Part 14/17:
Kats and Ellen Bogan's activity in Nazi camps echoed the same obsession with "efficiency" and "scientific" control that characterized the American eugenics movement. Prominent progressive thinkers and policymakers believed in applying engineering principles to society. This technocratic mindset eroded individual rights, justified inhumane treatment, and saw human life through a lens of genetic hierarchies.
The Nazis, with their extreme racial policies, took American eugenic ideas to deadly extremes. Yet American eugenicists—like Kats and Ellen Bogan—had already laid much of the intellectual groundwork, importing their ideas to Germany and normalizing sterilization policies and racial science.