Eugenics is often associated with Adolf Hitler’s dream of building a pure, master race. Racial hygiene ideology (Rassenhygiene), which had been developed in Germany since the early twentieth century and culminated during the Nazi era, was grounded in racial classification. The Aryan race to which the Germans belonged stood on the top of the scale. Thus, their goal was to purify and strengthen their race by multiplying its members while eliminating the presence of foreign races in the German nation. Indeed, during the Nazi period, the forced reproduction of ‘superior’ Aryans and the extermination of ‘inferiors’ became compulsory state policies resulting in hundreds of deaths of Jews, Gipsies, disabled, or any other group of people alien or harmful to their racial growth and purification (Weindling 1989; Kühl 1994; Proctor 1998; Pichot 2000; Kallis 2007).
Racism was also supported under other classification scales in Europe and the USA during the same period, mostly expressed as biological racism. The fundamental element of biological racism was the belief that race was initially constructed and should further be developed upon the common biological past of a certain group of people. Therefore, race was not always identified with a specific nation but its notion extended to larger groups, such as the Nordic race, and at times to the entire human race. 1
Without denying the obvious relation between racism and eugenics, it would not be accurate to identify them. Eugenics indeed embraces the distinction between superior and inferior groups of people or individuals but is not limited to racial biological classification and segregation. For instance, eugenics often dictated the segregation of people due to socially inappropriate behaviour or poverty to name a few non-biological criteria. In the same context, eugenics supported the proliferation of ‘worthy’ individuals based on their upper social class and not strictly on their valuable genetic inheritance. Undoubtedly though, many eugenicists were racists and many racists were eugenicists, particularly in the beginning of the twentieth century. As Turda argued, ‘…the fundamental reality was that eugenics was born into a period when European and American societies thought in terms of racial categories, and believed in the existence of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races’ (Turda 2010c, p. 66). Added to this, the fact that the Nazi practices were so radical both in eugenic and racist terms is the reason why the association among Nazism, racism and eugenics became the most popular example of eugenics in people’s minds.
However, eugenics existed before and after Nazism, related to many different ideologies and localities making its definition a difficult task. Yet, every form of eugenics has been rooted in its core ideology, the control of reproduction. The spectrum of eugenics ranges from individual reproductive choices to state intervention in mating and reproduction. Decades earlier than the Nazis, Sir Francis Galton developed the theory of eugenics to become a panacea for the social injuries of Britain. Eugenics was linked to the works of other British scholars, such as Thomas Robert Malthus’ population theory, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and, of course, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Galton incorporated statistics in genetics and did extensive research on family trees of famous and important British families to prove that human qualities, such as intelligence, were inherited (Galton 1869). As a supporter of biological determinism, Galton argued that each state was obliged to protect its superior, ‘biologically valuable’ citizens by providing them with the available means to reproduce more and more descendants, simultaneously refraining the ‘biologically lower classes’ from reproduction. The aim of the implementation of eugenics was to create a society with biologically robust and intellectually superior people who would gradually become even better because they were anticipated to genetically mix and socialise with superior fellow-citizens, thus ameliorating the human species as a whole. Eugenics was immediately embraced by the Americans who went further by implementing eugenics through state policies. The survival of the fittest became a state concern and relevant legislation was passed in many states (Stern 2005). Either as an academic discussion or a state policy, eugenics flourished during the first half of the century and gradually gained ground beyond the Anglo-Saxon world. Soon, it became an international phenomenon reaching cultures as variant as Asian and Latin (Adams 1990; Stepan 1991; Turda and Weindling 2007; Bashford and Levine 2010; Turda and Gillette 2014). The broad participation of scholars in the human betterment debate was evident in various cultural and political contexts around the world thus making the first half of the twentieth century the golden era of eugenics. During the same period, eugenicists formed associations, organised international conferences and made eugenics a scientific discipline taught in European and American universities.
However, the abuse of eugenics ideology coupled with racism and the imposing authority of a dictatorship led to the historical phenomenon of the Nazis. Following the public outcry provoked by the disclosure of Nazi eugenics, public discussions about social and racial purification came to an abrupt end after the end of the Second World War. Scientists and politicians avoided any connection with the tarnished ideology of eugenics and tried to conceal their pre-war activity. In this context, universal conventions were signed in order to prevent the repetition of similar practices in the future. These were the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UN 1948a) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN 1948b). As eugenics was at the time associated with Nazism and racism, these universally agreed conventions condemned it, albeit not explicitly. The international eugenics movement did not cease to exist; what essentially changed was that the word ‘eugenics’ was limited to private discussions. The word ‘eugenics’ was generally avoided and replaced by the new term ‘human genetics’. In Britain, the birthplace of the modern eugenics movement, the journal Annals of Eugenics was renamed as the Annals of Human Genetics in 1954, but The Eugenics Review became the Journal of Biosocial Science much later, in 1968.
Nevertheless, eugenics remained a largely supported ideology well after the 1950s. Being a versatile and adaptive ideological structure, eugenics was integrated in socio-economic issues, such as the confrontation of overpopulation by birth control. Without losing its grip to the control of fertility and human reproduction, eugenics embraced the international birth control movement. Facing its degradation, post-war eugenics changed focus from racism to family planning strategies (Glass 1966; Connelly 2008; Bashford 2014). Eugenicists supported birth control to allegedly protect some countries from overpopulation and the Earth from its catastrophic consequences (Ramsden 2002, 2009). However, the goal remained the same, namely the manipulation of human evolution through the control of reproduction. The issue of overpopulation was promoted by a massive publication of related literature terrifying the public with the threat of a dystopian future on the overpopulated Earth. Bestsellers of eugenicists, such as Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (Osborn 1948, 1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) played a significant role in propagating eugenics veiled under overpopulation concerns (Vogt 1948; Descochers and Hoffbauer 2009). Furthermore, in the 1970s, there was a tendency in film production to deal with similar issues, such as the popular film Zero Population Growth (1972).
In addition, many international alliances emerged to tackle demographical and ecological issues, such as the Population Council in the USA, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), mainly supported by eugenicists such as Julian Huxley, Margaret Sanger, William Vogt, Carlos Blacker and many others (Stern 2005; Bashford 2014). The international birth control movement was initiated mostly by a group of Americans and British eugenicists (Stern 2005). It was not a coincidence that, contrary to the global trend of eugenics condemnation, the British Eugenics Society remained active until 1968 and the American Eugenics Society continued its activities until 1972.
Although a small number of eugenics societies continued their activities after the Second World War, the Hellenic Eugenics Society (HES) was the only one which commenced its activities during the post-war period. However, nowadays, the HES is still unknown to the general public and scholars, both in Greece and abroad. Why was this society founded then and not earlier, as was the case in other European countries? Moreover, why establish a Eugenics Society at a time when most scientific societies were gradually distancing themselves from eugenics? These considerations notwithstanding, there are a number of reasons why the HES was established at the beginning of the 1950s in Athens, as will be discussed throughout the book, together with a number of other topics related to eugenics, demography and medical genetics .
The study of the Greek example is important to the history of eugenics because it represented one of the few cases where eugenicists overtly expressed their views after the Second World War. The HES organised a series of successful public conferences from the 1950s to the 1980s, discussing the major issues of the time, such as overpopulation, family planning, genetic diagnosis and counselling. Contrary to the Greek state’s pro-natalist policies and despite the decreasing birth rate, Greek eugenicists put effort to disseminate family planning methods. The control of the quality of reproduction and the quantity of the population was the ultimate expression of eugenics during the post-war period.
Above all, the case of Greek post-war eugenics is valuable to the study of the history of eugenics because it proves the continuity of eugenics during the post-war period which is less discussed by historians. This book builds on existing literature on interwar eugenics and post-war birth control by eventually providing a linkage between them, thus expanding our knowledge of reproductive choices and population policies during the post-war period. Furthermore, the investigation of the collaboration among Greek, British and American eugenicists reveals that the HES was not limited in the national borders of Greece but was part of the transnational eugenics movement veiled under the dissemination of birth control policies and family planning strategies. In particular, this book provides unprecedented reasoning of the continuity of eugenics during the post-war period because its argumentation is based on original archival material. The importance of the disclosure of this material is twofold because not only reveals the content of the archives but also provides a research study derived from the combination of Greek, American and British archives.
Consequently, this book shows that the HES was not a rare and outdated exception among similar eugenics societies in Western Europe and the USA, which flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century. As will be discussed, it followed the international tendency to popularise birth control in conjunction with demographical concerns. Taking into account, the rich historiography of pre-war eugenics, it is acknowledged that the HES distanced itself from ideas and practices which tarnished eugenics ideology, such as ideas of...