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Memories
EUGENICS IN EUROPE BETWEEN THE TWO
WARS AND BEYOND: GYPSIES AND THE "SWISS" CASE
Ostracism against gypsies between the two wars did not only concern Germany
and the occupied Countries, particularly Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but also "neutral" Switzerland,
as is shown by an illuminating article by Laurence Jourdan, a journalist and
writer, the authoress of the reportage: "Operation Enfants de la grande route",
published in the French magazine "Point du jour".
In May 1999, the Swedish Parliament decided to pay compensation to the victims
of the forced sterilisation policy conducted in that country from 1934 to 1975.
Apart from the period between the two wars, in the whole of Europe, under the
pressure of a "new science", eugenics, and within the framework of a disturbing
nationalist fever, policies of elimination or control of "social deviants" and
foreigners were practiced. Nazi Germany took them to a paradoxical level, but
they were also carried out, under other forms, by the Swiss government against
gypsies. We have also had direct testimony of these "forgotten misdeeds" in
Italy.
"They took away my mother shortly after my birth (...) I passed the first six
months of my life in a paediatric centre for the mentally retarded. There I suffered
psychiatric torture for the first time for being a Jenische child (...) When
I first asked my tutor, Doctor Siegfried, who my parents were, he told me (...)
your mother was a whore, your father an anti-social element. And I lived with
this for ten years. Until I understood the meaning of those words: my parents
were gypsies." Today Mariella Mehr, a Jenische writer (a gypsy community), lives
in Italy. For over twenty five years she has been putting down on paper the history
of that Swiss community which was the victim, in the years between 1926 and 1972,
of the real persecution of gypsies, known as the "Enfants de la grand-route" (Main
Road Children) operation. Like many hundreds of other gypsy children, Mariella
was taken away from her parents by force. In her family, three generations have
been the victims of this forced sedenterisation policy: before her, her mother,
and then also her son. Seventy-two years later, only in 1998, the results of
a historical investigation have cleared away every "ambiguity" regarding this
operation. In June 1998 Ruth Dreyfuss, a federal councillor and today chairwoman
of the Swiss Confederation, publicly declared: "The conclusions of the historians
leave no room for doubt: The "Enfants de la grand-route" Aid Society is a tragic
example of the discrimination and persecution of a minority which does not share
the same lifestyle model of the majority".
Over almost half a century, in Switzerland, over six hundred Jenisches children
were forcibly removed from their families by the "Enfants de la grand-route" Aid
Society, which had a single mandate: to stamp out the nomadic lifestyle. With
this aim, the children of the itinerant population were systematically taken
away from their parents and placed with foster families or in orphanages, when
they were not imprisoned or interned in psychiatric hospitals.
Within the sphere of the programme that intended to form them according to
the models of settled society, these children were subjected to actions of
racism, humiliation and cruelty. This oppression, which was worse in German
Switzerland and in Ticino, was less harsh in French Switzerland.
The "Enfants de la grand-route" Aid Society was created in 1926 by the famous
and prestigious Swiss charity federation Pro-Juventute, which was entrusted
with the task of "protecting children in danger of being abandoned or of homelessness".
The founder and director of this organisation, Alfred Siegfried (1890-1972),
terrified the gypsy children so much that the Jenisches likened him to Hitler.
Doctor Siegfried had the unfailing collaboration of the police and public
authorities of the cantons and towns to hunt down the gypsies.
Relentlessly determined to "uproot the evil of the nomadic lifestyle from infancy,
by means of systematic and coherent educational measures", Siegfried was animated
by a visceral racism against the community of travellers, which he defined
as "inferior", "psychopaths", "deficient" or "mentally retarded". The scandal
at last exploded in 1972, thanks to the Swiss weekly Der schweizerische Beobachter.
One year later, the Pro Juventute was forced to proceed to close down the organisation.
Confronted with this black page in its history, in 1987 the Swiss Confederation
recognised its moral, political and financial responsibility for the operation.
However, it was not until 1996 that a historical-graphical investigation
was made on that period, carried out by three historians of the Beratungsstelle
ffr die Landgeschichte (The National Historic Consultancy Centre) on assignment
from the Federal Council, with the intention of defining "the objectives, the
structures, the funding and the activities of the Enfants de la grand-route
Aid Society", and "to show the role of the Confederation and that of the Pro
Juventute Foundation".
The results, made public in June 1998 in Berne, are blood chilling. Since
the 1920s the modern administrative Helvetian state, having decided to combat
all
forms of marginality, had passed the resolution to resort to coercive measures
to subjugate the citizens that did not conform to its ideals of order. Gypsies,
considered to be "social deviants", or even "good-for-nothings, sloppy and
mostly degenerates", were defined "congenital tramps" by the criminal anthropology
of the time. Their lifestyle therefore, incompatible with the moral principles
of the bourgeois society that saw "in the errant life the road towards crime",
had to be normalised.
The Jenisches, whose nomadic ways were strictly linked to their economic
activity, moved around with the whole family, and gave more importance to
the transmission
of skills than to their children's scholastic education. Their culture and
their lifestyle became the target of the authorities: "anyone who wants to
effectively combat the nomadic lifestyle must aim to break up the community
of the travellers and, however harsh it may seem, bring to an end the family
community, No other solution exists", wrote Dr. Alfred Siegfried. The "Enfants
de la grand-route" operation, theoretically included in the framework of a "policy
of social assistance and social security", was in fact nothing other than a
policy of forced sedentarisation, destined, as the historians have revealed,
to "free society from the evil represented by these families and groups of
nomads, considered as inferior".
Since 1930, the Federal Department of Justice and Police organised the children's
removal over the following decade, while the Ministry of the Interior supplied
funds to finance the operation. According to the authors of the historic
research, "Confederation
subsidies covered from 7% to 25% of the Aid Society's balance." And this financing
was renewed until 1967. The operation was also funded by various patrons and
associations, apart from the sale of stamps and propaganda brochures published
by the foundation.
At the request of the Aid Society, a census of the itinerant population was
taken. And Alfred Siegfried had himself nominated as the tutor of 300 children,
whose parents had been taken into custody. According to his thesis, the total
separation of the child from his family universe was the necessary condition
for the success of his educational aims.
He wrote, in fact: "Every time that some child who has not yet adapted or who
has an unstable character comes into contact with his own parents, because
of our kindness, or due to an unfortunate chance meeting, our work is completely
undone". Robert Huber, removed from his family at only eight months of age,
met his mother for the first time when he was twenty. "In front of me there
was a woman who was a complete stranger. And this woman, my mother, told me
that I had ten brothers and sisters (...) The family no longer existed. None
of us knew where the others were (...) The Jenisches had to do national service.
And when they were in the army, their children were taken away. When they returned,
they found their wives weeping. And if they protested, the authorities threatened
to shut them up in psychiatric hospitals or in prison".
As Swiss citizens, the Jenisches were subjected to all duties, but enjoyed
no rights. This policy was largely supported by the church. The children
had, above all, to assimilate the values of order and work in order to become
socially
acceptable, but the education they received was reduced to a minimum. For
boys the only prospect was an apprenticeship, while the girls were confined
to domestic
work. Their daily life was constituted of ill treatment, racism and at times
also sexual abuse. They were ordered about by the nuns of religious institutes,
on the farms (where they were used as cheap labour) and often in the prisons.
During a period of eighteen years, Mrs. Uschi Waser, chairwoman of the Naschet
Jenische ("Stand up, Jenische") Association, stayed in twenty-three different
institutions. Shocked by the opinions regarding her that her 3,500 page dossier
contains, she explains: "Siegfried maintained that all gypsies were evil, thieves
and liars (...), not because they had learned to lie, but because they were
born like that".
Several Swiss scientists shared these prejudices and they based their researches
on it, unscrupulously taking advantage of the "Enfants de la grand-route" operation
to architect theses on the "hereditary inferiority" of the nomads.
Forced sterilisation was also practiced, although not in a systematic manner.
In 1964, in his report on the activity of the Aid Society, Doctor Siegfried
wrote: "the nomadic tendency, like some dangerous diseases, is transmitted
above all by the women".
And here is the testimony of Mariella Mehr: "when they realised that, at three
years of age, I was refusing to speak, they decided to force me to speak. They
used a kind of bathtub. (...) The patient was made to lie in it, blocked up
to his head by a plank of wood, so that he couldn't get out. And there he remained
until the water was stone cold. You could stay there for 17, 18 or 20 hours." The
psychiatrist Joseph Jurger, for many years the director of the Walshaus clinic
in Coira, where many Jenisches were interned, was one of the first Swiss ideologists
of racial hygiene. According to the historians' report, in 1988 many of these
victims of science at the service of the policy, about one hundred, were still
interned in clinics and institutes.
As of 1897 all the documents relative to the action of the Aid Society have
been deposited in the Federal Archives in Berne. Only the Jenisches may have
access to these documents, which are the property of the Cantons and which
are subject to a period of debarment of one hundred years. At first, however,
fearing that these papers could eventually be used to their harm, they requested
them to be destroyed. Only later, when the curtain was raised at last on
the hypocrisy of Swiss neutrality, did they realise how important it was
to safeguard
their history. And they understood just how much the policy had undermined
the foundations of their culture as an itinerant people. According to estimates,
there were 35,000 Jenisches in Switzerland, most of whom became "cement gypsies",
that is, settled. Now only 5,000 continue to travel along the roads of the
Confederation.
The "Enfants de la grand-route" operation developed in a favourable European
context, in the period between the wars, when publications on "nomadic pathology" and
on gypsies' inborn criminality abounded. Europe, shaken by a disturbing nationalistic
fever, was anxious to restore the moral values of society and to preserve western
culture. The demographic situation worried the economists, and the high birth
rate of the working and "marginal" classes was perceived as a danger for the lite,
apart from a threat to the interests of capitalist society. In order to be
strong, the nation had to free itself of the dead weight of the "weak" people,
of the "social deviants" and foreigners, capable of slowing down economic growth.
Anti-natal eugenics appeared as a solution to this problem of "social hygiene".
Since 1908, the Briton Francis Galton, the inventor of this new science that
was given the name of eugenics, and founder (in 1907 together with Karl Pearson)
of the Galton Library for National Eugenics, argued in favour of "the creation
of eugenic societies throughout the world". This ideology proposed to improve
the human race by intervening on the genetic patrimony, and recommended birth
control by means of the sterilisation or castration of those who could "biologically
weaken" the race.
The Swiss scientists charged with uprooting nomadic lifestyle, to a large
extent inspired by national-socialist ideals, contributed to reinforcing
this policy,
which then led to the extermination of at least 500,000 gypsies during the
Second World War. "At the time there was close collaboration between scientists
and, in particular, between German and Swiss psychiatrists (...); and these
latter played an important role in the elaboration of the legislation of the
Third Reich (...)", confirmed the historian Walter Leimgruber, one of the authors
of the report. And it was in Switzerland, in the Vaud Canton, that in 1928
the first European law was passed on the sterilisation of the mentally ill.
The Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rfdin (1874-1952), the director of the Psychiatrische
Universitètsklinik of Basle, was one of the co-founders, and from 1933 also
the chairman, of the German Society for Racial Hygiene. Rfdin, who prescribed
the interment of alcoholics and the mentally ill, ended up by joining the national-socialist
party, and he was also one of the three authors of the law for the forced sterilisation
of the congenitally mentally retarded, manic depressives, schizophrenics, epileptics,
of those who were blind or deaf for hereditary causes, of serious alcoholics,
etc., which was passed in Germany in July 1933, and which led to the mutilation
of about 400,000 people. On the basis of this text, in September 1939, the
decision of euthanasia for the mentally ill was reached. In France, the surgeon
and biologist Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize Winner for medicine in 1912, worked
out a programme of "hereditary biological aristocracy through eugenics". The
author of "Man, the Stranger", wrote: "To foster an lite, eugenics is indispensable.
It is evident that a race must reproduce its better elements." Thanks to the
Vichy government, Carrel was authorised to create, in 1941, his French Foundation
for the study of human problems, the aim of which was "the study of the various
aspects and measures to safeguard, improve and develop the French population".
In the 1930s various European countries adopted eugenic laws.
For example, in 1934 provisions for compulsory sterilisation were issued
by Norway and Sweden, followed in 1935 by Denmark and Finland. On this basis,
the operation could be carried out on the mentally ill and retarded, epileptics
and carriers of hereditary diseases. Furthermore, specific laws of the Scandinavian
countries foresaw the possibility of carrying out these operations also on
parents considered as unsuitable to bring up their children. These measures
of mass sterilisation were practiced on 40,000 people in Norway and 6,000
in
Denmark.
In Sweden this policy was carried on even until 1975! In this country, the
first to equip itself (in 1921) with a state racial institute, the victims
of the sterilisation policy included in a social and racial hygiene policy,
were about 63,000. And 90% of the operations, prescribed by doctors, were
carried out on women, sometimes still adolescent.
In September 1997 a Government Inquiry Commission was set up, which in March
1998 proposed a compensation fund of 175,000 kroner (21,000 dollars) for
each of the victims; the relative white paper was approved by parliament
on the
19th May 1999. However, those still living who had the right to compensation,
whose number was estimated at between 6,000 and 15,000 had to demonstrate
that they had been sterilised against their will, for reasons linked to "psychiatric
disturbances", "epilepsy" or "other mental deficiencies": thus they had to
face another ordeal, after having had to overcome feelings of shame and humiliation
that had imprisoned them in silence for so many years
Bibliography
- Sylvia Thode- Studer: Les Tsiganes suisses, la marche vers la
reconnaissance, Ralits sociales, Lausanne, 1987.
- Alfred Siegfried. Kinder der Landstrasse, Pro-Juventute, Zurich,
1964.
- Jacques Testard: Le Dsir du gène, Flammarion, Paris, 1994.
- Alexis Carrel: cet inconnu, Editions Golias, Lyons, 1996.
- Stephen Bates: "Sweden pays for grim past", The Guardian, London,
6th March1999.
On line:
www.ilmanifesto.it/lemondediplo/index
http://www.unionromani.org
http://www.errc.org
http://www.le-pmsi.fr/n03/Edito.html
The sites: www.unionromani.org and www.errc.org are of
the two most important Rom organisations in the World, which together provide
the operators with very accurate documentation and an abundantly stocked
press room on events, news, facts, culture and discrimination against nomadic
populations.
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