Illinois Holocaust Museum to Present Medical Exhibit
Blind students in Nazi Germany examine racial head models. During the Third Reich, deaf and blind people were urged to submit to compulsory sterilization as a civic duty.
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, an exhibition about the role of science in Nazi ideology, will open July 23 at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie. The exhibition examines how the Nazi leadership, in collaboration with individuals in the professions traditionally charged with healing and the public good, used science to help legitimize persecution, murder and, ultimately, genocide. Produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Deadly Medicine will be on display through Jan. 2, 2011.
“As the museum’s first major installation of a temporary exhibition since our opening last year, we’re particularly enthusiastic about the arrival of Deadly Medicine,” said Richard S. Hirschhaut, executive director of the Illinois museum. “We’ve planned a broad spectrum of events to complement this powerful, thought-provoking exhibition and translate its themes—of medical ethics, eugenics, perceptions of disability and ‘otherness’— into diverse programs exploring these issues in a global modern-day context.”
Eugenics theory sprang from turn-of-the-century scientific beliefs asserting that Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory 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. The Nazi regime was founded upon the conviction that “inferior” races 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 anti-Semitic 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 killed. Millions of others had become 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. (www.ilholocaustmuseum.com)
