The science of evil

[NewGuy]

Not sure where to put this or how. This is something I thought relevant to the understanding of current racist mentality in the US.

Some like to point to the German ideas of racism and claim it was wrapped up in fact. I found this in recent news and thought it worthwhile for understanding that train of thought. Keep in mind I am not in any way in advocation of the ideas nor the opinions of such thinking. I DO think that in America, it is best that we understand the problems and what people think about them in order to best solve. In a small way, I am hoping this cuts down on all the flame and predominance of such an issue on the board.

As such, I have posted the article below and if the mods deem necessary, I would not take it personal if the post were shortened. I thought it was best left posted as is so people can read it and not have to discard out of laziness in clicking a link.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/feature...22,0,561190.story?coll=bal-features-headlines

The science of evil
The Holocaust Museum's exhibit on Nazi medical practices raises frightening issues.

By Michael Ollove
Sun Staff
Originally published April 22, 2004

WASHINGTON - In the aged film clip, a string of adults in hospital gowns makes its herky-jerky way along a lawn in the shadows of a grand stone mansion. Everything about them seems exaggerated and unnatural, from their contorted grins to the capering way they move. They are meant to be seen as grotesqueries.

The German narrator resumes his ominous message, the words translated in subtitles for present-day, English-speaking museum visitors: "Idiots and the feeble-minded ... live in palaces," the voice intones, diverting "[d]iligent care for which only healthy and strong people are entitled."

The narrator declares that "we humans have sinned terribly against [the] laws of natural selection," by coddling the genetically impaired and, even worse, by allowing them to reproduce, duplicating their defects in a new legion of offspring. "We have not only sustained unworthy life," he decries, "we have allowed it to multiply."

The title of the 1937 film is Victims of the Past, a reference to the idea in the disgraced genetic field of eugenics that illness, disability and delinquency were passed without deviation, gene by gene, from one generation to the next. The film was a piece of Nazi propaganda, required showing in German theaters in support of the nation's program for the compulsory sterilization of the "genetically unfit" to choke off undesirable human traits - and undesirable human beings.

Ultimately, the Third Reich arrived at a more comprehensive solution than sterilization, one that it would also choose for other "biological" enemies, including Jews, Gypsies and other "inferior" races: extermination.

The film is shown in continuous loop in an extensive exhibit opening today at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Titled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, the exhibit explores the Nazis' incorporation of dubious "scientific" theories - particularly eugenics - to legitimize their grand design to purify the Aryan race. In photographs, testimony, propaganda, artifact, video and documents, the exhibition stands as a frightening warning of where the corrupted use of science can lead.

While Deadly Medicine does not lift its eyes much beyond the end of World War II in 1945, the exhibit's continued relevance is unmistakable as present-day bioethicists wrestle with the policy implications of startling genetic research and the possibilities it presents. The essential question is the same now as it was then: How will the science be used?

In the case of eugenics, essentially the selective breeding of humans, the terrifying answers are revealed in the new exhibit: sterilization, frightful experimentation on human beings, murder and genocide. If ever there was a marriage made in hell, it was the union of eugenicists and the Third Reich, "an explosive combination of science and politics" in the words of Susan Bachrach, curator of the exhibit. The German eugenicists lent Nazi ideology a whiff of scientific authority. The Nazis afforded the eugenicists an opportunity dreamed of - to put into practice their ideas for cleansing the Aryan race.

No wonder the leading proponents of eugenics in Germany celebrated the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Within a year, the Third Reich had passed a sterilization law, one of the central proposals of a number of leading German eugenicists. "It was only through the political work of Hitler that the meaning of racial hygiene has become publicly manifest in Germany," Ernst Rudin, a psychiatrist and leading eugenicist rhapsodized in 1934, "and it is only due to him that our 30-year dream to put racial hygiene into practice has become a reality."

As the exhibit makes abundantly clear, however, eugenics attracted adherents well beyond German borders. The term "eugenics" was coined by a 19th-century British aristocrat, Sir Francis Galton, from a Greek root meaning "well-born." Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, proposed that human traits, good and bad, were passed in predictable ways from one generation to the next.

By the early 20th century, eugenics was used to explain all manner of social ills: poverty, mental illness, low intelligence, alcoholism, criminality. If those exhibiting undesirable characteristics could be prevented from reproducing, the theory went, suffering would be lessened, the overall quality of humankind elevated, and social costs reduced by eliminating the need for asylums, prisons and orphanages.

 

[NewGuy]

Sterilization was key in the minds of many eugenicists, but their first success in enacting such practices were well before Hitler's dictatorship and far away from Germany.

"The United States certainly pioneered the establishment of those laws on the books," said Garland Allen, a professor of the history of science at Washington University. In 1907, Indiana passed the first sterilization law in the United States; by 1933, 34 other states had followed suit. Most never acted on their laws, but some - California, Virginia and North Carolina - did. By the time sterilizations ended in the United States in the 1970s, the procedure had claimed an estimated 60,000 victims, most of them institutionalized and poor.

Eugenicists in Germany were jealous of the success of their counterparts in America and other countries where compulsory sterilization was permitted. Nevertheless, eugenics gained ground in Weimar Germany, particularly in the social upheaval of economic and political collapse. Asylums and hospitals were overburdened, their patients disparaged. Eugenicists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche rued the deaths of German soldiers in World War I ("the best of humanity" in their language) compared to the continued existence of the mentally retarded ("idiots," in their words), on whom "the best care is lavished" despite their lives of "negative worth."

Costs were far from the only concern. German "racial hygienists" raised alarms about the degradation of the German race. If the genetically impaired were allowed to reproduce and fit Germans continued to practice birth control, the German race would continue toward extinction.

Racial alarm also figured in the ever more virulent anti-Semitism stoked by the ascending Nazis. Jewishness was identified not as a religion or a culture but as a race separate, foreign and inimical to Aryans. Conversion could not repair the biological.

Racial hygienists, identifying physical characteristics that were most laudatory, hewed to classically Nordic features. They used calipers (one is on display) to measure skull sizes and took note of hair and eye color. Their "data" resulted in a racial hierarchy, one that put Aryans at the top and all others - Slavs, Asians, Africans - below. Molds of human heads were circulated to portray the features of the lesser races.

The Nazis, already steeped in racism and anti-Semitism, took enthusiastic note of the work of the eugenicists and incorporated their theories in their own message. Germans must keep the race pure, Hitler insisted in Mein Kampf in 1925. The state must "see to it that only the healthy beget children."

After Hitler took power, the eugenicists achieved an unparalleled primacy, the envy of counterparts elsewhere in the world. Many were appointed to key positions at scientific institutions and received research funding. Their critics were silenced, while their views were furthered in state propaganda and official policy.

A horrifying, topsy-turvy moral order took hold. The disabled, deformed and mentally ill were not to be accorded compassion and assistance. Instead, they were demonized as drains on the country's treasury and genetic threats to the realization of the Master Race. "Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked," Joseph Goebbels told a Nazi Party rally in 1938. "Our objectives are entirely different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world."

In 1935, the Marital Health Law banned unions between "the hereditarily healthy" and the genetically unfit. Soon after, Germany passed the "Blood Protection Law" to outlaw marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. "You have this conflation under Hitler where two strands come together in an explicit way," says Bachrach.

By then, a centerpiece of eugenics was official policy. The 1933 sterilization law, co-written by Rudin, required health care professionals to turn in the "hereditarily ill." The targeted illnesses were "feeblemindedness," schizophrenia, manic-depression, genetic epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, genetic blindness and deafness, severe physical deformity and chronic alcoholism. Those identified were brought before hereditary health courts, whose hearings were formalities lasting only minutes.

By the end of the war, an estimated 400,000 had been sterilized. The men were given vasectomies, the women tubal ligation. About 5,000 died, the vast majority women.

It was not, however, enough for the regime. In July 1939, a family petitioned Hitler to put their deformed newborn to death. Hitler assigned the matter to his personal physician, Karl Brandt, who killed the child himself.

So began the Nazi program of euthanasia. The Reich Ministry of the Interior instructed midwives and physicians to register all children born with severe defects. Three doctors examined each case, typically without ever laying eyes on the potential victim. Between 1939 and 1945, more than 5,000 boys and girls were killed in special children's wards. One darkened room in the exhibit displays photos of some of the children lying nude in their cribs, some smiling, some crying, none aware of what their caretakers intended.

Under cover of war, the program soon was expanded to include adults. In the exhibit is a typed note on Hitler's personal letterhead authorizing "mercy deaths" for patients deemed "incurable." It may be the only directive in existence that directly links Hitler to the Holocaust.

Those selected were adult patients in private, state and church-run hospitals. They were taken to one of six facilities and killed by carbon monoxide piped into chambers disguised as showers. Their families were told they died of illnesses ("acute weakness of the heart muscle" the guardian of Karl Buhler was informed in a letter). Rumors about the program ended the gassings, but not the murders. Patients were merely killed by other means, such as starvation and overdoses. By the end of the Third Reich, more than 200,000 had been killed in the program, named T-4.

It was a triumph of eugenical arguments, as one record on display chillingly attests. It charts the number of patients killed - "disinfected" in the Nazi euphemism - and the projected food savings their elimination would bring.

T-4 also proved a valuable testing ground for the culmination of the Nazi program for racial hygiene. Auschwitz was where eugenics in its most malignant form achieved its consummation.

Today, eugenics is a pariah branch of science, a simplistic view of genetics that contributed to terrifying social policies, and not only in Nazi Germany. Yet, bioethicists and historians warn that the shameful history of eugenics must inform present-day realities created by advances in genetic science and escalating medical costs.

"It's easy to say that was then and this is now," says Paul Lombardo, director of the Program in Law and Medicine at the University of Virginia's Center for Biomedical Ethics. Already, says Lombardo, genetic, prenatal testing can identify certain diseases as well as gender. "There might be a time when we'll be able to choose in favor of characteristics such as looks and talents. Any time there is talk about tinkering with future generations, many will immediately think of eugenics."

As medical costs spiral, some worry about how genetic information will be used. "You can imagine in the not too distant future people with certain kinds of genes forced to go through genetic screening, or, if identified as having a genetically diseased fetus, pressured to have it aborted because health insurance won't cover the child or will raise premiums to do so," says Yale University's Daniel Kevles, who studies the history of science. "One has to understand the use of genetic information and technology in the larger context of the pressures on health care delivery systems."

The underlying issue inevitably bears on the question of the worth of individuals, a question for which both German eugenicists and the Nazis believed they had answers.

 

[nycflasher]

It is interesting to note that Eugenics essentially came from the US, but was perfected in Nazi Germany.

I'm not sure how much we can draw on this to understand racism in the US, however. The root of racism in the US is, I believe, ignorance. And it has been passed on throught the generations, in many cases.

I certainly don't excuse anyone's racism, but it is not hard to understand how/why someone feels that way when their daddy and their daddy's daddy were all racist and they learned it from birth.

I believe this is probably the case with Big D.

 

[NewGuy]

But they always absorb nazi doctrine to prove or apply logic to their beliefs. -This is a bit of insight to that thinking. I agree the root is in the US and in the way people are brought up. -This however gives insight to what turns that opinion into unbeatable fact in the mind of a racist.