Presentación Esencial

dark science:

EUGENICS & THE NAZI HORROR

EUGENICS & THE NAZI HORROR

diving in:

EUGENICS: THE NOT-SO-GREAT SCIENCE

EUGENICS: THE NOT-SO-GREAT SCIENCE

• A.K.A. "racial hygiene", it was a scientific movement in the late XIXth & early XXth centuries.

• Eugenicists believed social issues were hereditary (RACES), they aimed to identify, address, and prevent these issues through biological solutions.

• It had a huge impact on the USA & W.E. (especially Germany):

➨ Policies for "better breeding" and "positive eugenics efforts" (worthy/unworthy people).

the darker twist:

EUGENICS ARRIVES TO NAZI GERMANY

EUGENICS ARRIVES TO NAZI GERMANY

EUGENICS ARRIVES TO NAZI GERMANY

• Racist, antisemitist, and ableist ideas rooted in the population through fear.

• Jews, Romas, black people, people with a disability, "shouldn't reproduce". "They are a waste. Let's kill them".

• Propaganda to make people support the killing of these people, undercalling it euthanasia.

Slide to indoctrinate youth taken from a Nazi propaganda filmstrip. Promoting "euthanasia," The caption says: "Mentally ill Negro (English) 16 years in an institution costing 35,000 RM [Reichsmarks]." Place and date uncertain.

Nazi physician Karl Brandt, director of the Euthanasia Program. August 27, 1942

the true horror:

EUTHANASIA & AKTION T4 PROGRAM

Friedrich Mennecke, a Euthanasia Program physician responsible for sending many patients to be gassed. He was sentenced to death in 1946. Germany, date uncertain.

EUTHANASIA & AKTION T4 PROGRAM

• The 1939 Euthanasia Program by the Nazis systematically murdered disabled individuals, a precursor to the Holocaust's "Final Solution" by about two years. There was also a child-targeted euthanasia program.

• Hitler authorised the secret creation of 6 gassing instalations, calling it T4. Around 250,000 people were sistematically killed.

• Halted in 1941 but resumed covertly in 1942, expanded during World War II.

• A more de-centralised second phase was undergone, with the more local killing of disabled children under drugs and injections.

WHAT ARE YOUR QUESTIONS?

Topics to discuss:

• Difference between science and pseudoscience.

• Impact of the Euthanasia and Aktion T4 programs on the Jewish Holocaust.

• Personal opinions (including arguments), connecting this topic with the social, cultural, and political context of the time.

"Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution": Motto of the IInd INternational Eugenics Congress, 1921, portrayed as a tree with its roots based in a variety of different spheres.