Sore from the slings and arrows of foreign criticism, Germans heard gratefully last week a warm, approving speech from Dr. Clarence Gordon Campbell, president of the American Eugenics Research Association, delivered before the World Population Congress in Berlin.
Dr. Campbell, a Manhattan Social Registrite, put a fashionable practice behind him to devote his full time to eugenics. Long before Adolf Hitler was anybody, Dr. Campbell, though too polite to wound racial sensibilities by calling names, was unobtrusively teaching that if "Americans," as that term is generally understood, do not speed up their birth rate, the result after a few more generations will be to leave control of their country in the hands of some more pushing race.
In Berlin last week, after the Population Congress had been opened by bristling Minister of Interior Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Dr. Campbell declared: "The Leader of the German Nation, Adolf Hitler, ably supported by Dr. Frick and guided by Germany's anthropologists and social philosophers, has been able to construct a comprehensive racial policy of population development and improvement. This policy promises to be epochal in racial history!" Gently chiding good folk who think of marriage as something sentimental and religious with all bodily details omitted from consideration until after the ceremony, Dr. Campbell reported: "A decided tendency is now to be observed in enlightened minds no longer to place implicit faith in rhetorical principles which have no foundation in fact, and to explore the realities of nature."
Such realities include the question, now almost unaskable in most countries, of whether an engaged young woman and her suitor are well adapted to each other in their physical proportions and heredities. After polite Dr. Campbell sat down last week, Chief Arthur Giitt of the German Public Health Department bluntly told the Congress: "Our penal code will shortly make compulsory a health examination for all marrying persons. The purpose of this is first to dissuade bodily or mental inferiors from marrying and especially from procreation. Second, to prevent marriages between hereditarily tainted persons, the same as a marriage between an Aryan and a non-Aryan. Third, to influence the choice of life partners from a health as well as a racial viewpoint."
Even more bluntly Minister of Interior Frick said that during the War, while the best men of all embattled nations were at the front, "an increased facility of reproducing themselves was afforded to the weaklings." Thus the present generation of post-War youth is to be regarded generally askance, thinks Dr. Frick, and Nazi eugenists' plans for breeding Germans like prize cattle are especially vital. In prompt agreement, Dr. Knud A. Wieth-Knudsen, Norway's eugenist at the Congress, cried: "The intellectual currents which have dominated Scandinavian countries for the past 50 years—namely Liberalism, Radicalism and Feminism—are to blame for the decreasing birth rate in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Improvement can only be expected from new currents, such as the Nazi!"