May 17th – July 28th, 2019
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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS CRITIC’S SUMMER CULTURE PREVIEW 2019: WHAT TO SEE AND HEAR IN MAY
“The national state . . . must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children. . . . The state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing. . . . It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s traveling exhibition Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race examines how the Nazi leadership, in collaboration with individuals in professions traditionally charged with healing and the public good, used science to help legitimize persecution, murder, and ultimately, genocide.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to “cleanse” German society of people viewed as biological threats to the nation’s “health.” Enlisting the help of physicians and medically trained geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, the Nazis developed racial health policies that started with the mass sterilization of “hereditarily diseased” persons and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry.
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race traces this history from the early 20th-century international eugenics movement to the Nazi regime’s “science of race.” It also challenges viewers to reflect on the present-day interest in genetic manipulation that promotes the possibility of human perfection.
Eugenics theory sprang from turn-of-the-20th-century scientific beliefs asserting that Charles Darwin’s theories of “survival of the fittest” could be applied to humans. Supporters, spanning the globe and political spectrum, believed that through careful controls on marriage and reproduction, a nation’s genetic health could be improved.
“Deadly Medicine explores the Holocaust’s roots in then-contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific thought. At the same time, it touches on complex ethical issues we face today, such as how societies acquire and use scientific knowledge and how they balance the rights of the individual with the needs of the larger community.”
Exhibition Curator Susan Bachrach
The Nazi regime was founded on the conviction that “inferior” races, including the so-called Jewish race, and individuals had to be eliminated from German society so that the fittest “Aryans” could thrive. The Nazi state fully committed itself to implementing a uniquely racist and antisemitic variation of eugenics to “scientifically” build what it considered to be a “superior race.” By the end of World War II, six million Jews had been murdered. Millions of others also became victims of persecution and murder through Nazi “racial hygiene” programs designed to cleanse Germany of “biological threats” to the nation’s “health,” including “foreign-blooded” Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), persons diagnosed as “hereditarily ill,” and homosexuals. In German-occupied territories, Poles and others belonging to ethnic groups deemed “inferior” were also murdered.
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.–Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem
International Hygiene Exhibition, 1911 promotional poster: The eugenics movement pre-dated Nazi Germany. A 1911 exhibition at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden included a display on human heredity and ideas to improve it. The exhibition poster features the Enlightenment’s all-seeing eye of God, adapted from the ancient Egyptian “Eye of Ra,” symbolizing fitness or health.–Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin
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.–National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
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.–US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Dr. Ernst 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.–National Library of Medical Science, Bethesda, MD
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. –Blinden-Museum an der Johann-August-Zeune-Schule für Blinde, Berlin
A popular health manual, German Gold (1942) advised: “Mothers, you must absolutely avoid alcohol and nicotine during pregnancy and when nursing. They hinder, they harm, they disrupt the normal course of pregnancy. Drink fruit juice. Fruit juice is nutritious and restorative!” Producing healthy, “fit” mothers and children was an overriding aim of the Third Reich.–US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Heads of racial types, created by anthropologists from plaster molds of the faces of living subjects, were mass-produced in Nazi Germany for use in exhibitions and racial hygiene classes. This head portrays the “Dinaric” (Balkan) racial type.–Blinden-Museum an der Johann-Agust-Zeune-Schule fur Blinde, Berlin
Heads of racial types, created by anthropologists from plaster molds of the faces of living subjects, were mass produced in Nazi Germany for use in exhibitions and racial hygiene classes. This head portrays the “Negro” racial type.–Blinden-Museum an der Johann-Agust-Zeune-Schule fur Blinde, Berlin
The head of a Jewish youth was sculpted from wood by the Jewish artist M. Winiarski for German officials in the occupied Polish city of Lodz.–Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, Instytut Naukowo-Badawyczy, Warsaw
“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.” –US Holocaust Memorial Museum
“Don’t Go Blindly into Marriage!” Eugenics had the support of many scientists worldwide, including the US. This drawing illustrated a 1924 pamphlet that urged couples to be informed about the health, including genetic health, of prospective spouses. This image was first published by Louisiana’s Department of Health.–US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden
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.–Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin-Dahlem
“Adolf Hitler as the Doctor of the German Nation,” National Health Guardian, 1935. Rudolf Hess referred to Nazism as “applied biology.”–National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD
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.–Verein Schloss Hartheim, Alkoven, Austria; photo by Wolfgang Schuhmann; Diakonie-Kork Epilepsiezentrum, Kehl-Kork, Germany
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race is a traveling exhibition produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Through reproductions of photographs and documents, films, and survivor testimony, it traces how the persecution of groups deemed biologically inferior led to the near annihilation of European Jewry. It also challenges viewers to reflect on the present-day interest in genetic manipulation that promotes the possibility of human perfection.
This exhibition is made possible through the support of The David Berg Foundation, The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, The Lester Robbins and Sheila Johnson Robbins Traveling and Temporary Exhibitions Fund established in 1990, and The Dorot Foundation.
Header Image: 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.–US Holocaust Memorial Museum