|
|
July 16, 2004/Tamuz 27 5764, Vol. 56, No. 43
Holocaust museum explores role of science
JUSTIN BOSCH
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON - Forced killings are "mercy deaths," the condemned are "research material" and "disinfecting" describes sterilizations, killings and exile.
"Deadly Medicine," a new special exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, navigates the pseudoscience that under-pinned the Holocaust.
How Germany, which had been a medical leader early in the 20th century, devolved into an epicenter of bad science is the exhibit's central concern.
"We're trying to help people understand how something like this could evolve," says Arthur Berger, the museum's director of communications.
The exhibit abounds with medical instruments, artifacts and records and explains how science, economics and politics acted as catalysts for the Holocaust.
Science to most would seem a benevolent instrument, but the exhibit shows how science can abet, if not spawn, gross-scale genocide.
The role of science in legitimizing large-scale forced killings, sterilizations and deportations is a contributing factor to the uniqueness of the Holocaust, compared to other repressive and genocidal regimes, says exhibit curator Susan Bachrach.
The roots of the Nazis'"science" date to the 19th century, when scientists worldwide wondered whether Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory could be applied to humans.
This application - eugenics - sought to improve the human genetic code via selective breeding. A confluence of events in Germany propelled the program from obscurity to a sadistic national movement.
An economic crisis created a pretext for the Nazis to pour resources into filtering the population of those "unfit" elements who were a financial burden, and physicians afforded the development credibility. Significantly, the Nazi party enjoyed a rate of membership among physicians higher than in most other professions.
"The underlying idea and ideology was that some people were less valuable than others," Bachrach says.
German eugenics eventually cast Jews and others, including blacks and Gypsies, as an economic dredge whose very existence taxed the economy and their com-patriots.
"Deadly Medicine" divides the history into three periods. "Science as Salvation" tracks the pre-Nazi period; "The Biological State" is concurrent with the rise of the Nazis; and "Final Solutions" covers the forced murders that began under the shadow of war.
The stark layout uses sharp graphics to evoke the Holo-caust chronology.
The exhibit begins with bright lights, and then grows dim and opaque. Shades of green create the feel of a medical laboratory and patches of antiseptic white tiles suggest psychiatric wards. Late in the exhibit, the few splashes of color come from artistic works of condemned schizophrenics.
A chair with raised ridges along the seat once forced photographic subjects into upright posture, a steel gynecological examination chair resembles a torture device and an acrylic cube displays two plaster-cast human heads used for medical education, one of Nordic descent, the other African.
A European map tracks the distribution of the races by colored dots, and its key ranks the races in descending order. Nordics top the list while Jews and Africans fall to the bottom.
Posters depict "undesirable" members of society as literally backbreaking. In one, a fit Aryan, the German racial ideal, bears a shoulder-straddling pole seating two sickly men. Others calculate the annual economic burden of such individuals in terms of tens of thousands of Reichs-marks and appeal to economic and nationalist sensitivities.
The exhibit concludes with a cast of a Jewish face once used for medical study.
The exhibit points out that other nations took similar measures, but never at the level of a nationwide com-pulsory program.
In the United States, laws that banned marriages between races and between the so-called normal- and feeble-minded were borne of the same ideals, but were not carried out on the same scale. The U.S. Supreme Court approved forced sterilizations, with the usually liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reasoning, "three generations of imbeciles are enough."
The exhibit, open daily during museum hours, is open through October 2005. An online accompaniment captures the bulk of the content and can be found at the museum's Web site, http://www.ushmm.org.
|
|
