The British Royal Family: Gunther von Reibnitz and other subjects

 

Günther von Reibnitz, father of Princess Michael of Kent, was a German military officer and member of the SS involved in the Lebensborn programme created to 'mass produce Aryan children for Das Dritte Reich. 

So you get the idea of how complex things are. The Eugenics programme was born in Britain. In 1859, Charles Darwin published the book Origin of Species which talks about evolution by natural selection about the survival of the fittest. In 1871, Charles Darwin wrote: "We civilised men... do our outmoust to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick.. Thus the weak members of society propagate their kind."

The term Eugenics was the idea of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who in 1883 was thinking about : "The question was then forced upon me. Could not the race of men be similarly improved? Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" 

One of the children of the Lebensborn programme was Anni-Frid Lyngstad - born to a Norwegian mother and a German soldier father, she grew up in Sweden and a member of the celebrated group ABBA.

William Beveridge, the architect of the post 1945 Welfare State was very active in the eugenics movement and said "those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry are to be recognized as unemployable. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State... but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights - including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood". This was Left Wing Eugenics. 

Charles Darwin’s son, Major Leonard Darwin, presided at the conference. In the run up to the First World War, he lobbied the British government to establish flying squads of scientists, with the power of arrest, who would travel around the country identifying the “unfit”. Those classified as such would be segregated in special colonies or sterilised.

Surprised? Never mind ideological differences, you find champions of Eugenics both Left and Right. My journey through history is a voyage of discovery. Not the kind of things that the politically correct classes want to be reminded about.