Evil Breeding

revealed her pale scalp and the skull beneath; she could have modeled for a phrenologist. Although Althea had lost most of her vision, her faded eyes retained an unmistakable look of sharp s intelligence. She wore a pink silk dress.
    “Good morning, Holly!” Althea is one of the few friends I have who greet me first. “Rowdy, good morning to you, too.”
    The big boy was on his best therapy-dog behavior. He did not chomp on the palms and then deposit half-digested leaves on some prominent spot on the living room rug. Instead of dropping to the tile to beg for a tummy rub, he sat close enough to Althea to let her reach his head. Then he raised a massive paw and rested it on the arm of her chair. Posed together with the palm fronds in the background, the two looked like figures in a sentimental Victorian oil painting.
    Taking a seat in one of the thickly cushioned rattan chairs, . I said, “Althea, I need to ask you something that isn’t about Sherlock Holmes.”
    She chortled. “If pressed, Holly, I am capable of limited small talk on one or two other subjects.”
    “Eugenics,” I said abruptly. “I need to know about the eugenics movement: who supported it, what it meant, how people felt about it.” I hesitated. Althea’s age was no secret, and she was ferociously proud of her memory. Even so…
    “In the thirties,” she said with a knowing little smile.
    “Yes,” I replied gratefully. I leaned forward in my chair. “I have the impression that, at least for some people, eugenics meant different things before and after the Holocaust. That in the late twenties maybe...” I stumbled. “Or in the early thirties.” I took a breath. “That some people, some decent people, saw it just as a way to improve social conditions, end poverty, and so forth.”
    “Revisionist nonsense!” Althea decreed. “Eugenics was as evil then as it is now. Breeding better people, indeed! Ridding the gene pool of unfit stock! Elitist, racist, anti-Semitic, pseudoscientific palaver! People are not show dogs, and that’s that.”
    “But why would...” I began again. “Why would a kind, decent person have supported it?”
    “Stupidity?” Althea suggested. “Naivete. And people who are kind and decent in some respects may still harbor delusions of their own superiority. Vanity plays a role. It isn’t flattering to be told that we’re all created equal, is it? Ah, but to be told that by virtue of nothing more than birth, one is an Aryan superman? The appeal to vanity was as effective as it was dangerous.”
    “A lot of Americans were taken in, at least temporarily,” I pointed out. ‘ ‘They had German friends. They visited Germany in the thirties. Just the way they do now. Althea, Americans visit Germany all the time. American dogs do!” Mindful of the beer lecture I’d delivered to Kevin, I said, “I have a friend, Delores Lieske, whose malamute, Tazs, went to Berlin, for heaven’s sake, to celebrate the reunification of Germany. This was for the German-American Volksfest. Tazs was specially invited. All expenses paid! He gave weight-pulling demonstrations, and he visited with people. Paws across the water. He’s very charming. Among other things, he purrs and moans when you pat him, and he turns somersaults. Or he did then.” I hesitated. “He’s a little old for somersaults. Now he corkscrews. Anyway, in the thirties, most of the visits back and forth between Germany and the U.S. were probably just like that! Innocent! Americans went there, and they didn’t see—”
    Althea jabbed a bony fist in the air. She seemed almost to be mocking the Nazi salute. “Then, in the thirties, there was evil to be seen. And if people didn’t see, it was only because they were fooling themselves. I ask you! What kind of person is taken in by goose-stepping ? Flashy uniforms, braggadocio, national self-aggrandizement, tirades of hate! Your friend’s dog wouldn’t have been deceived! My dear, from the beginning, the evil of the Third Reich was visible, audible, and palpable. The essence of that evil was, of course, the death of compassion.” Althea paused. “Flolly, if I may ask, is there someone in particular you have in mind? Besides a somersaulting dog?”
    I told Althea about Geraldine R. Dodge. I gave the short version. “She’d had friends in Germany since the early twenties,” I finally said, “if not earlier. These were other dog people, breeders, important dog-show judges. I can’t believe that they