With the outbreak of the war, Lothrop Stoddard began working as a foreign correspondent in Nazi Germany. Although he was definitely not a Nazi supporter, his racist credentials helped him to get interviews with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels which were later published in Time magazine.Through his newspaper articles and a book that he released in 1940, Stoddard tried his best to distance himself from the Nazis. The Holocaust still lay in the future but news reports about Aktion T4 and similar excesses placed him in an awkward position. In trying to defend his own ideas while denouncing the Nazis for pursuing similar goals, all that he could say was that, while the Nazi ideals were justified, their methods were too severe.
By the end of World War II, the rest of the world was stunned to discover just how far the Nazis had been willing to go to support their ideology. Revelations surrounding Aktion T4, the Holocaust, and the vicious persecution directed against Jews, Roma, and other racial groups in the name of racial purity robbed the eugenics movement of what little support it had. It probably didn't help that testimony from the Nuremberg War trials showed the powerful influence of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard on the early Nazi movement. During his trial, Karl Brandt particularly cited American racist theorists as an inspiration for the Nazi euthanasia program and as proof that the Nazis were hardly unique in their beliefs. Brandt's defense wasn't very effective (he was executed) but the Nazi connection conferred a stigma on the eugenics movement that it never lost.
Lothrop Stoddard's popularity didn't survive the Nazi association. By the time of his death in 1950, he was largely forgotten. Oher eugenicists managed to adapt to the new era by changing their message to escape Stoddard's fate. While never really abandoning his eugenicist leanings, Paul Popenue is largely remembered today as the father of marriage counseling. His warnings about the decline of masculinity and the need to assert traditional roles in marriage are still quoted in conservative circles though. Despite die-hards like Carleton Coon, the use of racial theories in social sciences were largely abandoned (with some high-profile exceptions). Most of the researchers who had been known for racial studies in previous decades either retired or shifted to other fields of research entirely. Advocates of hereditarian theories of human intelligence still managed to carve out a niche for themselves (controversies notwithstanding).;
That's not to say that the laws that the eugenicists and scientific racists helped foster weren't still in place, though. The last of the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States weren't repealed until 1967 following the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling (South Carolina and Alabama didn't formally remove anti-miscegenation language from their constitutions until much later). Involuntary sterilization laws remained in force for numerous countries around the world including Sweden, Japan,Switzerland, India, and many Warsaw Pact nations. While the eugenics argument had been discredited, other rationalizations for sterilization were typically adopted (which usually focused on "protecting" patients regarded as mentally disabled). In the U.S., involuntary sterilization continued in some states until the 1980s while in Canada, cases of sterilization continued as recently as 1972. Despite a few high profile compensation cases, the identity of most involuntarily sterilized patients remains unknown.
While the eugenics movement (and scientific racism in general) seem unlikely to regain its former popularity, the debate surrounding the role of heredity and environmental factors in human traits seems unlikely to go away. Controversies have a way of springing up as new books are released for popular consumption. There are also organizations such as the Pioneer Fund that continue to support research into racial differences in intelligence despite widespread condemnation by mainstream scientists. The complex ethical issues surrounding eugenics may well become more heated as genetic screening techniques become more widely available and key markers for "undesirable" traits are identified. Only time can tell what new controversies genetic engineering will bring in future.
As a postscript to this series, there have been a number of articles of late that have attempted to invoke the specter of eugenics and Nazism in discrediting Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. The crux of the argument seems to be that Darwin's theory had a heavy influence on Nazi philosophy and can thus be held responsible for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. Whatever role that biologists played in the early eugenics movement, it's hard to dismiss the fact that scientists were also the most vocal critics of the eugenics movement from the very beginning. In the meantime, even church leaders in some countries supported various eugenics policies over the years. There is enough blame to go around for every political or ideological group and nobody has a valid reason to be smug.
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