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Maltz exhibit is bitter tonic
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BY: SUSAN H. KAHN Assistant Editor
The new exhibit at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage is like a tonic that tastes unpleasant but holds the promise of cure.
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, opening Sept. 25 and running through Jan. 20, is a chilling examination of how eugenics informed public policy and legitimized the racial ideology that gave rise to Hitler’s Final Solution. It is not easy to swallow, but it raises important questions about medical ethics, the value of diversity, and the quest for physical perfection.
The eugenics movement didn’t just happen in Germany and it wasn’t only about the Jews.
The culmination of Nazi racial hygiene was the near-annihilation European Jewry.
Deadly Medicine features more than 200 artifacts and objects, almost 200 photographs, historic film footage, and survivor testimony. On loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Deadly Medicine
was originally shown there in 2004.
One enters and exits the exhibit through a corridor where the question is posed, “Where would you draw the line?” Developed by the Maltz Museum as a companion to Deadly Medicine, this interactive display raises seven current-
day bioethical questions. For example, health officials recently jailed a man, who they believed infected 56 people with rare, drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, for refusing an order to be quarantined. Should a citizen be detained against his will to protect public health?
Visitors can express their opinions by depositing “yes” or “no” tokens in the clear plastic boxes mounted underneath
each scenario. Deadly Medicine takes visitors on a historical journey in a cleverly designed setting vaguely
reminiscent of a 1930s medical clinic. Exhibit areas are separated by canvas folding screens, resembling those used for privacy between hospital beds. Artifacts, most of which are two-dimensional, are mounted on white tile walls
set off by institutional-looking pipes and panels of glass. A few small TV screens play historical film footage, but
by and large, this is an exhibit requiring reading of the accompanying text. The first quarter of Deadly Medicine
describes the beginnings of the eugenics movement that blossomed in the early 20th century. German biologist
August Weissmann’s 1892 theory of “immutable germ plasm,” coupled with the re-discovery in 1900 of Mendel’s principles of heredity, fostered growing international support. The movement was also influenced by Darwin’s theory
of evolution by natural selection, or “survival of the fittest.” Its practical result would be marginalization or elimination of the “unfit.”
“This exhibit makes the point that the eugenics movement didn’t just happen in Germany and it wasn’t just about the
Jews,” says Maltz Musem executive director Judi Feniger. “It was an international movement that attracted the support of many physicians and scientists.” In the U.S., the Immigration Act of 1924 sharply limiting immigration
from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia reflected an effort to ensure a healthy “racial stock.” From 1927 to 1972, residents of the Lynchburg (Va.)
Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded were deemed “unfit” to reproduce and were forcibly sterilized.
Soon the exhibit narrows its focus to post-World War I Germany with examples of the Weimar government’s (largely positive) public health campaigns. These were aimed at reducing tuberculosis, venereal disease and alcoholism, which scientists had linked with birth defects and infant mortality. However, it wasn’t long before a growing faction
began to connect eugenics to race. Jews and the Roma (gypsies) were identified as racial “hybrids,” aliens outside the German national body. These ideas were adopted by the growing Nazi party and were embraced by many German
physicians and scientists. When Hitler ascended to power and all the educational and cultural institutions came under state control, racial eugenics permeated German society. The fecund German mother producing many healthy offspring was exalted. Homosexuality, deemed an obstruction to reproduction, was criminalized.
Deadly Medicine traces how eugenics was used to justify ever more inhumane acts. An estimated 400,000 Germans underwent sterilization under the provisions of a 1933 law promoting this surgery for those suffering from any one of nine conditions: feeblemindedness (a highly elastic label), schizophrenia, manic-depression, chronic alcoholism,
Huntington’s chorea, genetic epilepsy, genetic blindness, genetic deafness, and severe physical deformity.
The Blood Protection Law announced at Nuremburg in 1935 effectively denaturalized Jews and forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. The “Final Solutions” exhibit area chronicles the euthanasia of thousands of disabled children and infants, considered a burden on wartime Germany’s resources. This program soon expanded to include adult mental patients, who were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning in gas chambers disguised as showers.
These actions were just the prelude. The culmination of Nazi racial hygiene was the near-annihilation European Jewry. Deadly Medicine examines the familiar particulars of the Holocaust n the concentration of Jews in ghettos, the mass gassing in the camps, cruel medical experiments n in a mercifully abbreviated way.
The most moving part of the exhibit comes at the end. In a small theater, a film loop offers testimony by survivors. Their unblinking accounts of childhood memories, the stuff of nightmares, put a human face on the history that precedes them. There is no spoonful of sugar to make Deadly Medicine go down, but if the exhibit provokes thoughtful discussion of today’s bioethical issues, it may be just what the doctor ordered.
skahn@cjn.org
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, opening Sept. 25 and running through Jan. 20, is a chilling examination of how eugenics informed public policy and legitimized the racial ideology that gave rise to Hitler’s Final Solution. It is not easy to swallow, but it raises important questions about medical ethics, the value of diversity, and the quest for physical perfection.
The eugenics movement didn’t just happen in Germany and it wasn’t only about the Jews.
The culmination of Nazi racial hygiene was the near-annihilation European Jewry.
Deadly Medicine features more than 200 artifacts and objects, almost 200 photographs, historic film footage, and survivor testimony. On loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Deadly Medicine
was originally shown there in 2004.
One enters and exits the exhibit through a corridor where the question is posed, “Where would you draw the line?” Developed by the Maltz Museum as a companion to Deadly Medicine, this interactive display raises seven current-
day bioethical questions. For example, health officials recently jailed a man, who they believed infected 56 people with rare, drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, for refusing an order to be quarantined. Should a citizen be detained against his will to protect public health?
Visitors can express their opinions by depositing “yes” or “no” tokens in the clear plastic boxes mounted underneath
each scenario. Deadly Medicine takes visitors on a historical journey in a cleverly designed setting vaguely
reminiscent of a 1930s medical clinic. Exhibit areas are separated by canvas folding screens, resembling those used for privacy between hospital beds. Artifacts, most of which are two-dimensional, are mounted on white tile walls
set off by institutional-looking pipes and panels of glass. A few small TV screens play historical film footage, but
by and large, this is an exhibit requiring reading of the accompanying text. The first quarter of Deadly Medicine
describes the beginnings of the eugenics movement that blossomed in the early 20th century. German biologist
August Weissmann’s 1892 theory of “immutable germ plasm,” coupled with the re-discovery in 1900 of Mendel’s principles of heredity, fostered growing international support. The movement was also influenced by Darwin’s theory
of evolution by natural selection, or “survival of the fittest.” Its practical result would be marginalization or elimination of the “unfit.”
“This exhibit makes the point that the eugenics movement didn’t just happen in Germany and it wasn’t just about the
Jews,” says Maltz Musem executive director Judi Feniger. “It was an international movement that attracted the support of many physicians and scientists.” In the U.S., the Immigration Act of 1924 sharply limiting immigration
from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia reflected an effort to ensure a healthy “racial stock.” From 1927 to 1972, residents of the Lynchburg (Va.)
Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded were deemed “unfit” to reproduce and were forcibly sterilized.
Soon the exhibit narrows its focus to post-World War I Germany with examples of the Weimar government’s (largely positive) public health campaigns. These were aimed at reducing tuberculosis, venereal disease and alcoholism, which scientists had linked with birth defects and infant mortality. However, it wasn’t long before a growing faction
began to connect eugenics to race. Jews and the Roma (gypsies) were identified as racial “hybrids,” aliens outside the German national body. These ideas were adopted by the growing Nazi party and were embraced by many German
physicians and scientists. When Hitler ascended to power and all the educational and cultural institutions came under state control, racial eugenics permeated German society. The fecund German mother producing many healthy offspring was exalted. Homosexuality, deemed an obstruction to reproduction, was criminalized.
Deadly Medicine traces how eugenics was used to justify ever more inhumane acts. An estimated 400,000 Germans underwent sterilization under the provisions of a 1933 law promoting this surgery for those suffering from any one of nine conditions: feeblemindedness (a highly elastic label), schizophrenia, manic-depression, chronic alcoholism,
Huntington’s chorea, genetic epilepsy, genetic blindness, genetic deafness, and severe physical deformity.
The Blood Protection Law announced at Nuremburg in 1935 effectively denaturalized Jews and forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. The “Final Solutions” exhibit area chronicles the euthanasia of thousands of disabled children and infants, considered a burden on wartime Germany’s resources. This program soon expanded to include adult mental patients, who were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning in gas chambers disguised as showers.
These actions were just the prelude. The culmination of Nazi racial hygiene was the near-annihilation European Jewry. Deadly Medicine examines the familiar particulars of the Holocaust n the concentration of Jews in ghettos, the mass gassing in the camps, cruel medical experiments n in a mercifully abbreviated way.
The most moving part of the exhibit comes at the end. In a small theater, a film loop offers testimony by survivors. Their unblinking accounts of childhood memories, the stuff of nightmares, put a human face on the history that precedes them. There is no spoonful of sugar to make Deadly Medicine go down, but if the exhibit provokes thoughtful discussion of today’s bioethical issues, it may be just what the doctor ordered.
skahn@cjn.org
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