Eugenics in Berlin and Dresden Part #3

Dresden was the final destination of a long summer in Europe before I headed back to Boston. It had a different feel than Berlin, smaller and more quaint, but with the charm of an old historic city that is populated mainly by locals. There was definitely less English spoken, but enough for me to get around. The two main sites I visited were the German Hygiene Museum and the Military History Museum, besides doing my own touring of the Old Town district and a botanical garden. I was excited to see the German Hygiene Museum especially because I thought I would be able to find a trove of information there for my research.

Botanical Garden

Old Dresden

Procession of the Princes

The Hygiene Museum was not what I was expecting; I was reminded of the Science Museum back at home in Boston. After becoming wary of the word “hygiene,” I was almost surprised to see families and school trips at the museum. The museum was divided into exhibition rooms focusing on a certain theme of the human experience; for example, "Living and Dying," "Eating and Drinking," "Sexuality," "Memory, Thinking, Learning," etc. 

German Hygiene Museum

It is important to remember the museum in its original context: a place that provided health education to the public. It was founded in 1912, when Dresden was known for being a "healthy" city, whose reputation was based on its famous sanatoriums. I was able to comprehend how this might be problematic as I explored some of the display cases in an exhibit laying out the history of the museum. One shelf contained some models of Greek statues, and the description next to it was titled "Idealizing the Body." As a champion of hygiene, the museum and the city were able to determine who was considered "healthy" versus "unhealthy." The display "Idealizing the Body" demonstrated that a classical Greek figure was the standard for health and beauty to Germans in the early 1900s, and was set forth as an example by the museum. 



When the ancient Greeks codified the dimensions and form of the organic, natural body in their sculpture in the fifth century B.C., they established a paragon of physical beauty that remains a standard down to the present day... Ever since the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum was founded in 1911, it, too, has repeatedly turned to classical statues for its exhibition models of the body and its production of instructional materials.

Later on, when the Nazis came to power, the museum more strongly pursued a political agenda so that they had fully embraced the thinking of eugenics by 1945. According to the exhibition of the museum's history, after 1933, offices in the museum were occupied at least intermittently by Nazi Party organizations, the SS, and government institutions dealing with information about health, "race" ideology, and eugenics. One of the projects of the Hygiene Museum was a eugenics propaganda show called "Miracle of Life," an initiative that was led by Bruno Gebhard in 1935. He later organized the exhibition "Eugenics in New Germany," which was displayed in several cities in the U.S. for the American Public Health Organization. Clearly, the site was an important political tool that indirectly helped to cause the persecution of many groups of people.

This was all fascinating information that contributed to my research, but unfortunately there was not much more than a small section in the museum dedicated to its eugenic history. I did not have much more success in the Military History Museum, which did not have the same historical roots and covered a much more general theme on war. Overall, I feel that the biggest challenge of my research project was trying to parse out information about racial science from the broader and more common subject of Nazism and World War II, which is rather easy to present since there is so much history that one can dive into. In addition, there might be some truth to the idea that we as the visitor of these sites and museums are more fascinated by the horrors that the Nazis committed rather than the broader social context and ideology that led to their actions. While I did not find as much as I had hoped on my adventures in Germany, the information that I did collect was valuable, and I appreciated above all the chance to see these objects of propaganda up close and actually visit the sites of science.

Thank you to the History of Science department, Professor Anne Harrington, and the Rosenkrantz Discovery Fund for making this incredible experience possible. I am so excited to take my research a further step forward by applying it to my junior paper in tutorial this year!