Presentación Esencial

EUGENICS & THE NAZI HORROR

dark science:

EUGENICS & THE NAZI HORROR

EUGENICS: THE NOT-SO-GREAT SCIENCE

diving in:

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

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):

EUGENICS ARRIVES TO NAZI GERMANY

the darker twist:

EUGENICS ARRIVES TO NAZI GERMANY

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.

• 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.

EUGENICS ARRIVES TO NAZI GERMANY

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

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

EUTHANASIA & AKTION T4 PROGRAM

the true horror:

• 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.

EUTHANASIA & AKTION T4 PROGRAM

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.

WHAT ARE YOUR QUESTIONS?

"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.