Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race

          This week on September 11th I took the opportunity to go to the Deadly Medicine exhibit at the Reece Museum on campus at ETSU. The exhibit included multiple examples of German propaganda, photos taken of the test subjects, and photos of the labs/buildings where the experiments and research studies were conducted. In an attempt to cleanse the German society and secure their so thought biological superiority, eugenics research became supported among health researchers and the German government. One of the exhibits that really caught my eye was The Mass Sterilization Program. On July 14th, 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring was enacted.  This allowed the sterilization of men and women who suffered from specific hereditary conditions. 

The image above was one displayed in the exhibit, its states, "You are sharing the load! A hereditary ill person costs 50,000 reichsmarks on average up to the age of sixty." This image was printed in a Nazi-era high school biology textbook by Jakob Graf. 

The final solutions for the racial hygiene the Nazi's were practicing resulted in euthanasia, or 'mercy death'. Those who were born with birth defects that were being seen as burdens on national resources were selected to be killed. They started with the German infants and children that were born with severe birth defects killing more that 5,000 between 1939 and 1945. Also, from January 1940 through August 1941 there were70,000 institutionalized adults, mainly non-Jewish Germans, killed in gas chambers. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures inside the exhibit, but the picture that really opened my eyes to the horrors of this era was of a one of the buildings in a town where they were burning bodies and the black oily smoke that was coming from the chimney for the whole town to see. I could not imagine experiencing such a terrible sight, let alone living with that every day. When you are going through grade school and learn about the holocaust most of the information you are taught is just a statistics cocktail full of numbers without meaning. Going through this exhibit has shown me a more in depth look at the methods and view points of the Nazis and of the gruesome tasks that they supported and encouraged.