after Eula Biss, “All Apologies”
I. “It must be made familiar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as fact.”
In 2014, German minister of culture Monika Grütters apologized on behalf of the government for the 300,000 people with disabilities who were murdered during the Third Reich. At the unveiling of a Berlin memorial, at which the press and several families of the victims were gathered, she announced: “Every human life is worth living: That is the message sent out from this site.”
The location of the memorial, an 80-foot blue glass wall, was chosen due to its proximity to the site where the killings had been organized. Disability advocates who organized the memorial hoped the glass would encourage visitors to sit and reflect on the past. At the opening of the memorial, Grütters emphasized that the government had a “moral obligation” to remember those lost.
Obligation, defined as: “an act to which a person is morally or legally bound.” Or, as a verb: “to make someone indebted by conferring a kindness.”
When I was seven, I was taken to a neurologist who—after conferring with my parents—told me I had epilepsy. For years after this meeting, I took the anti-epileptic drug (AED) Zarontin three times a day, every day. At school, in between visits to the nurse’s office for my midday dose, we studied the body, and the human brain, and how the sheer size of it differentiated us from other species. Later, we learned about World War II, and read memoirs by survivors, and widened our eyes at the horror of it all. One teacher called the fight against the Third Reich a war for the world’s soul.
In Berlin, visitors to the memorial can read the stories of several victims. Years before Germany began ‘euthanizing’ the mentally ill (and before the ghettos, concentration camps, and gas chambers used to kill millions of Europe’s Jews), Germany sterilized those with mental or physical disabilities. The program was codenamed Aktion T4 for the Tiergartenstraße 4 address of the building in which the killing was organized and, many decades later, where the 80-foot blue wall memorial would be placed.
Three decades before Aktion T4, in 1907, the United States became the first country in the world to pass compulsory sterilization laws. Indiana was the first to pass legislation, followed by California and Washington. Eventually, thirty-three U.S. states would pass forced sterilization laws: any individual found to have epilepsy, cerebral palsy, alcoholism, ‘feeble-mindedness,’ or physical deformities could be subject to the full extent of the law.
Formulating the theory under which many sterilization laws would later be defended, Englishman Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883. He defined it as “the science of improving [human] stock” and was largely inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin’s theories in On the Origin of Species. Galton stated: “What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.”
In college, when I discovered that the country’s first epileptic colony had been located just minutes down the road from where I lived in Western New York, I had nightmares for months on end in which I was sent there. In my dreams, the cemetery was not a field of ruins as it is today. Empty holes gaped at me, waiting to be filled. Metal posts stuck out of the ground, the bodies beneath them marked only by numbers.
Calling for “persistence” in promoting eugenics’ importance, Galton, in a 1904 article for the American Journal of Sociology, wrote that “There are three stages [of eugenics promotion] to be passed through: 1) It must be made familiar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as fact 2) It must be recognized as a subject whose practical development deserves serious consideration and 3) It must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion.”
In 1936, nearly three decades after America’s first sterilization laws were implemented, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Organized society has alike the right and the obligation to protect itself against those ills and vices that have sapped the vitality and paved the way for the destructions of other civilizations.” Quoting the Greek tragedy Medea, he stated, “The tragedy is not that these children are dead, but that they were ever born.”
II. “It must be recognized as a subject whose practical development deserves serious consideration.”
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime…society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated after handing down the 1927 decision to forcibly sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck. Holmes went on to proclaim: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Two years earlier, in his 1925 political manifesto Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: “There is today one state, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of human stock] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union.”
As a result of the case, Virginian Carrie Buck was labeled ‘promiscuous’ for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Her subsequent sterilization at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded upheld Virginia’s compulsory sterilization law as legal and paved the way for over 60,000 forced sterilizations performed throughout the United States.
"We do not stand alone" a Nazi poster from 1936 proclaimed, showcasing the flags of other countries with compulsory sterilization legislation, including the United States, Denmark, and Sweden, and those considering similar legislation, like the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Lithuania, and Japan.
Carrie Buck, by her own account, always insisted she was raped by her foster parents’ nephew.
When asked about his views on rising Nazism in the United States, Executive Secretary of the American Eugenics Society Leon Whitney stated, “While we were pussy-footing around…the Germans were calling a spade a spade.”
“I have studied with great interest the laws of several Americans states,” Hitler once admitted regarding compulsory sterilization.
"The Germans are beating us at our own game," Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1934, a full year after the first German concentration camp started operating.
After the war, during the Nuremberg war crime trials, several high-level Nazi officers quoted as their defense U.S. Supreme Court Justice Holmes’s own words of “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
III. “It must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion.”
After her involuntary sterilization in 1927, Carrie Buck proclaimed: “They done me wrong. They done us all wrong.”
Just months after his release from the Virginia State Colony, sterilization victim Raymond Hudlow was drafted into the U.S. Army and took part in the Omaha Beach landings. Hudlow served in General Patton’s army in the Battle of the Bulge, where his knee was wrecked with shrapnel, and in Holland, where he was captured by German soldiers.
Celia Vandegrift, a nurse at the Virginia State Colony for forty years, participated in thousands of forced sterilizations during her time at the colony. In 2014, the same year the Berlin memorial opened, she told journalists: “I thought, at the time, I was doing the right thing. I can see now that it was so wrong.”
Now 92, Raymond Hudlow insists that the beatings he sustained by German soldiers were nowhere as painful as the sterilization that the Commonwealth of Virginia performed on him. “They treated us like hogs…I remember this just as it was yesterday,” Hudlow proclaimed. “It has never left me.”
Upon hearing Hudlow’s request for an apology on behalf of the 8,000 Virginians sterilized under eugenic law, the Virginia General Assembly refused to apologize, fearing an admission of guilt might lead victims to sue for compensation. Instead, in 2001, they expressed “profound regret” for the sterilizations that took place. Governor Jim Gilmore said he believed an expression of regret was sufficient.
“The word apology draws fire,” House representative Mitchell Van Yahres added as explanation for opposing Virginia’s apology. “It carries a connotation of guilt that I don’t want to be associated with.”
Virginia Senator Warren E. Barry lamented the “trend in this country to rewrite history” while standing on the Senate floor and told colleagues, “Now we go back…and take the most unfortunate chapters in our history and try to relive them for no real purpose.”
In my high school American History classes, I learned one version of my country’s history. It did not include eugenics.
In 2014, German chairman for the Council for Disabled Persons Adolf Bauer welcomed news of the Berlin memorial, stating, “This…will serve as a means never to forget Nazi crimes committed against disabled people.”
Last summer, I visited Berlin to see the memorial for the Reich’s disabled victims. I rented a studio apartment above a Thai restaurant where, from the window by my bed, I could see the city’s Rathaus, or town hall. Laying down, I watched the German flag waving in front of the clocktower. Even though I had grown out of my epilepsy years before and no longer took medication, I still occasionally had dreams about the New York colony, about gaping holes and forgotten names and stories that are no longer remembered by history.
In 1990, sociologist Helen Fein coined the phrase universe of obligation to describe how the members of a group, nation, or community define who belongs and who does not. In other words, a society’s universe of obligation includes individuals “towards whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends.” Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman later added, “To render the humanity of victims invisible, one needs merely to evict them from the universe of obligation.”
In the United States, compulsory sterilizations of the mentally ill and disabled continued until Oregon performed the last legal sterilization in 1981. But the disabled were not the only population affected: between 1970 and 1976, as many as 25-50% of Native American women in the country were sterilized, largely by the government-run Indian Health Service. In California, forced sterilizations of female inmates occurred as recently as 2010.
In Germany, my translator told me that she puts a case around her passport when she travels to the U.S. so no one will see where she’s from. “People yell. They’re mean when they realize you’re German,” she said. “We are still blamed for what our country has done, years and years later.”
U.S. deputy chief counsel for the 1945 Nuremberg war trials Morris Amchan described his decision to help reenact the trials for American television on their thirty-year anniversary as an “obligation to history.” He said, “I do have the feeling that unless you remember what happened [in Germany], it could happen again; it could happen here…”
We have no memorials dedicated to the victims of eugenics in the United States.
In 1945, when the details of the Holocaust became public, the world widened their eyes in shock and horror. As First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "In the end...we are 'One World' and that which injures any one of us, injures all of us."
The literal translation of the German apology Es tut mir leid is “It does me sorrow.”
In Berlin, I visit the memorial at Tiergartenstraße 4. The long blue wall is located behind Berlin’s Opera House, across the street from the city’s largest park. I read the stories of the victims and, absorbed in what was written, don’t pay attention to where I’m heading. Entschuldigung, I say when I bump into a woman with a stroller. Es tut mir leid. I am so, so sorry.
Kathryn Waring is an essayist and multimedia writer based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in American Literary Review, The Rumpus, and gravel, among others. She's currently at work on her first book, which examines the history of America's first epileptic colony, her own family's experience with epilepsy, and the ways in which we remember (or don't) the history that surrounds us.