Years before Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft made population reduction the official foreign policy of the United States Government, the Rockefeller brothers, most especially John D Rockefeller III, or JDR III as he was affectionately known, were busy experimenting on human guinea pigs.

In the 1950’s, brother Nelson Rockefeller was occupied with exploiting the cheap, non-union labor of Puerto Ricans in the New York garment center sweatshops, flying them into New York at cheap rates on the family’s Eastern Airlines shuttle. He was also engaged in setting up cheap labor manufacturing directly on the island, far away from prying US health and industrial safety regulators, under a government program named Operation Bootstrap.

At the time, Nelson was Under Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and a shadowy and highly influential figure in the Eisenhower Administration.

David Rockefeller.  Died at 101.  No cancer for the super rich.

In Nelson’s version of Operation Bootstrap, the boots were owned by the Rockefeller family and their business friends. The only straps were those used by sweatshop owners on the island to force a higher level of productivity.

While Nelson was thus busy encouraging the spirit of free enterprise among Puerto Ricans, brother John D. III, was running human experiments in mass sterilization on the poorer citizens of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was an unfortunate island whose sovereignty got lost somewhere in the shuffle of American diplomacy. It was a de facto US colony, with ultimate legal control decided far away in Washington, making it an ideal experiment station. Through his newly founded Population Council, JDR III first ran some of the experiments in population reduction which would later become global State Department policy under Henry Kissinger’s NSSM 200.

JDR III made Puerto Rico into a huge laboratory to test his ideas on mass population control beginning in the 1950’s. By 1965, an estimated 35% of Puerto Rico’s women of childbearing age had been permanently sterilized, according to a study made that year by the island’s Public Health Department. The Rockefeller Population Council, and the US Government Department of Health Education and Welfare—where brother Nelson was Under-Secretary—packaged the sterilization campaign. They used the spurious argument that it would protect women’s health and stabilize incomes if there were fewer mouths to feed.

Poor Puerto Rican peasant women were encouraged to give birth in sanitary new US-built hospitals where doctors were under orders to sterilize mothers after two children by tying their tubes, usually without the mother’s being aware of what was being done. By 1965, Puerto Rico was a world leader in at least one category. It had the highest percentage of sterilized women in the world. India lagged badly in comparison, with a mere 3%. It made a difference when the Rockefeller family could control the process directly without government meddling.

John D. III’s forced sterilization was no radical departure for the family. The Rockefellers had long regarded Puerto Rico as a convenient human laboratory. In 1931, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, later renamed the Rockefeller University, financed the cancer experiments of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads in Puerto Rico.

Rhoads was no ordinary scientist. It later came out that Rhoads had deliberately infected his subjects with cancer cells to see what would happen. Eight of his subjects died.  The Rockefeller Institute pathologist, Rhoads, complained in November 1931, ‘Porto Ricans are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8…’ Initially written in a confidential letter to a fellow researcher, Rhoads’s boast of killing Puerto Ricans appeared in Time magazine in February 1932 after Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, gained possession of the letter and publicized its contents

Rather than being tried for murder, the Rockefeller Institute scientist was asked to establish the US Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah and also Panama, and was later named to the US Atomic Energy Commission, where radiation experiments were secretly conducted on prisoners, hospital patients and US soldiers.[1]

In 1961, more than a decade before his policies were to become enshrined in NSSM 200, JDR III gave the Second McDougall Lecture to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Rockefeller told the listeners, ‘To my mind, population growth is second only to control of atomic weapons as the paramount problem of the day.’ He spoke of a ‘cold inevitability, a certainty that is mathematical, that gives the problems posed by too-rapid population growth a somber and chilling caste indeed.’ The ‘grim fact’ of population growth, he warned, ‘cuts across all the basic needs of mankind and…frustrates man’s achievement of his higher needs.’[2]

JDR III grew up surrounded by eugenicists and race theorists, Malthusians, at the Rockefeller Foundation such as Frederick Osborn, Henry Fairchild and Alan Gregg. For John D. III, it seemed only natural that he and others of his ‘class’ should decide which elements of the human species survived, in order that they could have ‘life as we want it to be.’ They saw it as being a bit like culling herds of sheep for the best of breed.

The logic of human life for the family was simple: supply and demand. As Jameson Taylor expressed it,

For most Americans and for most of the world, the idea that the leading policy circles of the United States Government, acting on the behest of some of its wealthiest families and most influential universities, would deliberately promote the mass covert sterilization of entire population groups was too far-fetched to accept.

Few realized that individuals with names such as Rockefeller, Harriman, banker J.P. Morgan Jr., Mary Duke Biddle of the tobacco family, Cleveland Dodge, John Harvey Kellogg from the breakfast cereal fortune, Clarence Gamble of Proctor & Gamble, that all were quietly funding eugenics, most as members of the American Eugenics Society, and financing experiments in forced sterilization of ‘inferior people’ and various forms of population control as early as World War I. Their counterparts in the English Eugenics Society at the time included a British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, economist John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Lord Balfour and Julian Huxley, who went on to be the first head of UNESCO after the war.

Most ordinary citizens simply didn’t appreciate who was running such things, and how they really viewed the majority of mankind behind all their noble rhetoric of democracy and development.

The population and related food policies of the US Government of the early 1970’s emanated from the halls of the Rockefeller Foundation, from their Population Council and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and from a handful of similarly well-endowed private foundations, such as the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. The true history of those organizations was carefully buried behind a façade of philanthropy. In reality, these tax-exempt foundations served as vehicles for the advancement and domination of powerful elite families at the expense of the welfare of most American citizens and of most of mankind.

One man served as head of the Medical Division of the Rockefeller Foundation for more than 34 years. His name was Alan Gregg. An all-but unknown person to the outside world, it is likely that, in his 34 years at the Medical Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, Gregg wielded more influence over life and death on the planet than Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler combined. He was Vice President of the Foundation on his retirement in 1956, and his ideology pervaded the institute decades after. It was an ideology of Malthusian brutality and racist finality.

Gregg once wrote in an article for a scientific journal on population, ‘There is an alarming parallel between the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the growth of human population in the earth ecological economy.’ Gregg then asserted that ‘cancerous growths demand food, but so far as I know, they have never been cured by getting it…The analogies can be found in our plundered planet.’

This was a formulation which translated as, ‘people pollute, so eliminate pollution by eliminating people…’ Gregg then went on, in a paper commissioned by one of the most eminent scientific journals in the US, to observe, ‘how nearly the slums of our great cities resemble the necrosis of tumors.’ And this ‘raised the whimsical query: Which is the more offensive to decency and beauty, slums or the fetid detritus of a growing tumor?’

The role of the Rockefeller Foundation in US and global population policy was not accidental, nor was it a minor aspect of the mission of the institution. It was at the very heart of it. This population policy role held the key to understanding the later engagement of the Foundation in the revolution in biotechnology and plant genetics.

In 1913, the founder of the Standard Oil trust, John D. Rockefeller Sr., was advised to hide his wealth behind a tax-exempt foundation. That year Congress had passed the first federal income tax, and the Rockefeller family and other wealthy Americans such as steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, were enraged at what they deemed illegal theft of justly-earned gains. As Carnegie put it at the time, ‘Wealth passing through the hands of the few can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race (sic) than if distributed in small sums to the people themselves.’ [4] In so many words, money should only belong to the very wealthy, who know best how to use it.

The newly-established Rockefeller Foundation’s stated mission was, ‘to promote the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world.’ It went without saying that the foundation alone, and the Rockefeller family, would decide just what ‘promoting the wellbeing of mankind’ entailed.

From its inception, the Rockefeller Foundation was focused on culling the herd, or systematically reducing populations of ‘inferior’ breeds. One of the first Rockefeller Foundation grants was to the Social Science Research Council for study of birth control techniques in 1923. In 1936, the foundation created and endowed the first Office of Population Research at Princeton University, headed by Eugenics Society member Frank Notestein, to study the political aspects of population change.

From its founding onwards, the philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation was to deal with ‘causes rather than symptoms.’ Clearly one of the ‘causes’ of world problems, as the family saw it, was the persistent tendency of the human species, at least the less wealthy portion of it, to reproduce and multiply itself. An increasing number of people in the world meant a greater potential to cause trouble and to demand a bigger slice of the Big Pie of Life, which the Rockefellers and their wealthy friends regarded exclusively as their ‘God-given’ right.

Back in 1894, when the family’s oil fortune was in its early days, JDR III’s father, John D., Junior, wrote an essay as a student at Brown University entitled, ‘The Dangers to America Arising from Unrestricted Immigration.’ In it he wrote about immigrants, then mostly from Italy, Ireland and the rest of Europe, calling them, ‘the scum of foreign cities, the vagabond, the tramp, the pauper, and the indolent…ignorant and hardly better than beasts.’ [5]

One of the first philanthropic projects undertaken by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920’s was to fund the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York where by 1917, John D. Rockefeller had become the office’s second largest supporter after the Harriman family.

Eugenics was a pseudo-science. The word was first coined in England in 1883 by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, and it was founded on Darwin’s 1859 work, the Origin of Species. Darwin had imposed what he termed, ‘the application of the theories of Malthus to the entire vegetable and animal kingdom.’ Malthus, who shortly before his death had repudiated his own theory of population, asserted in his 1798 tract, ‘Essay on the Principles of Population,’ that populations tend to expand geometrically while food supply grew only arithmetically, leading to periodic famine and death to eliminate the ‘surplus’ populations..

During the latter 19^th Century, an explosion of population in Europe and North America was accompanied, thanks to the application of science and technological improvements, by rising living standards and increased food supply, thus discrediting Malthusianism as a serious science. However, by the 1920’s, Rockefeller, Carnegie and other vastly wealthy Americans embraced a Malthusian notion of what came to be called, ‘social Darwinism,’ which justified their accumulation of vast fortunes with the argument that it was a kind of divine proof of their superior species’ survival traits over less fortunate mortals.

A related major Rockefeller Foundation project in the 1920’s was the financing of Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood Federation of America, initially known as the American Birth Control League, a racist association promoting eugenics in the form of population control and forced sterilization, under the guise of rational ‘family planning.’ She wrote: “Birth control is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator … the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’ is admittedly the greatest present menace to

civilization …’

Sanger, portrayed as a selfless woman of charity, was in reality a committed eugenicist, an outright race supremacist, who remained a Rockefeller family intimate until her death. She railed against ‘inferior classes’ and was obsessed with ‘how to limit and discourage the over-fertility (sic) of the mentally and physically defective.’ [6]

As it was defined by its sponsors, eugenics was the study of improving the ‘quality’ of the human species, while reducing the quantity of ‘inferior beings,’ or as Sanger put it, the ‘qualitative factor over the quantitative factor…in dealing with the great masses of humanity.’ The title page of  the Eugenics Review, the journal of the Eugenics Education Society, carried the original definition of British eugenics founder, Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, who defined eugenics as ‘the science of improvement of the human race germ plasm through better breeding. Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally.’

In her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger wrote, ‘Birth control…is really the greatest and most truly eugenic program.’ Sanger was appreciated in international circles for her population control zeal. In 1933, the head of the Nazi Physicians’ Association, Reichsärzteführer, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, praised Sanger for her stringent racial policies asking fellow Germans to follow her model.

Contrary to popular belief, the idea of a Nordic master race was not solely a Nazi Germany fantasy. It had its early roots in the United States of America going back to the early years of the 20^th Century.

The President of the prestigious Stanford University in California, David Starr Jordan, promoted the idea of ‘race and blood’ in his 1902 book, ‘Blood of a Nation.’ He claimed that poverty was an inherited genetic trait, as was talent. Education had no influence; you either ‘had it’ or you didn’t.

Two years later, in 1904 Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Institute had founded the major laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, the Eugenics Record Office on wealthy Long Island, outside New York City, where millions of index cards on the bloodlines of ordinary Americans were gathered, to plan the possible removal of entire bloodlines deemed inferior. The land for the institute was donated by railroad magnate, E. H. Harriman, a firm supporter of eugenics. This was eugenics, American elite style. Naturally, if the ideal was tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic types, that meant dark-skinned Asians, Indians, blacks, Hispanics and others, including the sick and retarded, were deemed inferior to the eugenics goal of ‘best of breed.’ [7]

The aim of the index card project was to map the inferior bloodlines and subject them to lifelong segregation and sterilization to ‘kill their bloodlines.’ The sponsors were out to eliminate those they deemed ‘unfit.’ As early as 1911, Carnegie was funding an American Breeder’s Association study on the ‘Best Practical Means for Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.’ [8]

One of the largest and most significant financial contributors for various eugenics projects soon became the Rockefeller Foundation. It poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into various eugenics and population projects, from the American Eugenics Society to Cold Spring Harbor, to the American Breeder’s Association.[9]

One of the more prominent members of the American Eugenics Society in the early 1920’s was Dr. Paul Bowman Popenoe, a US Army venereal disease specialist from World War I, who wrote a textbook entitled, ‘Applied Eugenics.’ In sum, Popenoe said, ‘The first method which presents itself is execution … Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.’ endnote He went on to eloquently advocate the ‘destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria or by bodily deficiency.’ endnote In his book, Popenoe spoke of estimated five million Americans who would, at one point or another, end up in mental hospitals, and of ‘five million more who are so deficient intellectually with less than 70% average intelligence, as to be in many cases, liabilities rather than assets to the race.’ [10] The book was aimed at a select, elite readership. It was an example of what the eugenics movement termed ‘negative eugenics’—the systematic elimination of ‘inferior’ beings, whether mentally inferior, physically handicapped or racially non-white.

Popenoe’s radical approach was a bit too controversial for some, but by 1927, in Buck vs. Bell, the US Supreme Court, in a decision by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ruled that the forced sterilization program of the State of Virginia was Constitutional. In his written decision, Holmes wrote, ‘It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Holmes, one of the most influential Supreme Court justices, was also one of its most outspoken racists. In 1922, the ageing Holmes wrote to British economist and Labour Partyleading figure, Harold J. Laski, ‘As I have said, no doubt often, it seems to me that all society rests on the death of men. If you don’t kill ‘em one way you kill ‘em another—or prevent their being born. Is not the present time an illustration of Malthus?’ The statement could have served as the guiding slogan of the Rockefeller Foundation eugenics efforts.  [11]

This 1927 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates for thousands of American citizens to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. One Illinois mental hospital in Lincoln fed new patients milk from known tubercular cows, in the conviction that a genetically strong human specimen would be immune.[12] The State of California was the eugenics model state. Under its sweeping eugenics law, passed in 1909, all feebleminded or other mental patients were sterilized before discharge, and any criminal found guilty of any crime three times could be sterilized at the discretion of a consulting physician. California sterilized some 9,782 individuals, mostly women classified as ‘bad girls,’ many of whom had been forced into prostitution.[13]

Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’ words in their own defense. In the postwar world, not surprisingly, it was to no avail. The Rockefeller propaganda machine buried the reference; the victors defined the terms of peace and the truth of war.

The Rockefeller enthusiasm for eugenics during the 1920’s did not stop at America’s own shores. Rockefeller Foundation money played an instrumental role in financing German eugenics during the 1920’s.  From 1922 to 1926, the Rockefeller Foundation donated through its Paris office a staggering $410,000 to a total of hundreds of German eugenics researchers. In 1926, it awarded an impressive $250,000 for the creation of the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. That was the equivalent of some $26 millions in 2004 dollars, a sum especially unheard of in a Germany devastated by Weimar hyperinflation and economic depression. During the 1920’s, Rockefeller Foundation money dominated and steered German eugenics research.[14]

As American researcher Edwin Black and others later documented, the leading psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at that time was Ernst Rüdin, a man who went on to a stellar career as the architect of Adolf Hitler’s systematic program of medical eugenics. The Rockefeller-financed Rüdin was named President of the world Eugenics Federation in 1932. Their platform was openly advocating the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a ‘public burden.’

The Rockefeller Foundation largesse for German research was apparently unbounded in those days. In 1929, the year of the great Wall Street crash and extreme German economic crisis, Rockefeller gave a grant of $310,000 to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, one of several subsequent Rockefeller grants.

The multi-talented Rüdin was also head of brain research at that institute, where was employed Hermann J. Muller, an American eugenicist also funded with Rockefeller money. Later it was revealed that the institute received ‘brains in batches of 150-200’ from victims of the Nazi euthanasia program in Brandenburg. The brain research was directed towards the Nazi experiments on Jews, gypsies, the mentally handicapped and other ‘defectives.’ In 1931, the Rockefeller Foundation approved a further ten-year grant of a sizeable $89,000 to Rüdin’s Institute for Psychiatry to research links between blood, neurology and mental illness. Rockefeller money was funding eugenics in its purest form.[15]

Rüdin also led the Nazi program of forced eugenic sterilization, and was a prime architect of the 1933 Nazi Sterilization Law. Rudin and his staff, as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts, chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the sterilization law. Described as an ‘American Model’ law, it was adopted in July 1933 and proudly printed in the September 1933 Eugenical News (USA), with Hitler’s signature.  Rüdin called for sterilizing all members of an unfit individual’s extended family. Rüdin was twice honoured by  Adolf Hitler for his contribution to German eugenics and racial cleansing. Under his Sterilization Law, some 400,000 Germans were diagnosed as manic-depressive or schizophrenic and forcibly sterilized, and thousands of handicapped children were simply killed. Declaring racial hygiene a ‘spiritual movement,’ Rüdin and his associates found a willing collaborator in Adolf Hitler. ‘Only through [the Führer] did our dream of over thirty years, that of applying racial hygiene to society, become a reality,’ Rudin said.[16]

Hitler personally was a great enthusiast of American eugenics, praising US eugenics efforts in 1924 in his Mein Kampf. He wrote, ‘There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception of immigration are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.’[17] A few years later, Hitler wrote the American eugenicist Madison Grant to personally praise his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race. In it Grant had written among other things that America had been ‘infested by a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races…’ Grant advocated as a eugenic remedy ‘a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures (sic).’[18]  Hitler clearly recognized a kindred soul in Grant, a co-founder of the American Eugenics Society.

By 1940, thousands of Germans from old age homes and mental institutions had been systematically gassed, as had been advocated twenty years earlier in the United States by Popenoe, if with limited success. In 1940, just back from a tour of the German eugenics institutes, Leon Whitney, Executive Secretary of the Rockefeller-funded American Eugenics Society, declared of the Nazi experiments, ‘While we were pussy-footing around…the Germans were calling a spade a spade.’[19]

In May 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation had sent a telegram to its Paris office, which quietly funnelled the US Rockefeller funds into Germany. The telegram read: ‘JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE: NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.’ [20]Endnote O. That was one year before Hitler became Chancellor. The ‘KWG’ was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. The germ-plasm research was to continue well into the Third Reich, financed with Rockefeller Foundation money until at least 1939.[21]

The head of the German eugenics institute in Berlin was Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. His research on twins had long been a dream of American eugenics advocates in order to advance their theories of heredity. In 1942, in the German Nazi eugenics journal Der Erbarzt which he edited, von Verschuer advocated a ‘total solution to the Jewish problem.’ In 1936, still receiving Rockefeller funds, Verschuer was called to Frankfurt to head a newly established Institute of Genetics and Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt. The largest of its kind, the Frankfurt institute was responsible for the compulsory medical curriculum on eugenics and racial hygiene.[22]

Von Verschuer’s long-time assistant was Dr. Josef Mengele, who headed human experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp after May 1943. Von Verschuer was delighted when Mengele, who won the name, ‘The Angel of Death’ for his deadly experiments on human prisoners, was put in Auschwitz. Now their ‘scientific’ research could continue uninhibited. He wrote at the time to the German Research Society that, ‘My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer (captain) and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer (Himmler).’ [23]

Never one to place principle before pragmatism, the Rockefeller Foundation ceased its funding of most Nazi eugenics, but not until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. By that time, what had been established with their money over a period of more than 15 years was consolidated. Alan Gregg, the Foundation’s Director of the Medical Division, was the man who was most intimately involved in the Nazi funding of eugenics at every step of the way. His division was responsible for funding the various Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes.

Another pivotal figure was Raymond B. Fosdick, who became President of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1936, and was by informed accounts, the leading figure in the American Eugenics Society. Fosdick had earlier been general counsel to Sanger’s American Birth Control League, and was the person who in 1924 first convinced John D. Rockefeller Jr. of the importance of birth control and eugenics. He was the brother of prominent eugenics advocate, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Rockefellers’ pastor for whom Rockefeller built the Riverside Church in the mid-1920’s. Raymond Fosdick had worked for the Rockefeller family since 1913. He had been sent to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as part of Col. Edward Mandell House’s group, ‘The Inquiry,’ the secret team which ran the American negotiators at Versailles. After Versailles Fosdick went on to become John D. Rockefeller’s personal attorney and ran the Rockefeller Foundation for over three decades.[24] Endnote In 1924, Fosdick had written a personal letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr., urging foundation funding for Margaret Sanger’s eugenics work in birth control, stating, ‘I believe that the problem of population constitutes one of the great perils of the future and if something is not done along the lines these people are suggesting, we shall hand down to our children a world in which the scramble for food and the means of subsistence will be far more bitter than anything at present.’ [25]

Leaving Mengele holding the proverbial bag, Verschuer fled Berlin before the end of the war, and avoided a Nuremburg trial. By 1946, he was writing to his old friend, the US Army eugenicist, Paul Popenoe, in California, who had mailed cocoa and coffee to Verschuer back in postwar Germany. Old Nazi friends managed to whitewash Verschuer’s Auschwitz past, for which all records had been conveniently destroyed.

In 1949, the Auschwitz doctor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was named Corresponding Member of the American Society of Human Genetics, a new organization founded in 1948 by leading eugenicists hiding under the banner of the less-disgraced name, genetics. The first president of the American Society of Human Genetics was Hermann Josef Muller, a Rockefeller University Fellow who had worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in 1932. [26]

Von Verschuer got his membership in the American Society of Human Genetics from another German, an old eugenics colleague, Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who had worked with Ernst Rüdin on ‘genetic psychiatry.’ Part of von Verschuer’s re-packaged identity was a position he got after the war with the newly-created Bureau of Human Heredity in Copenhagen. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the money to found the new Danish office where the same eugenics activities could be more quietly advanced. The Bureau of Human Heredity, received a letter from von Verschuer mentioning that he had the results of Auschwitz ‘research’ moved to Copenhagen in 1947, to the care of Danish Institute Director, Tage Kemp, also a member of the American Eugenics Society. Kemp had worked on eugenics with the Rockefeller Foundation since they financed his 1932 research stay at Cold Springs Harbor Eugenics Record Office. Kemp’s Institute hosted the first International Congress in Human Genetics after the war in 1956.[27]

Eugenics was the foundation of John D. Rockefeller III’s obsession with overpopulation. Given his enormous influence and the huge financial muscle of the Rockefeller Foundation to fund scientific research, it was an obsession which would have untold consequences for generations after his death.

John D. III was nurtured on the grim pseudo-science of Malthus and fears of population growth. When he was a senior at Princeton University in 1928, his father, John D. Rockefeller Jr. named his son to the board of the family’s Bureau of Social Hygiene, a birth control organization. JDR III’s Princeton mentor, economics professor, Frank Fetter, was a member of the American Eugenics Society. Fetter taught that ‘democracy was increasing the mediocre and reducing the excellent strains of stock…’ [28]

In 1931, JDR III joined the board of the Rockefeller Foundation itself. There, eugenicists like Raymond Fosdick and Frederick Osborn, founding members of the American Eugenics Society, fostered JDR III’s interest in population control. Osborn was president of the American Eugenics Society in 1946, and was also president of the racist Pioneer Fund. With John D Rockefeller III he would co-found the Rockefeller Population Council. During the Third Reich, Osborn had expressed his early support for German sterilization efforts. In 1937 Frederick Osborn personally praised the Nazi eugenic program as the ‘most important experiment which has ever been tried.’ In 1938 he lamented the fact that the public opposed ‘the excellent sterilization program in Germany because of its Nazi origin.’ By 1934, a year after Hitler came to power in Germany, JDR III wrote his father that he wanted to devote his energies to the population problem. [29]

In 1952, JDR III was ready to make his life’s major work. With $1,400,000 of his own funds in addition to Rockefeller Foundation money, he founded the Population Council in New York, to promote studies on the dangers of ‘over-population’ and related issues. Many of the leading American eugenicists had become pessimistic that their decades of efforts of forced sterilization of mental and other deficient people were making a difference in the quality of the leading genetic stock. With population control, Rockefeller and others in the establishment believed they had finally found the answer to mass, efficient and effective negative eugenics.

John Foster Dulles, then chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and later Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, played a key role in establishing John D. III’s new Population Council along with Frederick Osborn, first director of the Council. Osborn remained a central figure at the Population Council until the late 1960’s.

The founding meeting of the Population Council, held in the Rockefeller family’s Williamsburg Virginia village, was attended as well by Detlev W. Bronk, then president of both the Rockefeller Institute and the National Academy of Sciences. John D. Rockefeller III arranged for the conference to be sponsored under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences to give it a quasi-scientific aura. The head of the Academy, Dr. Detlev Bronk, was sympathetic to the agenda of population control. Being promoted was the same unvarnished eugenics racial ideology, veiled under the guise of world hunger and population problems.

In addition, a representative from the Carnegie Institution, Warren S. Thompson, director of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, and Thomas Parran, US Surgeon General during the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, were there as well. Pascal K. Whelpton from the Population Division at the United Nations came, and so did two men who ran the UN Population Division in later years, Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis, both as well, members of the American Eugenics Society. [30]

Over the following 25 years, the Rockefeller Population Council would spend a staggering $173 millions on population reduction globally, establishing itself as by far the most influential organization to promote the eugenics agenda in the world. Among the Council’s favourite projects were funding research for Norplant, a contraceptive steroid implanted under the skin to provide contraception for several years, the IUD contraceptive device, and the French abortion pill, RU-486. Sheldon J. Segal, led the work.[31]

In 1952, when he decided to create the Population Council, Rockefeller scrupulously avoided using the term ‘eugenics.’ Population control and family planning were to be the new terms of reference for what was the same policy after 1952, deploying vastly enlarged international resources. The old talk of racial purity and elimination of inferiors was altered. The eugenics leopard, however, did not change its spots after the war. It became far more deadly under John D.’s Population Council. At the time of the founding of Rockefeller’s Population Council, the American Eugenics Society made a little-publicized move of its headquarters from Yale University directly into the offices of the Population Council in the Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Rockefeller shrewdly repackaged his discredited eugenics race and class ideology as ‘population control.’ Instead of focussing on domestic issues such as American poor immigrants or the mentally challenged, he turned his sights on the entire developing world, a vast sea of humanity which stood between the Rockefeller family and the realization of their ambitious postwar designs for a new American Century.

The strategists around the Rockefeller eugenics organizations explicitly set out to pursue the same agenda as essentially Von Verschuer and the Nazi eugenics crowd had, but under the deliberate strategy of what they termed ‘crypto-genetics.’ The key American proponent of hiding the eugenics nature of their work under the name ‘genetics’ and ‘population control’ was Rockefeller’s head of the Population Council, Frederick Osborn. Osborn pointed to studies indicating that, with the proper approach, ‘less intelligent’ women can be convinced to reduce their births voluntarily. ‘A reduction of births at this level would be an important contribution to reducing the frequency of genes which make for mental defect.’ He asserted that birth control for the poor would help improve the population ‘biologically.’ And for families which experience chronic unemployment, Osborn said ‘Such couples should not be denied the opportunity to use new methods of contraception that are available to better-off families. A reduction in the number of their unwanted children would further both the social and biological improvement of the population.’ Referring to racial minorities, he explicitly called for ‘making available the new forms of contraception to the great number of people at the lower economic and educational levels.’

‘The most urgent eugenic policy at this time,’ Osborn insisted, was ‘to see that birth control is made equally available to all individuals in every class of society, because there is new evidence that the more successful or high IQ individuals within each group may soon be having more children than the less intelligent individuals within the group . . . these trends are favorable to genetic improvement.’ He stressed that the reason for making birth control ‘equally available’ should be disguised: ‘Measures for improving the hereditary base of intelligence and character are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics . . . Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.’ [32]

During McCarthy’s Red Scare campaigns in the 1950’s United States, countless innocent intellectuals had their careers ruined by being publicly accused of being ‘crypto-communists,’ a term denoting one who deeply hides his communist beliefs while working to subvert the American system. In the late 1950’s, Dr. Carlos P. Blacker, a past Chairman of the English Eugenics Society, proposed that, ‘The Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is, by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful in the US Eugenics Society.’[33] Blacker was close friends with the Population Council’s Frederick Osborn.

In 1960, the English Eugenics Society agreed to Blacker’s proposal, and adopted a resolution stating, ‘The Society’s activities in crypto-eugenics should be pursued vigorously, and specifically that the Society should increase its monetary support of the Family Planning Association (the English branch of Sanger’s Planned Parenthood) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and should make contact with the Society for the Study of Human Biology…’[34]

The architect of the American reshaping of the elitist eugenics agenda into the new garment of population control was Rockefeller’s friend and employee, Frederick Osborn, first President of John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council, and a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, who was its President until he took the post as head of the Population Council in 1952.

A significant problem after the Second World War was that the very name eugenics had been thoroughly associated in the public mind with Nazi racist extermination programs, the definition of a Master Race and other human atrocities. As Osborn formulated the problem in a 1956 article in Eugenics Review, ‘The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters…We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong? We have all but killed the eugenic movement.’ [35]

Osborn had a ready answer: people for some reason refused to accept that they were ‘second rate’ compared to Osborn, Rockefeller, Sanger and their ‘superior class.’ As Osborn put it, ‘We have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in human nature. People are simply not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character was formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation…They won’t accept the idea that they are in general second rate…’[36]

Osborn proposed a change in packaging. Eugenics was to be mass-marketed under a new guise. Instead of talking about eliminating ‘inferior’ people through forced sterilization or birth control, the word would be ‘free choice’ of family size and quality. As early as 1952 when he joined with John D Rockefeller III in the Population Council, Osborn saw the huge potential of contraception and mass education for eugenics, albeit masquerading as free choice. One of his first projects was contributing the funds of his Population Council to research in a new ‘contraception pill.’[37]

‘Foreshadowing the future work of the Population Council and the Rockefeller Foundation in population control,’ Osborn wrote, again in his Eugenics Review, ‘there is certainly a possibility that… pressures can be given a better direction (for birth control) and can be brought to bear on a majority of the population instead of a minority.’ And when such pressures are brought to bear, Osborn added, individuals will believe they are choosing on their own not to have children, ‘if family planning has spread to all members of the population and means of effective contraception are readily available.’ He wrote that some 13 years before the widespread introduction of the oral birth-control pill.[38]

Osborn went on to call for a system of what he termed, ‘unconscious voluntary selection.’ Ordinary people would be led down the path of eugenics and race culling without even being aware where they were going or what they were doing. Osborn argued that the way to convince people to exercise the ‘voluntary’ choice, would be to appeal to the idea of ‘wanted children.’ He said, ‘Let’s base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care.’ In this way, he argued, the eugenics movement ‘will move at last towards the high goal which Galton set for it,’ namely creation of the master race, and reduction of inferior races. [39]

Publicly, Osborn appeared to purge eugenics in the postwar era of earlier racism. In reality he applied the racism far more efficiently to hundreds of millions of darker-skinned citizens of the Third World. Osborn also secretly held the office of President of the infamous white-supremacist Pioneer Fund from 1947-1956. Among other projects the Pioneer Fund ‘supported highly controversial research by a dozen scientists who believe that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites,’ according to a December 11, 1977 article in the New York Times. [40]Endnote Among recipients of Pioneer Fund money was Stanford University Nobel laureate, William Shockley, who advocated forced sterilization of all persons with an IQ below 100. He got more than $1 million in research funds from Osborn’s Pioneer Fund. [41]

When Osborn wrote those words advocating ‘unconscious voluntary selection,’ he was still Secretary of the American Eugenics Society and President of John D. Rockefeller III’s newly-founded Population Council. JDR III was chairman and Princeton eugenicist, Frank Notestein, was board member, and later became President of Rockefeller’s Council.

Member of the Rockefeller Foundation board and close family friend, Frederick Osborn was an unfettered enthusiast of the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for Nazi eugenics experiments. Scion of a wealthy American railroad family, graduated in 1910 from Princeton University, which would later be the school of John D. III, Osborn was a part of the wealthy American upper class. Under the banner of philanthropy, Osborn would pursue policies designed to preserve the hegemony and control of society by his wealthy associates.

In 1937, Osborn had praised the Nazi eugenics program as the ‘most important experiment that has ever been tried.’[42] Endnote II  One year later, Osborn bemoaned the fact that the general public seemed opposed to ‘the  excellent sterilization program in Germany because of its Nazi origin.’ [43] Osborn and the Rockefeller Foundation knew well what their money was going toward in Third Reich Germany, even though they later piously disavowed this knowledge.

As late as 1946, after the war and the ghastly revelations of the human experiments in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Osborn, then President of the American Eugenics Society, published, in his Eugenics News magazine, the so-called Geneticists’ Manifesto entitled, ‘Genetically Improving the World Population.’

In 1968, Osborn published his book, The Future of Human Heredity: An Introduction to Eugenics in Modern Society.  He had lost his postwar inhibitions about calling his work what it was: eugenics. At that time his nominal boss and protégé in population eugenics, Population Council chairman, John D. Rockefeller III, was preparing himself to head a Presidential commission on the population problem.

In his book, Osborn cited studies showing that less intelligent women could be persuaded to reduce their births voluntarily: ‘A reduction of births at this level would be an important contribution to reducing the frequency of genes which make for mental defect.’ Osborn added, ‘The most urgent eugenic policy at this time is to see that birth control is made equally available to all individuals in every class of society.’ He also noted that, ‘Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.’[44] In short, they would be most likely attained by using crypto-eugenics tactics. In a speech to the annual meeting of the American Eugenics Society in 1959, Osborn stated, ‘With the close of World War II, genetics had made great advances and a real science of human genetics was coming into being…Eugenics is at last taking a practical and effective form.’[45] Genetics was the new name for eugenics.

Forerunning the later human cloning debate and the widely publicized sheep clone, Dolly, Osborn doled out strong praise for Hermann J. Muller, Ernst Rüdin’s colleague in Germany, who had received Rockefeller funds during the 1930’s for eugenics research. Quoting Muller, Osborn wrote, ‘It would in the end be far easier and more sensible to manufacture a complete new man de novo, out of appropriately chosen raw materials, than to try to refashion into human form those pitiful relics which remained.’[46] Osborn also praised Muller’s proposal to develop sperm banks to ‘make available the sperm of highly qualified donors.’ The idea for a gene revolution was being debated back then.

Rockefeller’s Population Council gave grants to leading universities including Princeton’s Office of Population headed by Rockefeller eugenicist, Frank Notestein, a long-time friend of Osborn, who in 1959 became President of the Rockefeller Population Council in order to promote a pseudo-science called demography. Its task was to project horrifying statistics of a world overrun with darker-skinned peoples, to prepare the ground for acceptance of international birth control programs. The Ford Foundation soon joined in funding the various Population Council studies, lending them an aura of academic respectability and above all, money. The Rockefeller Population Council grants were precisely targeted at creating a new cultural view about growing human population through their funding of demographic research such as that of Princeton’s Notestein. According to John Sharpless who studied the history of population control using the Rockefeller Foundation archives, in the 1950’s:

‘the non-profit sector was where the debate over the population problem actually played itself out, ultimately defining how the policy issue would be viewed in the period which followed.[emphasis added]…[the Population Council made sure that] … research would take place in both the social as well as the biological sciences … this effort was not simply an exercise in pure science but one which aimed specifically at policy … not only the legitimating of the ‘science’ of demography but also the acceptance of demography as a policy science … they were slowly encouraging an evolution in thinking among ‘population specialists’ to view intervention in demographic processes (particularly fertility) as not only appropriate but necessary.’[47]

In 1952, the same year that John D. founded the Population Council with Osborn at its head, Margaret Sanger created, thanks to Rockefeller Foundation money, a global version of her American Planned Parenthood Federation called the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Sanger had first met JDR III in 1947. She had convinced him then of the urgency of promoting mass birth control.

Following the initial Rockefeller financing, her IPPF soon was backed by a corporate board which included DuPont, US Sugar, David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, Newmont Mining Co., International Nickel, RCA, Gulf Oil and other prominent corporate members. The cream of America’s corporate and banking elite were quietly lining up behind Rockefeller’s vision of population control on a global scale.

Less than a decade after the revelations of eugenics and Auschwitz, population control was again becoming fashionable in certain American elite circles of the 1950’s. It was a testimony to the power of the US establishment to mould public opinion and encourage fears of exploding populations of poor, hungry peasants around the world.

In 1960, Rockefeller friend and wealthy patron of population control, Hugh Moore, founded the World Population Emergency Campaign with the help of funds from DuPont, which would later become a major promoter of the gene revolution in agriculture. Eugene R. Black, former senior executive of David Rockefeller’s Chase National Bank, ran, as president of the World Bank, a campaign which had as its main aim to create and reinforce First World fears of a population explosion in Third World countries.

The 1958 Castro revolution in Cuba provided additional impetus to instigating these fears among unwitting Americans. The argument promoted in the American mass media by circles around the Population Council was simple and effective: over-population in poor developing countries leads to hunger and more poverty, which is the fertile breeding ground for communist revolution.

John D. III’s brother, Laurance Rockefeller, established and ran the Conservation Foundation in 1958 to complement John D.’s Population Council. Both the Population Council and Conservation Foundation were united around the unspoken theme that natural resources must be conserved, but conserved from use by smaller businesses or individuals, in order that select global corporations should be able to claim them, thus establishing a kind of strategic denial policy masquerading as conservation.

The population control lobby which would later shape Kissinger’s NSSM 200 was consolidating around Rockefeller Foundation grants and individuals, preparing a global assault on ‘inferior peoples,’ under the name of choice, of family planning and of averting the danger of ‘over-population’ – a myth their think-tanks and publicity machines produced to convince ordinary citizens of the urgency of their goals.