Burkhard Bilger writes about the choice of his German parents to move to Oklahoma after WWII, where his father took a job at a university:
“Oklahoma had its own version of the history [my parents] had left behind. The Nuremberg Race Laws were based on Jim Crow codes passed in the United States after the Civil War and still widely enforced when my parents arrived."
"Oklahoma was the first state to segregate phone booths. Forty years earlier, white rioters in Tulsa had burned down more than twelve hundred Black-owned houses and killed as many as three hundred Black residents. Intermarriage was still illegal between Blacks and those of other races…”
“By 1937, forced sterilization was legal in thirty-two states. [Charles] Davenport set up a laboratory at the Carnegie Institution that kept index cards on nearly a million ordinary citizens and advocated for strict immigration laws and sterilization of the unfit. "
"When the first German eugenics research was done in the 1920s, the Rockefeller foundation helped fund it. Josef Mengele, later known as the Angel of death for his medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, was among those Rockefeller supported.”
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