![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[travel] Nazi eugenics
In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, there was an exhibit on loan from the Washington DC Holocaust museum on eugenics. It was interesting to see how the Nazis took something extreme and justified it to a somewhat skeptical public. They basically mixed some reasonable (though still controversial) arguments in with increasingly extreme conclusions from those arguments.
For example, they produced graphs of demographic shifts showing how, by 1960, there would be a crushingly huge weight of old and infirm people to support. This was argued to mean that people (especially fit, productive ones) need to have more offspring to prrevent social collapse. Amusingly, the 1960 disaster scenario looks a lot like what developed countries have today, demographics-wise, whereas their 1900 historical scenario looks like a modern third-world country. Apparently that disaster didn't come to pass, though modern demographers are currently debating whether further demographic shifts toward an older population will bring down the social security system.
Here's another still-common (though controversial) fear – that smart people aren't reproducing enough, causing the population to become dumber. The Nazis played off this fear with the sort of chartjunk Edward Tufte loves to hate – underbreeding Aryan pole vaulters are being replaced by overbreeding drooling idiots. While the chart is incendiary and kind of ridiculous, there is still serious concern from many that smart people are focusing too much on their careers instead of having children.
This was also a time when Germany's economy was in the toilet. The Nazis pointed out the socialized healthcare costs for the disabled were a huge tax burden at a time when most Germans could not afford medical care. Again, the argument for spending money to help healthy people stay at their optimum potential is reasonable and probably resonated well with the average German. Finally, America had been the "leader" in eugenics throughout the 1920s, with many states allowing the compulsory sterilization of mental institution patients. Germany basically said “Look how well it's working in America. We can't afford to fall behind. Let's take it to the next step.”
However, with these arguments in place, Germany started executing extreme solutions. After calculating the taxpayer burden of each lifetime invalid, they reasoned that they could save a lot of money by killing them outright instead of ust sterilizing them. The definition of invalid broadened to include more or less anyone the Nazis didn't like, and the killings became larger and larger. Unlike the Holocaust, these killings were done with less secrecy. It took a very brave act by a very brave Catholic preacher in 1942 to put a stop to things. He delivered a sermon to a large audience condemning the Nazi actions as un-Christian, and incredibly, the Nazis backed down. Meanwhile choice frauleins who exhibited Aryan perfection were paid large sums of money to have as many children as possible. The fathers in many cases were high ranking SS officers. The whole exhibit left me very uneasy, and not just for the enormity of the Nazi exterminations. The uneasiness was my reaction to seeing how a toxic payload can be delivered wrapped in reasonable-looking arguments.
One of the most surreal aspects of my visit was that a mentally handicapped German man was passing through the exhibit around the same time as me. He clearly understood what the exhibit was all about and was very upset by it, though he couldn't figure out that I didn't speak German.
---
I started thinking about how eugenics may go through a resurgence soon (in a very different form) thanks to the growing ease of genetic engineering. I'll save that for a separate post.
For example, they produced graphs of demographic shifts showing how, by 1960, there would be a crushingly huge weight of old and infirm people to support. This was argued to mean that people (especially fit, productive ones) need to have more offspring to prrevent social collapse. Amusingly, the 1960 disaster scenario looks a lot like what developed countries have today, demographics-wise, whereas their 1900 historical scenario looks like a modern third-world country. Apparently that disaster didn't come to pass, though modern demographers are currently debating whether further demographic shifts toward an older population will bring down the social security system.
Here's another still-common (though controversial) fear – that smart people aren't reproducing enough, causing the population to become dumber. The Nazis played off this fear with the sort of chartjunk Edward Tufte loves to hate – underbreeding Aryan pole vaulters are being replaced by overbreeding drooling idiots. While the chart is incendiary and kind of ridiculous, there is still serious concern from many that smart people are focusing too much on their careers instead of having children.
This was also a time when Germany's economy was in the toilet. The Nazis pointed out the socialized healthcare costs for the disabled were a huge tax burden at a time when most Germans could not afford medical care. Again, the argument for spending money to help healthy people stay at their optimum potential is reasonable and probably resonated well with the average German. Finally, America had been the "leader" in eugenics throughout the 1920s, with many states allowing the compulsory sterilization of mental institution patients. Germany basically said “Look how well it's working in America. We can't afford to fall behind. Let's take it to the next step.”
However, with these arguments in place, Germany started executing extreme solutions. After calculating the taxpayer burden of each lifetime invalid, they reasoned that they could save a lot of money by killing them outright instead of ust sterilizing them. The definition of invalid broadened to include more or less anyone the Nazis didn't like, and the killings became larger and larger. Unlike the Holocaust, these killings were done with less secrecy. It took a very brave act by a very brave Catholic preacher in 1942 to put a stop to things. He delivered a sermon to a large audience condemning the Nazi actions as un-Christian, and incredibly, the Nazis backed down. Meanwhile choice frauleins who exhibited Aryan perfection were paid large sums of money to have as many children as possible. The fathers in many cases were high ranking SS officers. The whole exhibit left me very uneasy, and not just for the enormity of the Nazi exterminations. The uneasiness was my reaction to seeing how a toxic payload can be delivered wrapped in reasonable-looking arguments.
One of the most surreal aspects of my visit was that a mentally handicapped German man was passing through the exhibit around the same time as me. He clearly understood what the exhibit was all about and was very upset by it, though he couldn't figure out that I didn't speak German.
---
I started thinking about how eugenics may go through a resurgence soon (in a very different form) thanks to the growing ease of genetic engineering. I'll save that for a separate post.