Rumors that Germany banned the translated publication of Dr. J. H. Landman’s much quoted book, “Human Sterilization”, because its author is Jewish were vehemently discredited in an interview with the author.
Dr. Landman deplored the tendency of many would-be champions of the Jews to battle Nazi propaganda with counter propaganda. He admitted that he had dispensed with the German royalties to his book, but added that he was not given any reason for the ostensible delay in its publication.
Basing his arguments on the grounds that sterilization is a subject of purely scientific significance, he ridiculed the possibility of religious or racial considerations preventing its appearance in German print. Citing the evil of stirring American Jews into hysteria over a mythical demonstration of prejudice, he declared that he would be more eager to impart information of a ban of racial origin, if one existed.
Dr. Landman volunteered the opinion that collectively speaking, the Jewish race would be exempt from sterilization.
“It is not true”, he said, supplementing an article he had written in the July-August 1933 issue of Criminal Law and Criminology, on “The Human Sterilization Movement”, “that there is an Aryan race or that it is superior to another alleged race. Certainly, if the Jews constitute a race, by all known scientific tests they prove to be an intellectually superior people and therefore Jewishness, as such, should exempt people from subjection to compulsory sterilization.”
Dr. Landman, the possessor of a Ph.D., J.D., and J.S.D., said at a recent meeting of the American Society of Zoologists, “Much that is myth, fable or postulate passes for scientific fact. The scant scientific cugenic knowledge has been prostituted to justify ancestor worship, race superiority, snobbery, class distinction, intellectual aristocracy and race prejudice.”
He has contributed articles to the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the Birth Control Review, Illinois Law Review, and the American Law Review. In its January 13 issue the Literary Digest quoted copiously from his book, “Human Sterilization”, in a feature en to went into effect on January 2.
Twenty-seven states in this country have compulsory sterilization laws. The same ruling in New York during 1912 was declared unconstitutional in 1918. During the interim forty-two people were sterilized.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
