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Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race
August 14, 2009 – February 14, 2010
In the quest to produce a nation of superior Aryan beings in Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler turned to the concept of “racial hygiene,” or “eugenics.”
“Eugenics proponents argued that by keeping the ‘unfit’ alive to reproduce and multiply, modern medicine and costly welfare programs were interfering with natural selection, the concept Charles Darwin called the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the animal and plant world,” said Chief Curator of History Fritz Hamer.
This exhibit traces the journey of eugenics from its start as a scientific concept in the late 19th century to its deadly use by Nazi Germany as a justification for the sterilization and murder of millions of people.
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Nazi officials at the “The Miracle of Life” exhibition, German Hygiene Museum, Dresden, 1935. The new Nazi museum leadership asserted that societies resembled organisms that followed the lead of their brains. The most logical social structure was one that saw society as a collective unit, literally a body guided by a strong leader.
Credit: National Archives and Records Administration |
Heads of racial types, created by anthropologists from plaster molds of the faces of living subjects, were mass-produced in Nazi Germany for use in exhibitions and racial hygiene classes. This head portrays the “Dinaric” (Balkan) racial type.
Credit: Blinden-Museum an der Johann-Agust-Zeune-Schule fur Blinde, Berlin
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Many thanks to our local Sponsor, the South Carolina Council for the Holocaust.
Deadly Medicine: Creating a Master Race is organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Deadly Medicine is sponsored in part by The Samberg Family Foundation, the Dorot Foundation, the Viterbi Family Foundation of the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego, and the Rosenbluth Family.
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