“IF ONE IMAGINES… A BATTLEFEILD COVERED WITH THOUSANDS OF DEAD YOUTHS… THEN OUR INSTITUTIONS FOR IDIOTS AND THEIR CARE… ONE IS MOST APPALLED BY… THE SACRIFICE OF THE BEST OF HUMANITY WHILE THE BEST CARE IS LAVISHED ON LIFE OF NEGATIVE WORTH.”
–Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Authorization of the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life
It is hard to imagine what life was like a hundred years ago. I will forgo painting a detailed picture, except to say that the whole idea of reading a post on a blog would be utterly alien to the turn-of-the-century consciousness. It’s hard to imagine a world without air travel, computers, (quality) recorded music, strip malls, retail bookstore chains, and the globalized economy. And it would be equally hard to imagine living in a state committed to an intense nationalism, modern progress, and quelling biological threat.
Such was the state of Germany after the ghastly results of WWI. The “war to end all wars” was really only the beginning that served to intensify those commitments with the rise of the Nazi Party. Their deification of the state claimed a right to territorial expansion and the need for biological superiority. For the average German it was either follow the policies the resulted in another World War (and the extermination of six million Jews) or extinction. There is not much middle ground between utopia and annihilation.
At the Science Museum of Minnesota I was introduced to this cultural backdrop as well as the factors that lead up to the Nazi embrace of the mythical “Aryan master race” in their exhibit Deadly Medicine, an exhibit sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Interestingly enough, the idea of “racial hygiene” was not particular to the Nazis. Theirs was the terrible subset of a science gone mad that had swept through Western industrialized nations called eugenics—or as the exhibit said, “science as salvation.”
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