According to Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Nazi Major General Karl Brandt introduced Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, as scientific evidence in his defense. Brandt was charged with killing concentration camp inmates to collect their skulls for study. Although US congressmen had quoted from Grant’s book in the 1920 and 1930s while debating immigration, sterilization, and marriage laws, Karl Brandt was found guilty and hanged.
American Upper Class
Madison Grant (1865-1937) was the son of a physician and descendent of Englishmen who believed in the divine right of kings. He graduated from Yale in 1887 and although he studied law, he was more interested in natural science and belonged to several exclusive clubs devoted to the gentlemanly pursuit of hunting big game trophies. Grant is credited with saving the redwoods, saving the buffalo, and other wildlife. Though he was, of course, saving them in order to hunt them, he did save them and is credited with this.
Game Management for Humans
Grant applied his theories of game management to the human population. It seemed to him that the strongest and best trophies had disappeared from the American wilderness and he believed the strongest and best humans would disappear from America due to inferior blood from freed slaves and later, inferior immigrants. In the introduction to Grant’s book, his friend Major General Fredrick Osborn said, “the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity, and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal.” While allowing that some other races could contribute, none could compare to the descendents of “the blue-eyed, fair-haired people of the north of Europe.”
