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July 4, 2009
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Deadly Medicine:Creating the Master Race

Exhibition at Maltz Museum Shows an International Eugenics Movement Preceded the Nazis

WKSU's Vivian Goodman reports
Reporter
Vivian Goodman
Ken Burns Documentary "The War" reminds us how America thwarted Germany's quest for world domination by an Aryan Master Race. But a new exhibition at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage shows Eugenics , the basis of the Nazi's philosophy , originated long before Hitler, and partly in our own country. The exhibition entitled "Deadly Medicine" also evokes the ethical issues confronting modern medicine:

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Students at the Berlin School for the Blind examine racial head models circa 1935. Students were taught Gregor Mendel’s principles of inheritance and the purported application of those laws to human heredity and principles of race. During the Third Reich, German born deaf or blind, like those born with mental illnesses or disabilities, were urged to submit to compulsory sterilization as a civic duty.
Dr. Enst Wentzler treats a child with rickets. Dr. Wentzler’s Berlin pediatric clinic served many wealthy families and high-ranking Nazi officials. Although Wentzler developed methods to treat premature infants or children with severe birth defects, he supported ending the lives of the “incurably ill” and served as a primary coordinator of the pediatric “euthanasia” program, evaluating patient forms and ordering the killing of several thousand children.
Dr. Eugen Fischer reading Heredity Journal. Dr. Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity from 1927 to 1942, authored a 1913 study of the racially mixed children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German southwest Africa. Fischer opposed “racial mixing,” arguing that “Negro blood” was of “lesser value” and that mixing it with “white blood” would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted his institute’s activities to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS doctors, served as a judge on Berlin’s Hereditary Health Court, and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and “racial purity” of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.
Dr. Otmar von Verschuer examines twins at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s Department for Human Heredity, Verschuer, a physician and geneticist, examined hundreds of pairs of twins to study whether criminality, feeble-mindedness, tuberculosis, and cancer were inheritable. In 1927, he recommended the forced sterilization of the “mentally and morally subnormal.” Verschuer typified those academics whose interest in Germany’s “national regeneration” provided motivation for their research.
Head shots showing various racial types. Most western anthropologists classified people into “races” based on physical traits such as head size and eye, hair and skin color. This classification was developed by Eugen Fischer and published in the 1921 and 1923 editions of Foundations of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene.
Nazi officials at the “The Miracle of Life” exhibition, German Hygiene Museum, Dresden, 1935. The new Nazi museum leadership asserted that societies resembled organisms that followed the lead of their brains. The most logical social structure was one that saw society as a collective unit, literally a body guided by a strong leader.
“You Are Sharing the Load! A Hereditarily Ill Person Costs 50,000 Reichsmarks on Average up to the Age of Sixty,” reproduced in a high school biology textbook by Jakob Graf. The image illustrates Nazi propaganda on the need to prevent births of the “unfit.”
A clandestine photograph taken by a farmer who lived in the vicinity of Hartheim, showing smoke rising from the chimney of the crematorium. Operation T-4 targeted mostly adult patients in private, state, and church-run institutions. From January 1940 to August 1941, more than 70,000 people were killed by gassing in one of six specially staffed and equipped facilities in Germany and Austria. By the end of World War II, an estimated 200,000 adults were murdered in various “euthanasia” programs.


Web Resources

The United State Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage




Listener Comments:

Fantastic piece Vivian...well done.


Posted by: Vince (Ann Arbor) on September 26, 2007 10:23AM
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