What does Harry Laughlin has to do with Hitler?

Answer 1

Harry Laughlin was an American eugenics who worked at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), together with Charles Davenport, and they supported many of the measures which later came to be associated with Hitler's Third Reich, including the elimination of the bottom ten percent of society, the feebleminded (which they never defined), the hereditarily defective, and had a special antagonism toward epileptics. The Nazis took much inspiration from Laughlin and Davenport's work in the US. One can say that if the seeds for Eugenics were first planted in London England, they then germinated in the US under the auspices of the ERO, and that then Hitler brought them to full fruition in Germany as the final solution. Their work, together with the racist Propaganda of such organizations such as the Human Betterment Foundation, helped to laid the foundation for the Third Reich's philosophy. Ironically, Harry H. Laughlin, who claimed that epilepsy was synonymous with feeblemindedness, and that people with epilepsy did not belong in society, died of epilepsy (see Edwin Black's War Against the Weak).