Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (review)

Few fields of historical inquiry can match the voluminous literature on eugenics, a theory introduced over a century ago by the British polymath Francis Galton (1822–1911), who essentially defined it as the science of human breeding. Since the pioneering works by Mark Haller, Kenneth Ludmerer, and Daniel Kevles, study after study have shown that by the interwar period eugenics enjoyed widespread popularity, notably among opinion-makers in the natural, biological, and social sciences. We now know that over the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics spread from England to North America, Latin America, Scandinavia, continental Europe, and Asia. Where policy-makers translated eugenics into sterilization, immigration, and marriage laws, it deeply affected the lives of millions of people worldwide.

Eugenics became a “dirty word” in the post-1945 era when news about abusive eugenic policies such as Nazi Germany’s 1933 sterilization law became common knowledge. But meanwhile eugenicists re-organized and, as Matthew Connolly and others have demonstrated, branched out into other movements, including birth control, population control, euthanasia advocacy, sex education, and marriage counseling. As historians unravel the threads connecting eugenics and other twentieth-century reform movements, eugenics increasingly looks to have been a thoroughly modern enterprise based on cutting-edge scientific ideas and deep concerns about the biological fitness of peoples and nations. The old interpretation of eugenics as a movement of reactionary authoritarianism no longer matches the historical evidence found in Blood and Homeland and other writings on the topic.

The essays in Blood and Homeland not only fill a large historiographic gap by describing eugenics in central and southeast Europe between the turn of the twentieth century and World War II, they also remind us that Nazi Germany is not the benchmark by which all other types of eugenics ought to be judged. Indeed, the contributors to Blood and Homeland make a convincing case that German “race hygiene” (as eugenics was known in that country) was far from unique. Nor did the eugenics movements of central and southeast Europe slavishly follow German leadership. They were driven mainly by local, national concerns rather than developments in Germany. As the 1930s unfolded Austrian eugenicists tended to resist Nazi versions of race hygiene. In Hungary eugenicists were in the vanguard of eugenic thinking. Overall, diversity as much as commonality characterized the history of eugenics.

Despite the Vatican’s 1930 condemnation of abortion, birth control, sterilization, and the ways Nazi race theorists used eugenic ideas to justify anti-semitic measures, the appeal of eugenics was broad enough to attract Jewish and Catholic biologists. In Poland, Jewish physicians and social workers formed a eugenics society as early as 1918. Jewish eugenicists argued that Jews’ distinct biological nature accounted for their lower rates of epilepsy, syphilis, and criminal behavior. As late as 1938 a leading Polish-Jewish eugenicist praised the Nazis’ 1933 sterilization law because of its emphasis on the hereditary sources of disease.

In Austria, Catholic doctors and scientists tended to accept general eugenic ideas, notably when they were aimed at strengthening family health and welfare. With few exceptions Catholic eugenicists rejected the surgical or artificial control of reproduction, but had no problems with marriage counseling as a means of educating Catholic families about the dangers of alcoholism, sexually transmitted diseases, and similar “hereditary health” matters.

Like all edited volumes, the quality of the essays in Blood and Homeland varies, but together they document the keen interest in eugenics on the part of biologists, physicians, and anthropologists throughout the European continent. They also reveal the close links between the eugenics and the public health movements, a trend that other historians of eugenics have noted. Typically, eugenicists were concerned with the prevention of illnesses, including tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases, and mental disorders, and with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation they were able to set up programs aimed at improving the health of nations.

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