Lothrop Stoddard - World War II

World War II

During World War II he spent 4 months as a journalist for the North American Newspaper Alliance in Nazi Germany. He wrote Into the Darkness (1940) about his experiences there. Among other events, the book describes interviews with such figures as Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley and Fritz Sauckel He got preferential treatment by Nazi officials compared to other journalists. For example the Propaganda Ministry insisted that NBC's Max Jordan and CBS's William Shirer use Stoddard to interview the captain of the Bremen.

In The Rising Tide of Color Stoddard blasted the ethnic supremacism of the Germans, blaming the "Teutonic imperialists" for the outbreak of the First World War. He opposed what he saw as the disuniting of White/European peoples through intense nationalism and infighting.

Between 1939 and 1940, Stoddard stayed for several months in Germany, later publishing a memoir on his experiences there titled Into the Darkness. One day he visited the Hereditary Health Supreme Court in Charlottenburg, an appeals court that decided whether people would be forcibly sterilized. After having observed several dysgenics trials at the court, Stoddard stated that the eugenics legislation of Nazi Germany was "being administered with strict regard for its provisions and that, if anything, judgments were almost too conservative", and that the law was "weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way". Stoddard was taken aback by the forthrightness of the Nazis' anti-Jewish views, foreseeing that the "Jewish problem" would soon be settled "by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich".

After World War II, Stoddard's theories were deemed too closely aligned with those of the Nazis and he suffered a large drop in popularity. His death in 1950 from cancer went almost entirely unreported, despite his previously broad readership and influence.