Gene Fools

On the edge of Loring Park, down the street from La Belle Vie, sits the former site of the now-defunct Minnesota Eugenics Society. Led by Charles Dight, the society was most vocal in the years leading up to World War II, when it preached the need to stop undesirables—anyone from homosexuals to those with mental illness—from reproducing. Dight even wrote a letter to a newly elected Adolph Hitler, praising him for “stamping out mental inferiority” among the German people and wishing him well in his future endeavors.

The University of Minnesota housed the Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics until the early 1960s. Now, almost fifty years later, the U of M’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies brings Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race to the Science Museum of Minnesota, an exhibit the foundation hopes will reopen a dialogue some mistakenly believe is unnecessary.

“Many people think the Holocaust was about a bunch of crazy people spewing ideas about hate,” says Stephen Feinstein, director of the center. “These were educated people at the forefront of the movement—MDs, psychiatrists. It shows how quickly there can be an ethical slide among professionals.”

Debuting in 2004 at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the exhibit has since traveled to diverse places such as the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, bringing with it artifacts from medical experiments, propaganda posters, audio and visual clips, and testimony from survivors of the Nazi regime. According to curator Susan Bachrach, the exhibit aims to do more than expose the atrocities of the Holocaust, it “aims to present an accurate picture and humanize the bad guys. [The Holocaust happened because] educated people made a series of decisions that took the country to a dark place.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the traveling exhibit is the addition of a component focusing on the international support eugenics gained due to Darwin’s arguments on natural selection and the “survival of the fittest.” Many countries—including our own—preached family planning and segregation in the name of eugenics, a word that means “well born.” As a matter of public health, eugenics was also viewed by many as a legitimate way to eliminate, through breeding, serious health conditions such as epilepsy and minimize unfortunate incidences of mental illness. According to Feinstein, Minnesota’s state fair had a booth that explained the “benefits of Norwegians marrying Norwegians, Swedish marrying Swedish, not intermixing.” The current perception of eugenics as purely a Nazi invention is a direct result of the Nazis’ shift from trying to control genetics through marriage and reproduction to simply eliminating those seen as biologically unfavorable.