The Race to Forget? Bi-racial Descendants of the First Rhineland Occupation in 1950s West German Debates about the Children of African American GIs*

After the First World War, the German children of colonial French soldiers stationed in the Rhineland became a focal point of nationalist anxieties over ‘racial pollution’. In 1937, the Nazis subjected hundreds of biracial Rhenish children to compulsory sterilization. After 1945, colonial French soldiers and African American GIs participating in the occupation of West Germany left behind thousands of out-of-wedlock children. In striking contrast to the open vilification of the first (1920s) generation of biracial occupation children, post-1945 commentators emphasized the need for the racial integration of the children of black GIs. Government agencies implemented new programmes protecting the post-1945 cohort against racial discrimination, yet refused restitution to biracial Rhenish Germans sterilized by the Nazis. The contrasts between the experiences of the two generations of German descendants of occupation soldiers of colour underline the complicated ways in which postwar ruptures in racial discourse coexisted with certain long-term continuities in antiblack racism, complicating historians’ claims of ‘Americanization’ of post-1945 German racial attitudes.

Governing Juridical Sex: Gender Recognition and the Biopolitics of Trans Sterilization in Finland

In many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. Drawing on feminist and queer debates on the entanglement of recognition with governmentalization, this article moves beyond a human rights frame to examine how struggles for legal gender recognition are bound up with the production and discipline of trans subjectivities, bodies, and relationships. It argues that rights and recognition may not only reinscribe regulation, but also they are a means of rendering trans subjects governable. By theorizing gender identity as a biopolitical discourse that produces trans subjects, the article genealogically examines the problematization of “gender identity” in Finnish welfare population governance practices leading up to the 2003 Finnish gender recognition law. The analysis demonstrates how the discourse of “equality” was key for producing a clearly defined trans population that could be identified, assessed, and, hence, governed. While the sterilization requirement was justified as a replacement for former castration laws which had been used by male-to-female transsexuals to access genital surgery, it also acted as a disciplinary technology to neutralize the alleged threats to normative forms of kinship that could be produced through gender recognition. Finally, the article considers points of resistance and avenues for further research.

Eugenics, medicine and psychiatry in Peru

Eugenics was defined by Galton as ‘the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race’. In Peru, eugenics was related to social medicine and mental hygiene, in accordance with the neo-Lamarckian orientation, that predominated in Latin America. Peruvian eugenists assumed the mission of fighting hereditary and infectious diseases, malnutrition, alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, criminality and everything that threatened the future of the ‘Peruvian race’. There were some enthusiastic advocates of ‘hard’ eugenic measures, such as forced sterilization and eugenic abortion, but these were never officially implemented in Peru (except for the compulsory sterilization campaign during the 1995–2000 period). Eugenics dominated scientific discourse during the first half of the twentieth century, but eugenic discourse did not disappear completely until the 1970s.

7. Developments on the home front and in technical and medical fields

‘Developments on the home front and in technical and medical fields’ describes the social, political, and economic impacts of World War II on each of the countries that participated. There was severe war rationing in Germany and programs of compulsory sterilization continued until the latter stages of the war; Poland was the most dramatically changed country; the European Jewish population was decimated; Fascism was defeated in Italy; Britain lost its colonial powers; and in Russia, Stalin was transformed from being a feared and hated dictator into the benign saviour of his people. There were significant developments in military technology and medical practices applied during the war that had considerable post-war importance.

Making the World Safe for Eugenics: The Eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin's Encounters with American Internationalism

Harry H. Laughlin's main claim to fame was as director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, from which position he exerted considerable influence upon early twentieth-century campaigns to restrict immigration and to institute compulsory sterilization of the socially inadequate. Laughlin also had an absorbing fascination for the idea of a single world government. Over the course of forty years, he produced a voluminous body of mostly unpublished work on the subject. In examining Laughlin's musings on internationalism, this article provides a glimpse into how a leading American eugenicist would have projected onto the world stage the policies he was zealously endeavoring to implement at the domestic level. Laughlin sent samples of his work to many of America's leading internationalists. Their responses to Laughlin's ideas reveal much about the character of internationalism in the United States during the era of World War I, especially the extent to which his racist and imperialist assumptions were shared by other members of the internationalist movement. Consequently, this article provides yet another example of how liberal and conservative impulses were neither easily distinguishable nor mutually exclusive during the Progressive Era.

Secret suffering: the victims of compulsory sterilization during National Socialism

From the second half of the 19th century, eugenics claimed the medical and social need to intervene in human reproduction. During National Socialism, 300,000–400,000 people in Germany were subjected to compulsory sterilization because they had psychological diseases, impairments and social behavioural problems, which were regarded as genetically determined. After the end of the Third Reich, these interventions were not recognized as National Socialist injustice, and the victims were initially excluded from ‘compensation’. As shown in letters and interviews, the victims of compulsory sterilization suffered physically and psychologically throughout their lives. In particular, feelings of social ‘inferiority’, and of shame and suffering from compulsory childlessness and broken relationships, are found in many of the sources examined.