The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought: an excerpt from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain by Dan Stone

Chapter five from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain by Dan Stone.

As we have seen, before the First World War, and in some circles until well into the interwar period, eugenics — literally, ‘well born’ or ‘good stocks’— was the height of sophisticated, ‘progressive’ thought.¹ Across Europe, the novels and plays of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The New Machiavelli (1911) and George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1905), are suffused with the language of race-regeneration and fears of physical deterioration. In Arthur Schnitzler’s novel, The Road to the Open (1908), Berthold Stauber, a young and enthusiastic Viennese Jewish physician, tells his father, the humane Dr Stauber, that ‘You need only consider, father, that the most honest and consistent social hygiene would have the direct result of annihilating diseased people, or at any rate excluding them from all enjoyment of life, and I don’t deny that I have all kinds of ideas tending in that way which may seem cruel at the first glance.’ He went on to say that ‘You needn’t be afraid, father, that I shall begin straight away to preach the murder of the unhealthy and superfluous. But theoretically that’s certainly what my programme leads to.’² Although primarily a conservative ideology, both left and right were attracted to eugenic proposals. These ranged from ‘positive’ measures such as the encouragement of ‘hygienic marriage’, that is, marriage between two people of good stock, to ‘negative’ measures such as sterilisation or segregation in order to ensure that the unfit, feeble-minded and morally degenerate did not have children. In this chapter I will consider eugenics in general, before concentrating on one aspect of its rhetoric which to a post-Second World War audience is perhaps even more shocking than it was to an Edwardian one.

Eugenics was felt to be a modern, scientific enterprise, marking Edwardian Britain off from the more relaxed, self-confident style of its Victorian forebear.

The Victorians were presented with the self-evident nature of British superiority, in the achievements of industry and empire. But the Edwardian period saw the emergence of fears of British decline, especially after the military shock of the Boer War and rapid German economic growth. E. E. Williams’s scaremongering tract, Made in Germany, published in 1896, provided a taste of things to come. In the following decade, it became almost axiomatic that the British ‘race’ was suffering from a degeneration which only hard-nosed, coolly implemented scientific measures could repair. The rallying cry of ‘national efficiency’ brought together tariff reformers, advocates of conscription, rearmament both military and moral, as well as those whose fears centred more on the threat to the purity of the race posed by miscegenation, and the influx of ‘aliens’ into Britain, which at this time was basically a euphemistic synonym for Jews.³ Despite the fact that the 1904 Inter-Departmental Commission on Physical Deterioration reported that there was actually no evidence for degeneration, the very existence of such a commission seemed to justify people’s fears.

Among eugenicists, opinions differed as to the validity of the science founded by Francis Galton, and now heavily influenced by the genetic laws of the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), whose work (dating from 1865) was re-discovered in 1900. With the same end in mind –– race- regeneration –– scientists differed as to how to go about attaining it. The debates can be confusing to our contemporary notions of what is progressive and what is reactionary; some of the most ‘progressive’ thinkers – such as F. C. S. Schiller or W. C. D. and C. D. Whetham⁴ – suggested that the laws of heredity were indeed iron laws, that they could be used to isolate degenerate strains from healthy ones, hence establishing a scientific basis for eradicating the threat posed to the nation by the former. More ‘conservative’ figures – such as Arthur Balfour or G. K. Chesterton⁵ – remained suspicious of the new science of genetic heredity, and maintained that environmental circumstances were also important, if not more important, for dealing with degeneration. These latter thinkers tended still to be under the influence of Lamarckian views of heredity, which insisted that acquired characteristics could be inherited; in other words that notions such as the ‘racial instinct’ or ‘race-memory’ were to be taken seriously. As we will see, some figures managed the trick of combining both of these ways of thinking in order to justify views which, after the First World War, were coming to seem less like progressive ideas and more like violent justifications of class or race hatred.

The question of the role of genetics in heredity, for example, was perhaps the most pressing one for those concerned with the science of eugenics in the period before the First World War. Caleb Williams Saleeby, one of the early founders of the Eugenics Education Society, produced a number of books before 1914 which tried to convince the public of the beneficence of the enterprise he proposed to undertake. Claiming that ‘Our end is a better race’, he promised at the outset that the way to achieve this was through ‘selection for parenthood based upon the facts of heredity’. This, he said, was ‘Our primary idea’. Going on to attack those who were ‘unhampered by biological knowledge’, he went on to state that such a project was not a purely Mendelian one; rather it derives just as much from the teachings of Lamarck: ‘… the key to any of the right and useful methods of eugenic education is to be found in the conception of the racial instinct as existing for parenthood, and to be guarded, reverenced, educated for that supreme end’.⁶

Carefully steering a course between genetics and environment was the hallmark of Saleeby’s work. In his following book, part of the series ‘New Tracts for the Times’ published by Cassell — which included titles such as National Ideals and Race-Regeneration by the Revd R. F. Horton, and Womanhood and Race-Regeneration by Mary Scharlieb –– Saleeby argued that ‘for the regeneration of the race we desire the best hereditary possibilities and the best conditions for their development: only the product of the best “nature” and the best “nurture” will give us the best race’. As though responding to attacks on eugenics, Saleeby went on to defend the justice of his proposals by asserting that his understanding of eugenics was in no way an attempt to harm people: ‘We cannot raise the race by degrading individuals. Whatever lowers the humanity of fathers and mothers, whatever elevates the physiological above the psychological, the body above the mind, is an enemy of the race and no method for its regenerators.’⁷

In 1910 Saleeby had been converted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb from being an advocate of conservative eugenics to an advocate of more socialist proposals. By the time of his last book published before the First World War, it is interesting to note that heredity in his work takes on a greater role than previously. Although he remains cautious about advocating a purely ‘positive’ eugenics, which he associates with Galton, ‘we must not neglect whatever may be possible in this direction’. As an example, he cites the case of ‘energy… apparently a quality transmitted by heredity… [which] may prove to have a simpler genetic basis than many valuable qualities’. As if to defend his progressive credentials, Saleeby asserts, in an ironically ill-timed passage, that ‘The conspicuously dysgenic or degenerative action of war can scarcely be allowed to injure civilized races much longer, and the influence of the true eugenist will always be found on the side of peace and its illustrious champions.’⁸

By contrast with Saleeby’s middle-way approach, James Marchant, the director of the National Social Purity Crusade, made unabashed claims about heredity in order to make his arguments as forceful as possible. Writing at exactly the same time as Saleeby, Marchant appeared at first to be treading a similarly cautious path: ‘to avoid even momentary misunderstanding it must be immediately prefaced that the inheritance of vicious tendencies may be kept in check if not wholly stamped out; they are not inevitably bound to issue in evil deeds; they may be sterile tendencies’. Yet he went on in the very next sentence to state baldly: ‘Yet heredity plays havoc with the lives of men… The consequences of transgression follow with leaden footfalls which echo down the long corridor of time from generation to generation.’ Hence, the whole discussion of vice, particularly to be found in the cities, such as the white slave traffic (in which, incidentally, ‘The traders are mostly foreigners, Germans and Jews predominating…’) is set out as the consequence of degenerate hereditary inheritances. Although Marchant’s proposals for alleviating the situation are unclear, he has little time, in his role as Promoter of Public Morals, for the weak-willed, apologetic arguments of those who stress environmental factors as belonging to the social fabric.⁹

It is obvious that there was no clarity on such matters, however, since Marchant re-entered the debate during the war with an argument which, while devoted to the same goal of social purity, owed more this time to Lamarck than to Mendel. Indeed, now he attacked genetics per se; taking on ‘Mendel’s so-called laws’, Marchant eulogised instead (somewhat in the manner of Durkheim) the social inheritance: ‘Man enters into a great inheritance of customs and traditions, laws and religion, art and literature, which, even if we grant a great deal to heredity, exercise an immeasurable and decisive influence over him.’ He then went on to disparage at length the purely heredity-based argument of Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race (1917), a book which argued that the deterioration of England was ‘due to the lowering proportion of the Nordic blood and the transfer of political power from the vigorous Nordic aristocracy and middle classes to the radical and labour elements, both largely recruited from the Mediterranean type’. Rather than see everything in such terms –– which illustrated ‘the extreme use this modern doctrine of heredity is put’ to — Marchant’s argument turned full circle from his 1909 book. Noting that the young needed to be taught the ‘virtues of sex’, not to have them hidden from them, he went on to argue that his aim was ‘to accustom the young to regard the sex instinct as a “racial instinct”, as something which exists, as it in reality does, not primarily for the individual but for the race. It is a trust for posterity… the racial act is for the race.’¹⁰ One wonders today what choice there really is between Grant and Marchant, who undoubtedly had the same end in mind.¹¹

Indeed, it was easy for racist propagandists to seize upon such scientific inquiries in order to make their case seem watertight, especially when the scientists themselves, notably Galton’s protégé Karl Pearson, were convinced of the degenerating effects of immigrants. There was only a difference of degree, not of substance, between Pearson’s investigations with Margaret Moul (of the Galton Laboratory) into the racial qualities of Jewish schoolchildren (see Chapter 4), or the Eugenics Society’s Memorandum on Alien Immigration, which dressed up their prejudice in the language of objective research, and the vehemently racist propaganda leaflet Are You an Englishman? Then Read This! published around 1925. Pearson, engaged in statistical research, concluded after exhaustively correlating relationships between, for example, head shape and intelligence or hair colour and intelligence, found that, ‘Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population.’ Crucially, there was little to be done to alter this state of affairs: ‘The intelligence of these aliens is given; it is the product of their racial development and the action which environment has exerted in selecting for survival or destroying during long years of history the more or the less intelligent of their race.’ The Eugenics Society’s memorandum, from around 1925, claimed that it was ‘very undesirable that aliens, so unlike ourselves as to produce a definitely half-caste progeny, should mix with the community. The presence of negroes particularly is an evil…’ but did not explain why. Indeed it went on to admit that there was ‘great difficulty in discovering reliable information as to racial admixture, since statistics only show nationality and thus include as British persons who are racially foreigners’. Are You an Englishman?, sent to the Eugenics Society by the anti-alien campaigner E. Bloomfield –— with whom, to their credit, the Society declined to have further contact –– simply took such claims and presented them in a more earthy fashion:

one of the causes of industrial unrest and the cause of unemployment was the continuous immigration of low grade aliens, whose instincts and traditions, that is to say whose inherited race memories, these themselves the outcome of biological and therefore ineradicable causes, made it impossible for the Southern European and Eastern races ever to assimilate with our own Nordic stock.¹²

The mutually exclusive combination of Lamarckianism and Mendelism was no barrier to racism.

An equally heated debate raged concerning the best eugenic methods to be employed in order to promote race-regeneration. Havelock Ellis, for example, unquestionably a progressive figure in the history of sexology, supported ‘the extirpation of the feeble-minded classes’ but thought it best to do so ‘without any risky experiments in legislation’. He believed he could achieve his goal ‘by specially training the feeble-minded, by confining them in suitable institutions and colonies, and by voluntary sacrifice of procreative power on the part of those who are able to work in the world…’ At the same time he supported ‘the higher breeding of the race, as it may be exercised by the fully sane and responsible classes’.¹³

The following year Ellis argued for the same need to nurture the race, but did so in what appeared at first to be more careful tones. Early on in his book, The Task of Social Hygiene, he argued against those who believed the race to be degenerating, saying that there ‘is not the slightest evidence’ for the theory ‘that the bad stocks are replacing the good stocks’. Indeed, he proposed the term ‘aggeneration’, since ‘Regeneration implies that there has been degeneration, and it cannot be positively affirmed that such degeneration has, on the whole, occurred in such a manner as to affect the race.’ Furthermore, Ellis went on –– in the vein of Saleeby –– to defend eugenics against those who saw it as leading to the establishment of stud farms and the breakdown of traditional moral norms. ‘As things are,’ he wrote, ‘even if we had the ability and the power, we should surely hesitate before we bred men and women as we breed dogs or fowls. We may, therefore, quite put aside all discussion of eugenics as a sort of higher cattle-breeding.’ Nevertheless, he had by this stage in the book already set out his position on the ‘feeble-minded’, an ‘evil that is unmitigated’. The ‘unquestionable fact that in any degree it is highly inheritable renders it a deteriorating poison to the race’; the ‘very existence itself’ of ‘this feeble folk’ is ‘an impediment’.¹⁴ To today’s reader, the apparently measured message of Ellis’s beginning is severely tempered by such candid statements.

Even so, Ellis’s prescriptions for society seem mild when contrasted with the out-and-out defenders of degeneration theory, whose answers brooked no moral objection. A good example is again provided by Anthony Ludovici. Taking Nietzsche’s call for the ‘transvaluation of all values’ as his starting point, Ludovici devoted himself to proving how contemporary, liberal ideals promoted only the weak, effeminate and degenerate, and how the response necessitated an unprecedented degree of harshness. ‘This principle of Nietzsche’s,’ he asserted, ‘which, if we banish squeamish prejudices, we know to be our principle also, is simply the time-honoured law, that some race, some few must suffer, if an ideal race is to be attained at all.’¹⁵

In the late 1960s Ludovici was still convinced that the English race was degenerating. In the interwar period, when scientific racism was (as Elazar Barkan put it) in retreat in English and American thought (although mainstream eugenics was not), Ludovici espoused some of the most outrageous ideas for race-regeneration, methods which, in tracts such as Violence, Sacrifice and War (1933) and The Choice of a Mate (1935), do not shrink from advocating mass-murder. In the former work, for example, Ludovici wrote that since violence and sacrifice were social inevitabilities, ‘the time has come… consciously to select the section or elements in the world or the nation that should be sacrificed’. Who did Ludovici mean? He was, fortunately for us, only too ready to reveal that ‘a great and brave nation… will not hesitate to abandon all such suicidal solutions [to violence] as homosexuality, heterosexual vice, birth control, infanticide, emasculation, etc., and will distribute the burden of sacrifice over inferior races abroad, and inferior human products in all classes at home’.¹⁶ It is clear, then, that despite the general trend away from exaggerating the possibilities of positive eugenic measures in interwar Anglo-Saxon thought, there were people keeping the dream alive of an engineered super-race. As if in direct response to Ellis’s hesitation before treating people as dogs or fowl, Ludovici asked: ‘What breed of sheep, what breed of horses, what breed of common barn-fowl, could have been abandoned to the promiscuous mating alone (not to mention other errors) to which modern man has long been abandoned, without suffering ultimate degeneration?’¹⁷

Ludovici – though extreme in his views – was by no means alone. At the turn of the century the well-known nationalist journalist Arnold White stridently asserted that ‘The best specimens of a race, whether among men, pigeons, orchids, or horses, are only to be found where the laws of breeding and of culture are carefully obeyed.’¹⁸ We will encounter both Ludovici and White again later on. Though intemperate in his claims and intolerant in his attitudes, Ludovici was actually not so far removed from the establishment where the scientific possibilities were concerned. As late as 1939, for example, the ‘Geneticists’ Manifesto’, signed by seven eminent participants in the Seventh International Genetical Congress in Edinburgh, demanded the rejection of race-prejudice and was in general nothing like as incautious as Ludovici in its claims for genetics. Nevertheless, it still asserted, among other things, that both negative and positive eugenic birth-control measures were necessary and possible, and that ‘conscious guidance of selection is called for’ in reproduction.¹⁹ In this their statement remained true to the goals of Galton: eugenics’

first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children.²⁰

It is important to remember that not all advocates of eugenics were anything like as sure of the movement’s panacea-like qualities as was Ludovici. Most in fact were still afflicted with the effeminate characteristics of liberalism which Ludovici was working so hard to overturn, and torn between the need for state intervention and the protection of individual liberty.²¹ Valère Fallon, for example, professor at the Philosophical College of the Society of Jesus at Louvain, was a promoter of eugenics whose enthusiasm for the new science had to be kept in line with the tenets of Catholicism. In several articles from 1921 and 1922, which appeared in English in 1923 in an attempt to win over English Catholics to eugenics, Fallon endorsed the view that the increased luxury of modern civilisation tended to bring about the deterioration of physical vigour; indeed, ‘It is even maintained, and with a certain amount of plausibility, that humanity is degenerating, and that the proportion of abnormal, defective, degenerate, backward, and weak people is on the increase.’ He explicitly warned, however, that euthanasia and sterilisation were contrary to Catholic teaching, and attacked those who supported

the intensifying of the struggle for life, understood not merely as economic rivalry, but literally as implying the destruction of the multitude of weaklings and defectives in order to bring about in all its rigour the survival of the fittest, and to open the way for the élite – the happy few indeed! – to aspire to a greater well-being with more facility.

The role of eugenics, then, was primarily preventive. Although Fallon naturally could not endorse birth control (he eagerly condemned neo-Malthusianism), he pondered the possibility of a law to ‘forbid the marriage of persons whose offspring would certainly create a grave danger or heavy burden upon society’.²²

Ordinarily, these debates between eugenicists of various schools can be approached using conventional historiographical approaches, such as the history of ideas, with its way of historicising ideas so that the same word or phrase can be shown to have changed in meaning over time. This historicisation is certainly possible with the term ‘eugenics’ itself. With care, one can show how that word was used to promote many different types of social projects,²³ from those which would still be considered beneficial today (basic hygiene measures or care of the mentally ill, for example), to those which would be considered objectionable on the grounds of changed moral standards (the views of the promoters of the National Social Purity Crusade with its restrictive sexual mores, for example). Eugenics today carries an unmistakable stigma of evil, even though much of what we object to in the literature of its heyday is really the vocabulary (‘race-regeneration’, ‘national purity’) or tone rather than the measures under discussion. In Saleeby’s 1911 book, The Methods of Race Regeneration, for example, the injunction to ‘segregate’ the ‘naturally defective’ is essentially still the basis of contemporary dealing with the mentally ill, whether this be physically through asylums or socially/psychologically through ‘care in the community’. The current celebration of the human genome project seems once again to have given rise to a belief that a genetic explanation can be found for everything, and the return of eugenics –– now under more consumer-friendly names –– is already upon us.

There is, however, a good reason for the attachment of ‘evil’ to eugenics, and that of course is the role of ‘racial science’ in the Third Reich’s policies of euthanasia and, following on from these, the genocide of the Jews and Sinti and Roma. Today’s discussions about euthanasia or genetic engineering, for example, are stamped by a certain heightened emotional tone which very easily spills over into hysteria. Even serious students of the topic are not immune from bringing Nazism into contemporary debates, or vice-versa, as Michael Burleigh’s out-of-place discussion of the views of Peter Singer in the epilogue to his otherwise superb book on Nazi euthanasia policies shows.²⁴

Racial science was not the only strand of thought that fed into the Holocaust. Equally important were ‘irrational’ notions of hatred, fear of pollution, and what a number of scholars as diverse as R. G. Collingwood and Georges Bataille identified as an ‘excess energy’ which exists in ‘rationalised’ societies, ready to burst out at moments of crisis.²⁵ Nevertheless, even the most outrageous forms of behaviour were legitimised by the Nazis under the veneer of scientific objectivity (Hitler spoke of eradicating the Jewish ‘bacillus’), and there is no doubt as to the seriousness with which many scientists, from agriculturalists and demographers to chemical biologists, believed in the notion of the Volkskörper, the national body, which could be treated like an individual body, to be cared for ordinarily and, when diseased, cauterised. The gas chambers were the end result of a complex process of intermingled ideological, military and circumstantial developments, but the language of eugenics and racial hygiene was certainly part of the legitimising process for them. It helped to prepare the way, so to speak.²⁶

And here we encounter a problem with the terminology which renders it not so easily historicisable. There has for some time now been a debate as to the possibility of historicising the Holocaust, a debate which is illustrative of the problem of representing the Holocaust more generally using conventional historiographical tools, and the wider problem of the ‘crisis of history’ in the face of the postmodern challenge, a challenge which insists that language ‘constructs’ the truth of its subject-matter just as much as it reflects it.

There is an added problem in this case, a problem that until now has gone unnoticed both by students of the history of eugenics and by students of the Holocaust. It does not solely concern the problem of representation, but the problem of how ideas do not change over time, how ideas do travel across national settings, and how they become actualised. It also concerns an aspect of the Holocaust which is believed to render it particularly horrific: the fact that it was unprecedented, the fact that the industrial method of murder could have been neither envisaged nor comprehended, either by those who were its victims or by the so-called ‘bystanders’. An archetypal example of this is recorded from when the Polish underground courier, Jan Karski, reported to American Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, and Polish ambassador to the US, Jan Ciechanowski. After telling in great detail of his clandestine visits to the Warsaw Ghetto and of what was happening to the Jews upon their deportation from there, the following occurred:

Frankfurter silently got up from his chair. For a few moments, he paced back and forth in front of Karski and the ambassador, who looked on in puzzlement. Then, just as quietly, the justice took his seat again. ‘Mr. Karski,’ Frankfurter said after a further pause, ‘a man like me talking to man like you must be totally frank. So I must say: I am unable to believe you.’ Ciechanowski flew from his seat. ‘Felix, you don’t mean it!’ he cried. ‘How can you call him a liar to his face! The authority of my government is behind him. You know who he is!’ Frankfurter replied, in a soft voice filled with resignation, ‘Mr. Ambassador, I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.’²⁷

It is true that the Nazi path to the gas chamber was a twisted one, a path which (once the actual murder process started) began with the face-to-face shootings of the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile killing squads which accompanied the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union), ‘progressed’ through the gas-vans of Serbia and Chelmno, and then into the carbon monoxide gas chambers of the Operation Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka), based on those used in the ‘euthanasia’ programme, before ending with the most technologically sophisticated version in Auschwitz, the zyklon B gas chamber.

As if this history, which is well known, were not horrific enough in itself, it seems that we must question the extent to which such a thing was, in fact, unimaginable to the minds of civilised Europeans. For in the English literature on eugenics there existed for some forty years before the Holocaust a notion –– the ‘lethal chamber’ –– which can be differentiated from the Nazi gas chambers ‘only’ in the fact that the English versions never went into operation. In the rest of this chapter I will defend this claim, and think about whether the time difference between the first mention of the ‘lethal chamber’ in England and the operation of the Nazi gas chambers in occupied Poland confounds normal historiographical suppositions of change over time, and whether the English idea and the German actualisation of it are in any way related.

The brief discussion of eugenics in Britain which forms the first part of this chapter was necessary in order to emphasise the fact that ‘eugenics’ was really an umbrella term for a rich variety of ideas. It also serves the purpose of reminding us that, although we concentrate on it for good reason, the history of eugenics in Germany is by no means unique; indeed, it borrowed some of its ideas from abroad.

One of the most shocking of these ideas is that of the gas chamber. There are very few advocates of mass-murder of any sort, particularly not by gassing, to be found in the literature on eugenics. But it seems that in the British consciousness, fuelled by the hyperbole of the press, there was concern that this was exactly the end to which eugenics would lead. From the reassurances to be found in the writings of those who defended eugenics, it seems clear that the idea of the ‘lethal chamber’, though never set out in any detail, was a widely propagated one from which eugenicists had to distance themselves. At work here we see the defenders of traditional values fighting to ridicule the eugenicists, who in the years before 1918 were at the forefront of progressive thought.

It is unclear where the phrase comes from. Yet the fact that Arnold White felt the need to mention it in an article which later became part of his highly influential book which was cited above, Efficiency and Empire (1901), is revealing. Railing against the same sort of weak character that Ludovici later chose as his target, one which took unnecessary pity on the weak, White wrote the following:

There is no sign of a reaction against the cant that loads the dissolute poor with favours, while brave men and women who refuse to be proselytised prefer to die of hunger in a garret rather than sue for alms. In changing our present methods, however, we must carry with us public opinion. Flippant people of lazy mind talk lightly of the ‘lethal chamber,’ as though diseased Demos, half conscious of his own physical unfitness, but electorally omnipotent, would permit a curtailment of his pleasures or the abridgement of his liberty.²⁸

When White wrote these words in 1899 this sort of defence was necessary, for his advocacy of ‘efficiency’ could easily be caricatured as being a call for some kind of mechanised or engineered society, inimical to the tradition of ‘British liberty’. This is far from being a proposal to establish gas chambers, but a hyperbolic way of demonstrating the acceptably considered opinions of his own book. But today the passage is striking for another reason. Here, forty years before the operation of the first Nazi gas chamber, White introduces the notion of a ‘lethal chamber’ into his text in the apparently safe knowledge that his readers will know what he is talking about.

Some years later the phrase reappears in another book by White. In a collection of articles produced for the Referee under the pen-name Vanoc, White devoted a whole section to race-regeneration and related matters. In one article, ‘Race Culture’, he defended the advantages to be won from a policy of eugenics:

I admit that the word ‘Eugenics’ is repellent, but the thing is essential to our existence. To produce sound minds in sound bodies by impressing on all classes the dignity, the privileges, and the responsibilities of British parenthood is the race-improver’s aim. Naturally we are misrepresented… It is not a fact that Scotland Yard will be invoked to effect the union of the fit, and it is also an error to believe that the plans and specifications for County Council lethal-chambers have yet been prepared.²⁹

Again the implication is that word has been spread that this is precisely what the county councils intend to do; at least, the eugenicists have been the butt of jokes accusing them of unrealistic and dangerous dreams of social engineering, what A. F. Tredgold, a member of the Eugenics Education Society’s council, called ‘dark mutterings regarding “lethal chambers", mutterings that White for one felt the need to dismiss as absurd.³⁰

The term ‘lethal chamber’ also appears in the work of Caleb Williams Saleeby, the influential member of the Eugenics Society whose books have already been discussed. Because of his position, Saleeby undoubtedly felt more vulnerable than most to the attacks of anti-eugenicists; hence he felt obliged to distance himself from the wilder accusations levelled against his new science. ‘Thus,’ he wrote,

we need mention, only to condemn, suggestions for ‘painless extinction’, lethal chambers of carbonic acid, and so forth. As I incessantly have to repeat, eugenics has nothing to do with killing; natural selection acts by death, but eugenic selection by birth… No form of actual or constructive murder (such as the permission of infant mortality) has any place here, for all these proposals to kill miss the vital point, which involves the distinction between the right to live and the right to become a parent.³¹

Once again, it is clear that Saleeby is responding to those who have sought to besmirch the good name of eugenics by imputing to it intentions of the most abhorrent variety.

The timing of these replies from the eugenicists is no surprise: on 3 March 1910 Bernard Shaw, one of the more wayward supporters of eugenics with his notion of a ‘democracy of supermen’, delivered a lecture to the Eugenics Education Society. Confirming the fears of those who wished the Society to develop a reputation as a serious scientific institution, Shaw’s talk resulted in the press ridiculing eugenicists as advocates of ‘free love’ and ‘lethal chambers’.

Such an outcome was not entirely unforeseeable, given Shaw’s well-known volatility. Indeed, a week before the talk, at a time when relations between the Galton Laboratory and the Eugenics Society were already strained, Karl Pearson wrote to the aged Francis Galton, with the hope ‘that he will be under self-control and not be too extravagant’.³² The hope was to be misplaced. One month before Shaw’s talk a lecture by C. W. Wilson to the Birmingham Rationalist Association on the subject of eugenics gave rise to ‘much wild and absurd talk about lethal chambers, the right to live, and forcible marriages’.³³ In the case of someone so famously outspoken as Shaw, the outcome was sure to be far greater negative publicity. Either the press believed Shaw to be serious, and vilified him, or recognised the tongue-in-cheek nature of his lecture, and underscored it.

Shaw (as reported by the Daily Express) spoke of revising the normative view of the sacredness of human life, abolishing marriage and ‘going further in the direction of political revolution than the most extreme Socialist at present advocates in public’. The most shocking part of his speech, came, however, when he turned to the implementation of eugenic measures:

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment… A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.

The Daily Express was outraged, apologising to its readers for printing such material, only justifying it by stating that it ‘indicates the lengths to which the Socialists, of whom Mr. Bernard Shaw is a leader, will go’.³⁴

Other newspapers were equally repulsed by Shaw’s talk, though most reported it drily, without comment, other than that which was implied in the headline ‘Lethal Chamber essential to Eugenics’ as used by the Daily News and the Birmingham Daily Mail. This latter paper, though, was not unduly worried by Shaw’s prognostications: ‘This is all very shocking, but it is also Shavian, and as some centuries must elapse before Society has fitted itself for such a wildly “ideal” doctrine as this, no one need trouble himself seriously about it.’ Among the many other papers that reported the talk, only The Globe and the Evening News also recognised it as a skit on the dreams of the eugenicists, although the Illustrated London News offered a reading that saw Shaw as driving the final nail into the coffin of eugenics, ending with the thought that ‘The only daring suggestion for the improvement of the human race that Eugenics suggests to us is that the world would be a jollier place if there were fewer cranks in it.’³⁵

It was because of these attacks in the press that the eugenicists sought to employ the language of the ‘lethal chamber’ in order to make their actual views appear more reasonable, a policy of stealing their enemies’ weapons, so to speak. Hence a widely reported series of lectures at Bedford College for Women, which sought to dispel such ‘wild’ rumours. The Yorkshire Daily Post had this to say about a talk by Dean Inge:

Nothing has been more noticeable of recent years than the advance of the study of eugenics. Some have seized hold of this to advocate the abolition of the marriage tie, the institution of a State lethal chamber, and other equally absurd ideas. It was therefore timely that the Bedford College for Women should arrange a course of lectures to put the science in the right perspective.³⁶

A few days later, the Daily Sketch reported that Dr Saleeby had ‘wiped down’ Shaw in his comments on Shaw’s speech; and in response to J. W. Slaughter’s speech of 21 March the Manchester Dispatch wrote the following:

The way of the parent must be made easy, but apart from this we must exterminate the undesirable sections of humanity. The establishment of lethal chambers and the resort to surgical measures are, however, the plans of ‘wild eugenicists’ in the opinion of Dr. Slaughter. These undesirables must be kept apart from the community – kept in comfort, not treated harshly — and with safeguards against the reproduction of the species.³⁷

Unsurprisingly, the strategy of referring to the worst excesses of anti-eugenics caricaturists in order to appear reasonable was one that seems to have had limited success. Saleeby tried it once again before the war, but even after 1918, when eugenicists in Britain increasingly accepted the arguments of the progressive-minded environmentalists, eugenics largely failed to influence policy (the exception being the debate over the sterilisation of mental defectives).³⁸ But in 1914, just before the outbreak of war, Saleeby sought to defend the inherent moderation of eugenics in its pure form:

Since Galton’s death eugenics has been used as an agent of class prejudice, an argument against love, a reason for cruel and wicked surgical operations, for defending the neglect of infancy, and for wild talk about lethal chambers and stud farms. Such prostitutions of eugenics are the very substance of irreligion, and a materialistic ‘philosophy’ is at the heart of them.³⁹

Remarkably, Saleeby’s twin nightmare of ‘lethal chambers and stud farms’ sum up the two aspects of Nazi eugenics policy: the ‘negative’ policy of genocide –– the Holocaust –– and the ‘positive’ policy of the Lebensborn, Himmler’s nascent project to promote ‘sound breeding’ among SS members (although in reality there never were SS stud farms, as we have been encouraged to believe by popular literature).

The point of this is no more than to point out that in England, decades before the Nazis began gassing Jews to death by the million, the fantasy of the lethal chamber was already being mooted. In the early years of eugenics, it was not uncommon for its advocates to recommend that ‘The surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of this high privilege, is a gentle, painless death; and this should be administered not as a punishment, but as an expression of enlightened pity for the victims…’⁴⁰ In the literature cited here, the term ‘lethal chamber’ serves less a fantastic than a rhetorical quality: defending eugenics against its denigrators. But there is no doubt that the reason for the term’s continued use is to be found in the imaginative shock which it presents to the person who hears or reads it. Why then were people so shocked during the war, when the news of the mass-murders began to seep out of the occupied eastern territories, or after the war, when the newsreels confirmed what so many had wanted to disbelieve?

The answer might be the fact that the term ‘lethal chamber’ passes out of common parlance in interwar Britain. I have already noted that the wilder claims for eugenics gradually fell from favour after 1918; there are few references to lethal chambers after that point. Nevertheless, the idea only died slowly. In 1919 an investigation into male prostitution elicited this comment from W. J. H. Brodrick:

The professional boys are about the most degraded being you could find. They have no talk except obscenity; no ideas except unnatural vice; they are usually diseased and a pest and a nuisance to everybody with whom they come into contact. Personally I should be glad to see them put in a lethal chamber and have done with it.⁴¹

Shaw returned to the theme in 1922, this time with slightly more reasoned backing for his assertions, in his preface to Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s English Local Government, under the heading of ‘The Lethal Chamber’. On the question of ‘incorrigible villains’, Shaw argued that the ‘most obvious course is to kill them’. In response to the predicted objection that the state should not be setting an example of killing, Shaw argued that imprisonment already did this:

imprisonment is as irrevocable as hanging. Each is a method for taking a criminal’s life; and when he prefers hanging or suicide to imprisonment for life, as he sometimes does, he says, in effect, that he had rather you took his life all at once, painlessly, than minute by minute in a long-drawn-out torture.

Although Shaw was not as outspoken here as in his infamous 1910 speech, his conclusions were probably all the more worrying for that:

The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it… If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?⁴²

Probably the most public reference to the notion of the lethal chamber can be found in a book by Leonard Darwin, second youngest and longest-surviving son of Charles Darwin, and president of the Eugenics Society. In his 1926 book The Need for Eugenic Reform he devoted a whole sub-chapter to the idea of the lethal chamber as one of the possibilities for the elimination of the unfit. He objected to the lethal chamber for these reasons:

From the moral point of view, it would tend to associate the idea of murder with that of social progress, and would consequently tend to increase the number of murders. From the racial point of view, it would, as in the case of excessive punishments, be less willingly adopted than other more humane methods and, therefore, less effective. And from the individual point of view, it would cause great distress of mind to many through the fear not only that they themselves would be thus ‘eliminated’, but also that that might be the fate of some beloved relative… Certainly ‘scientific baby murder’ cannot be tolerated, and in regard to eugenic reform generally, we must never attempt to act through the agency of the death rate, but only through that of the birth rate.

Also condemning sterilisation, Darwin favoured ‘conception control’ above all.⁴³ But it is the fact that he felt the need to devote not inconsiderable space to the lethal chamber that is so interesting; even in the interwar years, it seems that the idea still existed, at least to the extent that those who wanted eugenics to be taken seriously had to prove their distaste for it. Even a radical hereditarian like Charles Armstrong –– who believed that ‘It is chiefly “humanitarian” legislation that is now deliberately destroying our fine stock’ –– felt it necessary to stress in the rush to ‘diminish the dangerous fertility of the unfit’ that it was sterilisation rather than the other two options of segregation or the lethal chamber that was preferable.⁴⁴

The only other reference I have found for the interwar period appears in the fringe context of an Imperial Fascist League meeting in 1937. Richard Thurlow, in his ground-breaking book Fascism in Britain, gives the details: Henry Hamilton Beamish, vice-president of the IFL (and founder of the Britons in 1918) gave a talk entitled ‘National Socialism (Racial Fascism) in Practice in Germany’ in which he lauded Hitler’s Germany for having identified ‘the enemy’. He then added, as Thurlow notes, ‘with chilling prophecy’, that ‘it would be the task of a great leader, Hitler for preference, to march into Russia in the next five years and place one half of the population in the lethal chamber and the other half in the zoo’.⁴⁵

The use of the phrase by an extremist like Beamish would not be so interesting were it not for the fact that it clearly has an intellectual heritage going back to the turn of the century. By the 1930s Beamish already — in England, at any rate –– sounded like the champion of a lost cause; but in Germany the cause was of course gaining ground. Before the First World War, the work of Galton and his successor Karl Pearson had long since argued for the importance of genetic over environmental factors in determining human heredity; by the time of Beamish’s lecture in 1937 or Ludovici’s published plans for selective breeding programmes, such an extreme, one-sided position was, scientifically speaking, outdated. G. R. Searle is certainly correct to state that demands for the use of the lethal chamber ‘were never seriously put forward by British eugenists’;⁴⁶ nevertheless, the whole language of racial deterioration, elimination of the unfit, and scientific, objective and hence unalterable descriptions of the evils of miscegenation, hybridisation and degeneration fed deftly into the programmes of racists. Besides, the idea of the lethal chamber was certainly kept alive precisely by those same eugenicists who sought to fight off any association with it, just as it was in the imaginative literature of H. G. Wells, who in 1933 fantasised about a gas attack on Berlin in 1940, describing in detail the corpses laid out on Unter den Linden, a scene whose ironic value needs no comment today, since it bears so uncanny a resemblance to descriptions of bodies in the Nazi gas chambers.⁴⁷

These ideas ultimately penetrated rather more deeply in Germany than in Britain. George Mosse has shown the considerable success with which the Archivfür Rassenund Gesellschaftsbiologie (Journal for Racial and Social Biology), founded in 1904, propagated Galton’s and Pearson’s ideas. It followed with especial interest developments at Pearson’s Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, founded at University College London in the same year.⁴⁸

While eugenics, or at least the laws of heredity in relation to race, had become scientifically acceptable by 1914, it was to be in 1930s Germany rather than in Britain that the language of the Volkskörper became the basis for a state-sanctioned programme of ‘national purification’. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this chapter, and have anyway been discussed many times over elsewhere. Here I want only to ask, since the field of eugenics was established in Britain, and was eagerly taken on board by German scientists, might it not also be the case that the notion of the ‘lethal chamber’, which had existed in British literature on eugenics since the turn of the century, also fed into the fantasies which eventually led to the gas chambers? If so, and far more research would be required to prove it, can the notion of the ‘unimaginableness’ of the Holocaust be modified? Could it be that, in Britain especially, the Nazi project should have been recognised as akin to an earlier British concern?

That the idea of the ‘lethal chamber’ was a British concern is shown in a rather shabby example of postwar extreme-right writing. Anthony Ludovici was almost eighty when, in 1961, he published Religion for Infidels, an attack on the weak, effete ethics that had been spread by the teachings of Christianity. The book reiterated what had been Ludovici’s favourite theme since the beginning of his writing career: degeneration, this time presented as one of ‘the most disastrous results of Christianity’s disregard for biological attributes in the estimation of human worth’.⁴⁹

It is when Ludovici turns to his solution to this ongoing biological deterioration that the text becomes interesting in this context. It is worth citing at length:

‘Then what is your remedy?’ the reader asks; and, in the defiance of his tone, I sense his assumption that he knows my answer and has the appropriate retort ready. What he expects me to say is, ‘A lethal chamber for the human rubbish we are salvaging at the cost of the dwindling minority of the sound and promising,’ and if I hint at such a thing, he is prepared at once to retort that the decent English public would never tolerate such ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist sadism.’ Incidentally, it should be noted that when the average person formulates this sort of reply, he not only shows himself incapable of going further back in history than World War II — as if thought on this question began then –– but also betrays his expectation of immediate applause from every moron in the nation, whose alleged inability to suffer the violent elimination of even selected lower-grade defectives, is compounded with the patient, not to say, cheerful, endurance of the death of thousands of quite unselected and presumably sound adults and children on our highways every year.

But Ludovici claims that he has ‘no intention of proposing… a lethal chamber’, if only because this would ‘confirm people in their Christian sophistries’. It is because, he says, ‘the “lethal chamber” solution is the only one popularly conceived as possible for relieving society of the crushing burden consisting of its biological trash and dregs, and of cleansing the national stock and protecting it from further contamination, [that] nothing whatsoever is done about it…’ If only people would listen to his solution, a ‘transvaluation of all values’ which would harden spirits against the depraved and degenerate, the problem would automatically take care of itself:

Men must learn again to feel in their hearts contempt and repugnance for biological depravity; and when this lesson has been learnt and the taste displayed in mating correspondingly chastened, there will be no need to argue over the pros and cons of a lethal chamber for human rubbish, for morbidity and defect will insensibly and inevitably diminish to the extent of ceasing to be a social problem.⁵⁰

There is a certain ambivalence here; either way, it is not attractive. Ludovici knows he cannot defend the ‘lethal chamber’ option, though one senses he has no particular objection to it, but his proposed solution arrives at the same end. In the year that Raul Hilberg published The Destruction of the European Jews, the major landmark in the historiography of the Holocaust, a British right-wing thinker was, in so many words, advocating the elimination of the ‘unfit’. It seems that although the British never put into operation the lethal chamber they invented, leaving it to the Germans to claim that notoriety, a few among them were so impressed by the results that they could still appeal to it after the war as the benchmark by which their own projects of biological regeneration should be judged. The ‘lethal chamber’, though it was realised by the Germans, was, like eugenics in general, certainly also a British problem.

171. Cf. p. 184: ‘Certain methods of eliminating inferior types, including the lethal chamber and imprisonment, are of course to be unhesitatingly condemned, and all methods must be used with great circumspection.’ Darwin recommends ‘conception control’ on pp. 179–83.