This is profoundly sobering, must-read material.

From WKSU, the NPR affiliate at Kent State University, reporting by religion reporter David Briggs in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and a column by Briggs:

“Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” a traveling exhibit from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., illuminates the role of the scientific community in the forcible sterilization and killing of people who were deemed “defective” in Nazi Germany.

The exhibit, opening this week at the Cleveland-area Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, documents the connection between the Nazi death machine and the Progressive-era American eugenics movement from which it derived some of its early legitimacy.

In both cases, scientists and public opinion leaders believed that the genetic stock and economic health of a nation can be improved by reducing less desirable segments of the population. In the U.S., the exhibit notes, that translated into laws in 26 states that allowed forcible sterilization of those with assumed hereditary problems. Some 16,000 involuntary sterilizations were performed in the U.S. between 1907 and 1933, according to the exhibit.

In Germany, an estimated 400,000 were sterilized for the same reason, followed by the killings of hundreds of thousands more who were deemed to be “unworthy of life” because of their disabilities. That program, called “Operation T-4,” then led to the extermination of Jews.

The exhibit features photographs of children with disabilities who were later killed.

Writes Briggs:

In a world where advances in genetic engineering again provide the temptation to create a new “master race,” the traveling exhibit … has contemporary relevance. The exhibit … helps people understand how the Nazi horrors that culminated with the Holocaust developed step by step from an international movement that devalued individuals who were different.

His column goes on:

As genetic screening improves, will we find it easier to deny life to those likely to be born with Down syndrome or conditions such as deafness? Will this attitude carry over to people who are considered different, such as those who may be seen to have a genetic predisposition to homosexuality or limited intelligence or poor athletic skills?

… What the Maltz exhibit helps us understand is that moral outcomes cannot be taken for granted, that even a scientific movement beginning with the best of intentions can be perverted by fear, ignorance, self- interest and demagoguery.

We can create a better world.

We just cannot start by devaluing even a single life.

The WKSU report, on streaming audio, includes some survivor interview material.

For more information on the exhibit, see the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. A comprehensive catalog of the exhibit, with a wealth of photographs and scholarly essays, is also available.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 6:52 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, eugenics, history, medicine, public attitudes, religion, sterilization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post