Exhibit explores Nazi `eugenics'
WASHINGTON -- Josef Mengele, the death camp doctor whose name is synonymous with Nazi sadism, makes only a brief appearance in the new Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibition "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." He is there, almost as a footnote, surrounded by his ilk, and more to the point, by the trappings, the prestige, and the dignity of science. Mengele, as a criminal, is a symbol for a larger crime: the use and abuse of science in the name of Nazism.
"Deadly Medicine," which opens this week and runs through October 2005, is so cogent and chilling it's worth seeing twice. Go through the first time the way curator Susan Bachrach intended, beginning with the fears and anxieties of Germany just after its devastating loss in the first World War. Defeat, poverty, and urbanization made Germans fear their culture was losing its identity and its resilience.
But rising to the challenge of saving Germany was a nexus of doctors, reformers, and scientists who promised relief. Mankind, looked at objectively, could make itself healthier: by having healthier babies, tracing and eliminating genetic defects, and preventing disease and "deviancy" from spreading throughout the society and from one generation to the next. All these efforts, including a sinister strain of racism, were grouped under "eugenics."
From an exploration of the rise of eugenics, the exhibit leads inexorably, methodically, and incrementally to the Nazi era of forced sterilization, euthanasia, and, finally, concentration camps and mass killings. Illustrating a complex interweaving of ideas are exhibits that show the wide appeal, to both the political left and the right, of eugenic thinking (which dated back to the 19th century). Calipers for measuring the body, trays of glass eyes for determining eye color, and anthropological mug shots show the scientific fascination with documenting the spectrum of human variation. Documenting the other end of this long and tragic evolution of thought is an asbestos mitt, used by the people who stoked the crematoriums where the bodies of the disabled were incinerated.
At every step in this tragic progress a moral threshold is crossed. Why it was crossed, then and there, in Adolf Hitler's Germany, is open to endless debate. But as the museum's director, Sara J. Bloomfield, says in the catalog to the exhibition, "During the Holocaust, every institution established to uphold civilized values failed -- the academy, the media, the judiciary, law enforcement, the churches, the government and, yes, the medical and scientific disciplines as well."
Now go through the exhibition a second time, starting with the most distinctive failure of German society, the death camps, and strip away each of the peculiarly German "twists" that happened to science and medicine in the years leading up to Hitler's regime. Suddenly, this is an exhibition about problems that are universal to science and medicine, about the arrogance of the Enlightenment and the willingness of thinkers to collaborate with ideologues, all of which is deeply troubling. "We've shown this to a lot of physicians, and they respond very uniquely to it," Bachrach says. "Some of them get very defensive about it."
Doctors can watch exemplars of their field, famous pediatricians, become instrumental in euthanizing children with birth defects. Anthropologists and other scientists will see how easy it was to cross the very fine line between gathering data on people from other cultures and using that data to divide people into racial classes, hierarchically arranged. One of the way stations en route to killing 6 million Jews was figuring out just what a Jew was -- and science was more than happy to assist in making the distinction.
Visitors who might like to think that Germany was exceptional in its pursuit of eugenics will find no comfort, either. Early in the exhibit, there is space devoted to eugenics in other countries. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s Supreme Court decision of 1927, which affirmed Virginia's right to sterilize a supposedly "feebleminded" woman, is plastered on the wall. The message is as repellent as the language is seductive: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."
The Holocaust Memorial Museum exists to remind us all of Auschwitz. This particular exhibition does even more. It reminds us that when faced with fears and anxieties similar to those that led to Auschwitz, we have precedents -- scientific, historical, legal, and social -- that can sober us quickly and turn us toward an ethical confusion and uncertainty that is, in the end, healthier than the certainty with which Nazi science proceeded down its grisly road. 
