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Points of View
Museum Displays Bad ScienceSpecial exhibit on eugenics tours U.S. in 6 months.Few who spend any time at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., leave without feeling some mix of disbelief, horror, shock, shame and revulsion. Many people from the Valley have toured the permanent display, but the staff periodically offers a special exhibition on the first floor of the building.The most recent, on eugenics, is the latest in a series that has included righteous gentiles, partisan resistance, the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and Jewish political art. Just opened for public viewing -- it goes on a national tour in six months -- is "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race."This is a gut-wrenching chronology of Nazi eugenics from the battlefield cemeteries of World War I to the gas chambers of World War II. The somber saga of "racial improvement," replete with texts, charts, photographs and laboratory paraphernalia, is laid out before the viewer. There is an autographed text from Sir Frances Galton, the geneticist related to Charles Darwin, who advocated abortion, state-mandated sterilization and restrictions on immigration to control the threat of "inferior" races.The visitor will see pictures of families certified "superior," as if they were porkers or jars of jelly on display at American state fairs, and "Rhineland Bastards," children of mixed parentage whom the Nazis sterilized after seizing power in Germany. Sadly, there is not enough of the American or international advocacy of eugenics. There is one small photograph of Carrie Buck, the principal figure in the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded his opinion justifying her sterilization with "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."Instead, we encounter an innocuous transparent model of a man displayed at Dresden in 1935, reference charts that judged color, shape and racial origin based on eye shape, and calipers used to measure the skulls of Jewish children as Nazi doctors, violating the Hippocratic oath, starved them to death.We read the reports of the foremost German physicians of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute where they decry the waste of money and care given individuals who suffered from schizophrenia, epilepsy, Down syndrome, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease. We stare through a peephole in a rotting door that closed upon an experimental gas chamber. We see smoke wafting from chimneys over Castle Hartheim, one of six medical facilities where people deemed "life unworthy of life" were murdered.Four hundred thousand Germans were legally sterilized in the four years that led up to World War II. Another 70,000 were put to death by the T4 program suspended only after Bishop von Galen formally intervened in the summer of 1941. Five thousand "Aryan" children who suffered various birth defects were murdered before the war's end in May 1945.And there was all the equipment and personnel shifted eastward as part of program 14fl3 to facilitate the killing at places such as Chelmno and Belzec. Some of those physicians, including Carl Clauberg and Otmar von Verschuer, went back to their peaceful pursuits in 1945.Sixty years later we still have to be reminded that there are shadowy places in our world where science may tread only when guided by ethics. For that lesson, we are indebted to Holocaust Museum project director Susan Bachrach, editor Dieter Kuntz, exhibitions director Stephen Goodell, project coordinator Kathleen Mulvaney, and lead researcher Jonathan Friedman."