4 Reasons Why Virginia's Recent Statement of "Profound Regret" Isn't Enough

The Virginia-Nazi Germany Alliance and Competition for Whiteness

Before WWII German race scientists were warning that "unless the Germans made progress in this field, America would become the world's racial leader...[given that] German racial policies were relatively "liberal" compared with the treatment of blacks in the United States, where a person with 1/32nd black ancestry was legally black, whereas if someone was 1/8th Jewish in Germany...that person was legally Aryan."

Eventually, Hitler's own eugenics program, which was modeled after Virginia's, sterilized 225,000 people in less than three years. But over the course of 10 years, 2 million Europeans underwent forced sterilization. Noting this result, Virginia’s race policy advocates then pushed as a goal, sterilization of 12 million Americans in order to restore the U.S. to global leadership in the racial purity movement.

In 1935 Virginia's Dr. W.A. Plecker gives a speech on Virginia's efforts to identify and curb her "mongrel" groups. Attending was Hitler's would-be designer of race laws - Ernst Rudin - who would later receive direct assistance in the Nazi project from Harry Laughlin. Plecker also writes a letter to the Nazis encouraging them to forcibly sterilize mixed groups en masse and compliments the Third Reich for sterilizing 600 children in Algeria who had been born to German women and black men.

In 1936 Henry Laughlin receives an honorary degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelburg for his contributions to the "science of race cleansing."



Note: Because of the close collaboration between Virginia policy leaders and the Nazis, the National Holocaust Museum Online has devoted a chapter to Virginia's seldom-discussed history of eugenics.

This "Did You Know?" piece was written with the valuable help of historical data contained in the Tim Hashaw book, Children of Perdition - Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America.