The Rocket

Issue date: 3/9/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Submitted Photo Susan Bachrach [Click to enlarge]

Imagine being told you can't have children because you aren't fit enough. That was the point of Susan Bachrach's lecture Tuesday.

To celebrate the 13th annual Holocaust program, a presentation by a curator from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., presented information for students and faculty about genetics before the Holocaust.

Bachrach, curator for special exhibitions, oversees all phases of special exhibitions at the museum, including the historic research and identification of artifacts. She presented her most recent exhibition titled, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.

Her speech focused on eugenics, an area of interest in the early 20th century, not typically taught in history classes in America.

Eugenics is a science dealing with the improvement of hereditary qualities, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Doctors and the government in Europe and America focused on trying to prevent those considered the "lesser" or "unfit" people from having children by sterilizing them. During the 1920s, the U.S government conducted a Fittest Family contest to seek out the so-called perfect family.

In Germany, during Adolf Hitler's reign, the concept of eugenics was taken beyond the sterilization that was taking place everywhere else.

"That is what we want people to take from this exhibit," Bachrach said. "While the ideas of eugenics did not have a direct path to the Holocaust, it did however provide the groundwork that led to the horrors that occurred in Germany."

Hitler and his Third Reich began to secretly murder children, and eventually adults, who were said to provide little or no future value to German society.

"The Nazi's did promote some forms of positive eugenics, such as no smoking or drinking during pregnancy, but at the same time, they were calculating the total savings that murdering the unfit would save the country," Bachrach said. "People always look at what happened to the Jewish people in Germany and often don't realize that it began with the fat, mentally challenged and deformed people."

Bachrach said people are unaware of how these extreme ways of thinking expanded beyond the borders of Europe.

"What they fail to grasp even more is that America was participating in eugenics as well, although not at the level of actually murdering thousands of innocent humans," she said.

The doctors that were involved in the Nazi plans of eugenics were not the crazy people that they were made be perceived as, she said.

"These doctors were known around the world as leading innovators in progressive medicine before the Holocaust," Bachrach said. "Somewhere along the way they, as did many other German people, became very twisted in their way of thinking."

Bachrach joined the Holocaust Museum in 1992, and has contributed to several exhibitions for the museum. She is also the author of Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust, which received the American Library Association's 1995 Best Book for Young Adults award.

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