International Federation of Eugenics Organizations

The International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO) was an international organization of groups and individuals focused on eugenics. Founded in London in 1912, where it was originally titled the Permanent International Eugenics Committee, it was an outgrowth of the first International Eugenics Congress. In 1925, it was retitled. Factionalism within the organization led to its division in 1933, as splinter group the Latin International Federation of Eugenics Organizations was created to give a home to eugenicists who disliked the concepts of negative eugenics, in which unfit groups and individuals are discouraged of prevented from reproducing. As the views of the Nazi party in Germany caused increasing tension within the group and leadership activity declined, it dissolved in the latter half of the 1930s.

In 1912, Leonard Darwin presided over an International Eugenics Congress at the University of London which was sponsored by the Eugenics Education Society (now the Galtin Institute) in Britain. Over 800 attendees and an equal number of visitors gathered each day of the Congress to discuss the political, social and cultural context of eugenics and its practical applications. By its end, the Congress had established a Permanent International Eugenics Committee, of which Darwin was named president. In 1921, the Committee arranged for the second meeting of the International Eugenics Congress to take place, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Led by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, and Clarence Little, it focused on issues including human heredity, racial differences, regulation of human reproduction, and eugenics.

In 1925, the Committee was renamed the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO). American eugenicist Charles Davenport was a dominant force in the early history of the body. As its president, in 1929, he wrote a letter to Benito Mussolini, then Prime Minister of Italy, warning him that "maximum speed [was] necessary" in implementing a eugenics program in Italy, because of the "enormous" danger of failing to control undesirable reproduction. The IFEO held its 9th Conference in England in 1930. Davenport led the IFEO meeting two years later in New York in 1932 at which Ernst Rüdin was selected as his successor to presidency. In the 1930s, the organization was meeting every two years, with a simultaneous Conference. By 1934, when the group met in Zurich, the original IFEO had representative organizations and individuals from Argentina, Belgium, Cuba, the Dutch East Indies, England, Estonia, France, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States.

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