care of Danish Institute Director, Tage Kemp, also a member of
the American Eugenics Society. Kemp had worked on eugenics with the Rockefeller
Foundation since they financed his 1932 research stay at Cold Springs Harbor
Eugenics Record Office. Kemp’s Institute hosted the first International
Congress in Human Genetics after the war in 1956.[27]
Eugenics was the foundation of
John D. Rockefeller III’s obsession with overpopulation. Given his enormous
influence and the huge financial muscle of the Rockefeller Foundation to fund
scientific research, it was an obsession which would have untold consequences
for generations after his death.
John D. III was nurtured on
the grim pseudo-science of Malthus and fears of population growth. When he was
a senior at Princeton University in 1928, his father, John D. Rockefeller Jr.
named his son to the board of the family’s Bureau of Social Hygiene, a birth
control organization. JDR III’s Princeton mentor, economics professor, Frank
Fetter, was a member of the American Eugenics Society. Fetter taught that
‘democracy was increasing the mediocre and reducing the excellent strains of
stock…’ [28]
In 1931, JDR III joined the
board of the Rockefeller Foundation itself. There, eugenicists like Raymond
Fosdick and Frederick Osborn, founding members of the American Eugenics
Society, fostered JDR III’s interest in population control. Osborn was
president of the American Eugenics Society in 1946, and was also president of
the racist Pioneer Fund. With John D Rockefeller III he would co-found the
Rockefeller Population Council. During the Third Reich, Osborn had expressed
his early support for German sterilization efforts. In 1937 Frederick Osborn
personally praised the Nazi eugenic program as the ‘most important experiment
which has ever been tried.’ In 1938 he lamented the fact that the public
opposed ‘the excellent sterilization program in Germany because of its Nazi
origin.’ By 1934, a year after Hitler came to power in Germany, JDR III wrote
his father that he wanted to devote his energies to the population problem. [29]
In 1952, JDR III was ready to
make his life’s major work. With $1,400,000 of his own funds in addition to
Rockefeller Foundation money, he founded the Population Council in New York, to
promote studies on the dangers of ‘over-population’ and related issues. Many of
the leading American eugenicists had become pessimistic that their decades of
efforts of forced sterilization of mental and other deficient people were making
a difference in the quality of the leading genetic stock. With population
control, Rockefeller and others in the establishment believed they had finally
found the answer to mass, efficient and effective negative eugenics.
John Foster Dulles, then chairman
of the Rockefeller Foundation and later Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State,
played a key role in establishing John D. III’s new Population Council along
with Frederick Osborn, first director of the Council. Osborn remained a central
figure at the Population Council until the late 1960’s.
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| John Foster Dulles |
The founding meeting of the
Population Council, held in the Rockefeller family’s Williamsburg Virginia
village, was attended as well by Detlev W. Bronk, then president of both the
Rockefeller Institute and the National Academy of Sciences. John D. Rockefeller
III arranged for the conference to be sponsored under the auspices of the
National Academy of Sciences to give it a quasi-scientific aura. The head of
the Academy, Dr. Detlev Bronk, was sympathetic to the agenda of population
control. Being promoted was the same unvarnished eugenics racial ideology,
veiled under the guise of world hunger and population problems.
In addition, a representative
from the Carnegie Institution, Warren S. Thompson, director of the Scripps
Foundation for Research in Population Problems, and Thomas Parran, US Surgeon
General during the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, were there as well. Pascal
K. Whelpton from the Population Division at the United Nations came, and so did
two men who ran the UN Population Division in later years, Frank Notestein and
Kingsley Davis, both as well, members of the American Eugenics Society. [30]
Over the following 25 years,
the Rockefeller Population Council would spend a staggering $173 millions on
population reduction globally, establishing itself as by far the most
influential organization to promote the eugenics agenda in the world. Among the
Council’s favourite projects were funding research for Norplant, a
contraceptive steroid implanted under the skin to provide contraception for
several years, the IUD contraceptive device, and the French abortion pill,
RU-486. Sheldon J. Segal, led the work.[31]
In 1952, when he decided to
create the Population Council, Rockefeller scrupulously avoided using the term
‘eugenics.’ Population control and family planning were to be the new terms of
reference for what was the same policy after 1952, deploying vastly enlarged
international resources. The old talk of racial purity and elimination of
inferiors was altered. The eugenics leopard, however, did not change its spots
after the war. It became far more deadly under John D.’s Population Council. At
the time of the founding of Rockefeller’s Population Council, the American
Eugenics Society made a little-publicized move of its headquarters from Yale
University directly into the offices of the Population Council in the
Rockefeller Center in New York City.
![]() |
Rockefeller Center in New York City
|
Rockefeller shrewdly
repackaged his discredited eugenics race and class ideology as ‘population
control.’ Instead of focussing on domestic issues such as American poor immigrants
or the mentally challenged, he turned his sights on the entire developing
world, a vast sea of humanity which stood between the Rockefeller family and
the realization of their ambitious postwar designs for a new American Century.
The strategists around the
Rockefeller eugenics organizations explicitly set out to pursue the same agenda
as essentially Von Verschuer and the Nazi eugenics crowd had, but under the
deliberate strategy of what they termed ‘crypto-genetics.’ The key American
proponent of hiding the eugenics nature of their work under the name ‘genetics’
and ‘population control’ was Rockefeller’s head of the Population Council,
Frederick Osborn. Osborn pointed to studies indicating that, with the proper
approach, ‘less intelligent’ women can be convinced to reduce their births
voluntarily. ‘A reduction of births at this level would be an important
contribution to reducing the frequency of genes which make for mental defect.’
He asserted that birth control for the poor would help improve the population
‘biologically.’ And for families which experience chronic unemployment, Osborn
said ‘Such couples should not be denied the opportunity to use new methods of
contraception that are available to better-off families. A reduction in the
number of their unwanted children would further both the social and biological
improvement of the population.’ Referring to racial minorities, he explicitly
called for ‘making available the new forms of contraception to the great number
of people at the lower economic and educational levels.’
‘The most urgent eugenic
policy at this time,’ Osborn insisted, was ‘to see that birth control is made
equally available to all individuals in every class of society, because there
is new evidence that the more successful or high IQ individuals within each
group may soon be having more children than the less intelligent individuals
within the group . . . these trends are favorable to genetic improvement.’ He
stressed that the reason for making birth control ‘equally available’ should be
disguised: ‘Measures for improving the hereditary base of intelligence and
character are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics . . .
Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than
eugenics.’ [32]
During McCarthy’s Red Scare
campaigns in the 1950’s United States, countless innocent intellectuals had
their careers ruined by being publicly accused of being ‘crypto-communists,’ a
term denoting one who deeply hides his communist beliefs while working to
subvert the American system. In the late 1950’s, Dr. Carlos P. Blacker, a past
Chairman of the English Eugenics Society, proposed that, ‘The Society should
pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is, by a policy of
crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful in the US Eugenics
Society.’[33] Blacker was
close friends with the Population Council’s Frederick Osborn.
In 1960, the English Eugenics
Society agreed to Blacker’s proposal, and adopted a resolution stating, ‘The
Society’s activities in crypto-eugenics should be pursued vigorously, and
specifically that the Society should increase its monetary support of the
Family Planning Association (the English branch of Sanger’s Planned Parenthood)
and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and should make contact
with the Society for the Study of Human Biology…’[34]
The architect of the American
reshaping of the elitist eugenics agenda into the new garment of population
control was Rockefeller’s friend and employee, Frederick Osborn, first
President of John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council, and a founding member
of the American Eugenics Society, who was its President until he took the post
as head of the Population Council in 1952.
A significant problem after
the Second World War was that the very name eugenics had been thoroughly
associated in the public mind with Nazi racist extermination programs, the
definition of a Master Race and other human atrocities. As Osborn formulated
the problem in a 1956 article in Eugenics Review, ‘The very word eugenics
is in disrepute in some quarters…We must ask ourselves, what have we done
wrong? We have all but killed the eugenic movement.’ [35]
Osborn had a ready answer:
people for some reason refused to accept that they were ‘second rate’ compared
to Osborn, Rockefeller, Sanger and their ‘superior class.’ As Osborn put it,
‘We have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is
very deep in human nature. People are simply not willing to accept the idea
that the genetic base on which their character was formed is inferior and
should not be repeated in the next generation…They won’t accept the idea that
they are in general second rate…’[36]
Osborn proposed a change in
packaging. Eugenics was to be mass-marketed under a new guise. Instead of
talking about eliminating ‘inferior’ people through forced sterilization or
birth control, the word would be ‘free choice’ of family size and quality. As
early as 1952 when he joined with John D Rockefeller III in the Population
Council, Osborn saw the huge potential of contraception and mass education for
eugenics, albeit masquerading as free choice. One of his first projects was
contributing the funds of his Population Council to research in a new
‘contraception pill.’[37]
‘Foreshadowing the future work
of the Population Council and the Rockefeller Foundation in population
control,’ Osborn wrote, again in his Eugenics Review, ‘there is certainly
a possibility that… pressures can be given a better direction (for birth
control) and can be brought to bear on a majority of the population instead of
a minority.’ And when such pressures are brought to bear, Osborn added,
individuals will believe they are choosing on their own not to have children,
‘if family planning has spread to all members of the population and means of
effective contraception are readily available.’ He wrote that some 13 years
before the widespread introduction of the oral birth-control pill.[38]
Osborn went on to call for a
system of what he termed, ‘unconscious voluntary selection.’ Ordinary people
would be led down the path of eugenics and race culling without even being
aware where they were going or what they were doing. Osborn argued that the way
to convince people to exercise the ‘voluntary’ choice, would be to appeal to
the idea of ‘wanted children.’ He said, ‘Let’s base our proposals on the
desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate
and responsible care.’ In this way, he argued, the eugenics movement ‘will move
at last towards the high goal which Galton set for it,’ namely creation of the
master race, and reduction of inferior races. [39]
Publicly, Osborn appeared to
purge eugenics in the postwar era of earlier racism. In reality he applied the
racism far more efficiently to hundreds of millions of darker-skinned citizens
of the Third World. Osborn also secretly held the office of President of the
infamous white-supremacist Pioneer Fund from 1947-1956. Among other projects
the Pioneer Fund ‘supported highly controversial research by a dozen scientists
who believe that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites,’
according to a December 11, 1977 article in the New York Times.[40]Endnote Among
recipients of Pioneer Fund money was Stanford University Nobel laureate,
William Shockley, who advocated forced sterilization of all persons with an IQ
below 100. He got more than $1 million in research funds from Osborn’s Pioneer
Fund. [41]
When Osborn wrote those words
advocating ‘unconscious voluntary selection,’ he was still Secretary of the
American Eugenics Society and President of John D. Rockefeller III’s
newly-founded Population Council. JDR III was chairman and Princeton eugenicist,
Frank Notestein, was board member, and later became President of Rockefeller’s
Council.
Yes, Hello Dolly…
Member of the Rockefeller
Foundation board and close family friend, Frederick Osborn was an unfettered
enthusiast of the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for Nazi eugenics
experiments. Scion of a wealthy American railroad family, graduated in 1910
from Princeton University, which would later be the school of John D. III,
Osborn was a part of the wealthy American upper class. Under the banner of philanthropy,
Osborn would pursue policies designed to preserve the hegemony and control of
society by his wealthy associates.
In 1937, Osborn had praised
the Nazi eugenics program as the ‘most important experiment that has ever been
tried.’[42] Endnote
II One year later, Osborn bemoaned the fact that the general public
seemed opposed to ‘the excellent sterilization program in Germany because
of its Nazi origin.’ [43] Osborn and
the Rockefeller Foundation knew well what their money was going toward in Third
Reich Germany, even though they later piously disavowed this knowledge.
As late as 1946, after the war
and the ghastly revelations of the human experiments in Auschwitz and other
concentration camps, Osborn, then President of the American Eugenics Society,
published, in his Eugenics News magazine, the so-called Geneticists’
Manifesto entitled, ‘Genetically Improving the World Population.’
In 1968, Osborn published his
book, The Future of Human Heredity: An Introduction to Eugenics in Modern
Society. He had lost his postwar inhibitions about calling his work what
it was: eugenics. At that time his nominal boss and protégé in population
eugenics, Population Council chairman, John D. Rockefeller III, was preparing
himself to head a Presidential commission on the population problem.
In his book, Osborn cited
studies showing that less intelligent women could be persuaded to reduce their
births voluntarily: ‘A reduction of births at this level would be an important
contribution to reducing the frequency of genes which make for mental defect.’
Osborn added, ‘The most urgent eugenic policy at this time is to see that birth
control is made equally available to all individuals in every class of
society.’ He also noted that, ‘Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained
under a name other than eugenics.’[44] In short,
they would be most likely attained by using crypto-eugenics tactics. In a
speech to the annual meeting of the American Eugenics Society in 1959, Osborn
stated, ‘With the close of World War II, genetics had made great advances and a
real science of human genetics was coming into being…Eugenics is at last taking
a practical and effective form.’[45] Genetics was
the new name for eugenics.
Forerunning the later human
cloning debate and the widely publicized sheep clone, Dolly, Osborn doled out
strong praise for Hermann J. Muller, Ernst Rüdin’s colleague in Germany, who
had received Rockefeller funds during the 1930’s for eugenics research. Quoting
Muller, Osborn wrote, ‘It would in the end be far easier and more sensible to
manufacture a complete new man de novo, out of appropriately chosen raw
materials, than to try to refashion into human form those pitiful relics which
remained.’[46] Osborn also
praised Muller’s proposal to develop sperm banks to ‘make available the sperm
of highly qualified donors.’ The idea for a gene revolution was being debated
back then.
Rockefeller’s Population
Council gave grants to leading universities including Princeton’s Office of
Population headed by Rockefeller eugenicist, Frank Notestein, a long-time
friend of Osborn, who in 1959 became President of the Rockefeller Population
Council in order to promote a pseudo-science called demography. Its task was to
project horrifying statistics of a world overrun with darker-skinned peoples,
to prepare the ground for acceptance of international birth control programs.
The Ford Foundation soon joined in funding the various Population Council
studies, lending them an aura of academic respectability and above all, money.
The Rockefeller Population Council grants were precisely targeted at creating a
new cultural view about growing human population through their funding of
demographic research such as that of Princeton’s Notestein. According to John
Sharpless who studied the history of population control using the Rockefeller
Foundation archives, in the 1950's:
‘the non-profit sector was
where the debate over the population problem actually played itself out,
ultimately defining how the policy issue would be viewed in the period which
followed.[emphasis added]...[the Population Council made sure that] ...
research would take place in both the social as well as the biological sciences
... this effort was not simply an exercise in pure science but one which aimed
specifically at policy ... not only the legitimating of the 'science' of
demography but also the acceptance of demography as a policy science ... they
were slowly encouraging an evolution in thinking among 'population specialists'
to view intervention in demographic processes (particularly fertility) as not
only appropriate but necessary.’[47]
In 1952, the same year that
John D. founded the Population Council with Osborn at its head, Margaret Sanger
created, thanks to Rockefeller Foundation money, a global version of her
American Planned Parenthood Federation called the International Planned
Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Sanger had first met JDR III in 1947. She had
convinced him then of the urgency of promoting mass birth control.
Following the initial
Rockefeller financing, her IPPF soon was backed by a corporate board which
included DuPont, US Sugar, David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, Newmont
Mining Co., International Nickel, RCA, Gulf Oil and other prominent corporate
members. The cream of America’s corporate and banking elite were quietly lining
up behind Rockefeller’s vision of population control on a global scale.
Less than a decade after the
revelations of eugenics and Auschwitz, population control was again becoming
fashionable in certain American elite circles of the 1950’s. It was a testimony
to the power of the US establishment to mould public opinion and encourage
fears of exploding populations of poor, hungry peasants around the world.
In 1960, Rockefeller friend
and wealthy patron of population control, Hugh Moore, founded the World
Population Emergency Campaign with the help of funds from DuPont, which would
later become a major promoter of the gene revolution in agriculture. Eugene R.
Black, former senior executive of David Rockefeller’s Chase National Bank, ran,
as president of the World Bank, a campaign which had as its main aim to create
and reinforce First World fears of a population explosion in Third World
countries.
The 1958 Castro revolution in
Cuba provided additional impetus to instigating these fears among unwitting
Americans. The argument promoted in the American mass media by circles around the
Population Council was simple and effective: over-population in poor developing
countries leads to hunger and more poverty, which is the fertile breeding
ground for communist revolution.
John D. III’s brother,
Laurance Rockefeller, established and ran the Conservation Foundation in 1958
to complement John D.’s Population Council. Both the Population Council and
Conservation Foundation were united around the unspoken theme that natural resources
must be conserved, but conserved from use by smaller businesses or individuals,
in order that select global corporations should be able to claim them, thus
establishing a kind of strategic denial policy masquerading as conservation.
The population control lobby
which would later shape Kissinger’s NSSM 200 was consolidating around
Rockefeller Foundation grants and individuals, preparing a global assault on
‘inferior peoples,’ under the name of choice, of family planning and of
averting the danger of ‘over-population’ – a myth their think-tanks and
publicity machines produced to convince ordinary citizens of the urgency of
their goals.
Former Nazi scientist and
colleague of Ernst Rüdin, Dr. Franz J. Kallmann. Kallmann, was a German
scientist who left Germany in 1936 when it was discovered that he was part
Jewish. After the war, he helped rehabilitate German eugenicist Otmar Freiherr
von Verschuer and win him respectability and acceptance in the American
scientific community. Kallmann’s enthusiasm for Nazi eugenics was in no way
dampened by his own experience of Nazi persecution of the Jews. In addition to
teaching at Columbia University, Kallmann was a psychiatric geneticist at the
New York State Psychiatric Institute, and in 1948, he was founding President of
a new eugenics front organization, the American Society of Human Genetics. At
the New York Psychiatric Institute, Kallmann continued the same research in
genetic psychiatry he had done with Rüdin in Nazi Germany.
Kallmann was a thorough-going
advocate of practicing elimination or forced sterilization on schizophrenics.
In 1938, when in the United States, he wrote in an article translated by
Frederick Osborn’s Eugenics News, that schizophrenics were a ‘source
of maladjusted crooks, asocial eccentrics and the lowest type of criminal
offenders.’ He demanded the forced sterilization of even healthy offspring of
schizophrenic parents to kill the genetic line. [48]
![]() |
| Il peccato originale della filantropia |
The choice of the term Human
Genetics reflected the attempt to disguise the eugenic agenda of the new
organization. Most of its founding members were simultaneously members of
Frederick Osborn’s American Eugenics Society. By 1954, his old friend von Verschuer
was also a member of this one big happy eugenics family. Kallmann’s American
Society of Human Genetics soon got control of the field of medical eugenics,
recognized by the American Medical Association as a legitimate medical field.
(7).
Kallmann’s American Society of
Human Genetics later became a sponsor of the Human Genome Project. The
multibillion dollar project was, appropriately enough, housed at the same Cold
Spring Harbor center that Rockefeller, Harriman and Carnegie had used for their
notorious Eugenics Research Office in the 1920’s. Genetics, as defined by the
Rockefeller Foundation, would constitute the new face of eugenics.
While brother John D. III was
mapping plans for global depopulation, brothers Nelson and David were busy with
the business side of securing the American Century for the decades
following the crisis of the 1960’s and 1970’s. American agribusiness was to
play a decisive role in this project, and the development of genetic
biotechnology would bring the different efforts of the family into a coherent
plan for global food control in ways simply unimaginable to most.
[1] Susan E. Lederer. "Porto Ricochet": Joking
about Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930s . (Oxford, 2002,
Oxford University Press), pp. 720-746. The ACHE Report on the Rhoads cancer
experiments in http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/radiation/. See also
Stycos, J.M.,‘Female Sterilization in Puerto Rico,’ Eugenics Quarterly, 1,
no.1, 1954.
[2] John D.
Rockefeller III, ‘People, Food and the Well-Being of Mankind,’, Second
McDougall Lecture 1961, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, 1961, pp. 9, 16-18.
[3] Jameson
Taylor, Robbing the Cradle: The Rockefellers’ Support of Planned
Parenthood.www.lifeissues.net.
[5] John Ensor Harr
and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America’s
Greatest Family (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), pp. 452-453.
[6] Margaret Sanger
was clear in her advocacyof racial superiority. In 1939 she created The Negro
Project. In a letter to a friend about the project, she confided, ‘The
minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the
Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not
want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the
minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any
of their more rebellious members [emphasis added].cited in Tanya L. Green,
‘The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Genocide Project for Black Americans, in blackgenocide.org/negro.html.
The board of Sanger’s Planned Parenthood Federation, which received generous
funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, included some of the most prominent
eugenicists of the day. Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard graduate and the author
of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy, was a Nazi
enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as
‘scientific’ and ‘humanitarian.’ Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger board
member, spoke of purifying America's human ‘breeding stock’ and purging America's
‘bad strains’ which he defined to include, ‘the shiftless, ignorant, and
worthless class of antisocial whites of the South.’ Laughlin was the
Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1921; he was later
President of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist organization that is still
functioning today.
[7] Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory, Archives: EUGENICS RECORDS OFFICE. Inlibrary.cshl.edu/archives/archives/eugrec.htm.
[8] Harry Laughlin,Report
of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting
Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population. (Cold Spring
Harbor NY. 1914). p.1. The project was a joint undertaking by the American
Breeders’ Association and the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office.
[9] Edwin
Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a
Master Race. (New York:Thunders’ Mouth Press, 2004) p. 57., see
also ‘Extends Work In Eugenics, Harriman Philanthropy to Have a Board of
Scientific Directors,’ The New
York Times 20 March 1913 which
cites Rockefeller financial support to the Eugenics Records Office in 1913 as
second only to Mrs. E. Harriman.
[10] Paul
Popenoe, Applied Eugenics (New York: Macmillan Company, 1933),
CHAPTER VII: THE NEED FOR NEGATIVE EUGENICS , pp.123-137.
[11] Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Carrie Buck vs. J.H. Bell. The Supreme Court
of the United States. No. 292. October Term, 1926. p.3. Justice Holmes,
delivering the majority opinion of the Court, wrote, ‘It is better for all
the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or
to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are
manifestly unfit for continuing their kind. The principle that sustains
compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian
tubes…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ The justices of the
Supreme Court never met Buck. They relied on the expert opinion of Dr. Harry
Hamilton Laughlin, head of Eugenics Record Office, in Cold Spring Harbor, New
York to help them make up their minds. Though Laughlin had never met her
either, a report had been sent to him, including Buck’s score on the
Stanford-Binet test that purportedly showed Buck had the intellectual capacities
of a nine-year-old. Laughlin concluded that she was part of the ‘shiftless,
ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South’ whose
promiscuity offered ‘a typical picture of the low-grade moron.’ Laughlin quotes
are cited in Peter Quinn, Race Cleansing in America, in American Heritage
Magazine, February/March 2003, Volume 54, Issue 1. The 1922 quote from Justice
Holmes is contained in a letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to
Harold J. Laski, 14 June 1922, Holmes-Laski Letters Abridged, ed. By Mark
DeWolfe Howe (Clinton, Ma: Atheneum, 1963). Vol. 1, p.330.
[12] State
of Illinois Board of Administration, Vol. II: Bienniel Reports of the
State Charitable Institutions: October 1, 1914 to September 30, 1916 (State
of Illinois, 1917), p.695, cited in Edwin Black, op. cit. pp. 254-5.
[14] Paul
Weindling, ‘The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Science,
1920-40: from Educational Philanthropy to International Science Policy’, N.
Rupke (ed.), Science, Politics and the Public Good. Essays in Honour of
Margaret Gowing, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, pp. 119-140. Reprinted: G.
Gemelli, J-F Picard, W.H. Schneider, Managing Medical Research in Europe.
The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation (1920s-1950s), Bologna: CLUEB, 1999,
117-136. See also Stefan Kuehl, ‘The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American
Racism, and German National Socialism,(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994),
pp.20-21. As well, Rockefeller Foundation Annual Reports 1927-36.
[15] Ernst
Rüdin, ‘Hereditary Transmission of Mental Diseases,’ Eugenical News,
Vol. XV (1930), pp.171-174. Also, D.P.O’Brien, Memorandum from D.P.
O’Brien to Alan Gregg, 10 November 1933: Rockefeller Foundation, RF 1.1 717
946. cited in Edwin Black, op. cit., p. 296.. See as well, Cornelius Borck, The
Rockefeller Foundation’s Funding for Brain Research in
Germany, 1930-1950.’ in
Rockefeller Center Archive Newsletter Spring 2001.archive.rockefeller.edu/publications/newsletter/nl2001.pdf.
Borck, a German researcher, was given permission to visit the Rockefeller
Center archives to study files relating to the foundation’s support for brain
research during the Third Reich and after. Though his report is very mild, he
is forced to admit a number of embarrassing items: ‘the RF(Rockefeller
Foundation-ed.) did not cease its activities in Germany in 1933; indeed, it did
not do so until the United States entered into World War II.’ And further: ‘,
the RF had funded, during the 1920s and early 1930s, some projects by
individual scientists engaged in eugenics and hereditary diseases who soon
became close allies of the new regime and its ambitions for a racial science,
such as, for example, Ernst Rüdin’s program of an epidemiology of inherited
nervous and psychiatric disease, or Walther Jaensch’s outpatients’ clinic for
constitutional medicine at the Charité.’
[16] Dr.
Thomas Ruder, and Volker Kubillus, Manner hinter Hitler, Malters: p Pi
Verlag fur Polotik and Gessellshaft, 1994) pp. 65-66.
[17] Adolf
Hitler, Mein Kampf. Translated by Dr. Alvin Johnson. New York Reynal
& Hitchcock. 1941. Vol. II, Chap. 3, p.658.
[18] Madison
Grant, The Passing of the Great Race. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1936). Pp.50-51, 89.
[20] Radiogram
to Alan Gregg, 13 May 1932: Rockefeller Foundation RF 1.1 Ser 7171 Box 10
Folder 63, cited in Edwin Black op. cit. p. 297.
[21] Raymond
B. Fosdick, Letter to Selskar M. Gunn, 6 June 1939: Rockefeller Foundation RF
1.1 717 16 150, cited in Edwin Black, op. cit., p 365. Fosdick, President of
the Rockefeller Foundation since 1936 wrote Gunn, that the Foundation’s
official denials to the public of funding Nazi research was ‘of course hardly
correct.’
[23]Otmar
Freiherr von Verschuer cited in Edwin Black, Eugenics and the Nazis
-- the California connection, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 9, 2003.
[25]Raymond
D. Fosdick to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,cited in Rebecca Messall, The
Long Road of Eugenics: From Rockefeller to Roe v. Wade. Originally published
in Hum Life Rev. 2004 Fall;30(4):33-74. in orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/MessallEugenics.php.
[27] Tage
Kemp, Report of Tage Kemp to the Rockefeller Foundation, 17 November 1932:
RF RG 1.2 Ser 713 Box 2 Folder 15., cited in Edwin Black, op. cit., pp. 418-419.
Also Benno Müller-Hill,Die ödliche Wissenschaft: Die Aussonderung von uden,
Zigeunern und Geisteskranken 1933-1945(Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1984).p.129.
[28] Thomas
C. Leonard, ‘Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era,’
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 19, Number 4, Fall 2005, p.210.
John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century: Three
Generations of America’s Greatest Family(New York: Scribner’s, 1988), p.272.
[29] Frederick
Osborn, ‘Summary of the Proceedings of the Conference on Eugenics in Relation
to Nursing,’ February 24, 1937, American Eugenics Society Papers: Conference on
Eugenics in Relation to Nursing , cited in Stefan Kühl, op.cit. pp.40-41. On
Fosdick’s influence in shaping JDR III’s interest in eugenics and population
see Harr & Johnson, op. cit. p. 369.
[30] John
Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, The Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of
Eugenics, Chapter 10: Eugenics after World War II. 2000. in www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/index.html.
[31] Population
Council, The ICCR at 30: Pursuing New Contraceptive Leads, in
Momentum: News from the Population Council, July 2000.
[32] Frederick
Osborn, The Future of Human Heredity: An Introduction to Eugenics in
Modern Society (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968)., pp. 93-104.
Curiously, Osborn never dropped his use of the term eugenics even in 1968.
[33] John
Cavanaugh-O’Keefe, op. cit. Chapter 10: Eugenics after World War II, C. P.
Blacker and’Crypto-Eugenics.’

















































