Hi everyone! I’m Frances
Choi, and for a week over the summer I was able to travel to Germany to explore
the roots of eugenic ideology leading up to and during the Nazi regime. I split
my time between two cities, Berlin and Dresden. To accompany me, I brought
along my summer reading for Junior Tutorial, Racial Hygiene by Robert Proctor. It was a fascinating book that
gave me a good background of eugenic thought among the German medical community
in the early 1900s. Proctor emphasized the idea that eugenic sentiment existed
long before the Nazis came into power, and that the medical community itself
actively aided the Nazi agenda, downplaying popular belief that the Nazis
hijacked a passive scientific community. My desire to pursue this research came
from learning about the American eugenics movement and forced sterilization of
women in Sophomore Tutorial, which was shocking for me to discover. I felt that
this trip would allow me to compare the movement in Germany versus the U.S.
while also giving me the chance to stay in a foreign country!
I arrived in the afternoon
in Berlin after having spent nine weeks in Rome. Since I speak Italian, this was
the first time I had any sort of language barrier in a foreign country, but
fortunately I could get around quite easily with English. I settled into my
hostel, which was in a very central location, and had my first German meal of schnitzel
and potatoes for dinner!
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| First meal in Germany! |
The next day was a full day for me; I had booked a six-hour tour of Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, which was the site of a Nazi concentration and Soviet prison camp about an hour train ride from Berlin. While the tour seemed to cover mainly the time period after my area of research, as one would expect from a Nazi-run concentration camp, I thought it was important to see for myself the devastating results of such an ideology. In fact, it was chilling for me to read about the origins of eugenics in Racial Hygiene, which seemingly started off as a genuine effort to protect the health of the German people, but became a tool that led to the death of millions. Oxford’s online definition of eugenics is: “The science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.” Without closer scrutiny, there does not seem to be anything wrong with this practice; it almost sounds positive.
It was a gloomy morning and
rained on and off until the afternoon, when the sun finally came out. The dreariness
only added to the solemn atmosphere that was immediately felt when you walked
through the gates of the camp. Sachsenhausen was a “model” concentration camp
for the hundreds that followed, and it was also the control center for the
Nazis. Although Sachsenhausen’s purpose was not to be a death camp, but a labor
camp, many still died at this location from “extermination via labor.” After
the Nazis cleared out with the end of World War II, the concentration camp was
reopened as a camp run by the KGB under the Soviet Union.
We also learned a bit about
the present-day area of Sachsenhausen, which is located in Oranienburg,
Germany. The tour guide told us that many of the neo-Nazis in Germany live in
this town, and used to cause trouble for the visitors of Sachsenhausen until
more police enforcement was brought in, even throwing eggs at them and shouting
“Heil Hitler!” In addition, the SS training camp outside the gates of
Sachsenhausen was now a police school, which we all found ironic. As we passed
by it, I was drawn to the large sign that had been positioned for all to see in
the lawn of the police school, and read:
“Human dignity shall be inviolable.
To respect and protect shall be the duty of all state authority.”
There was no doubt that these significant words were contrasting themselves with the horrors that resulted from the violation of human dignity for much of the 20th century at this site. It sounded almost like an apology. The word “human” clearly unified all types of peoples, as opposed to the idea that some groups of humans were superior to others. Both this and the mention of neo-Nazi presence in Oranienburg demonstrated the implications of the war and its deeper problematic ideologies, that have lasted to this very day.
The tour was quite long and packed with information, so I will discuss only some of the points that stood out to me or were relevant to my research. Our guide told us about how the Nazis created and identified categories of peoples by forcing them to wear different colored triangles. Based on the color of your triangle, you would be treated differently. The lowest of the low were the homosexuals, who wore pink, the Jews, who wore yellow, and the Sinti and Roma, who wore brown. Ironically, the criminals were a class that was treated the best out of all the prisoners, and wore green.
Another section of the tour dealt with the medical experimentation that occurred in the camp. The Nazi doctors were creative in finding ways to perform terrible experiments on the prisoners, especially those at the bottom of the social pyramid, who did not hold up to the standards of the model Aryan—someone who was tall, white, blond, and blue-eyed. If they deemed you inferior, they would sterilize you. This would happen especially to women via radiation burns on their ovaries. The scientists committed other gruesome acts such as injecting eyes with blue dye or bleaching the skin of Sinti and Roma. Our guide also talked about one particular doctor who enjoyed collecting tattoos, which actually used to be displayed as part of the memorial exhibit. However, they were later removed as a gesture of respect to the previous owners of the skin, which became sort of an object of wonder for visitors. On hearing this, I thought back to our discussion in Sophomore Tutorial about including human remains as part of a museum, and how to go about presenting the history of science to the public in an ethical way. It seemed that in this case the situation got too out of hand, which was food for thought as I contemplated the ways in which Germany as a country tried to display this dark part of their history in order to teach certain lessons, yet without making it into a spectacle.
There was no doubt that these significant words were contrasting themselves with the horrors that resulted from the violation of human dignity for much of the 20th century at this site. It sounded almost like an apology. The word “human” clearly unified all types of peoples, as opposed to the idea that some groups of humans were superior to others. Both this and the mention of neo-Nazi presence in Oranienburg demonstrated the implications of the war and its deeper problematic ideologies, that have lasted to this very day.
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| Prisoners wore a triangle on their uniform. |
The tour was quite long and packed with information, so I will discuss only some of the points that stood out to me or were relevant to my research. Our guide told us about how the Nazis created and identified categories of peoples by forcing them to wear different colored triangles. Based on the color of your triangle, you would be treated differently. The lowest of the low were the homosexuals, who wore pink, the Jews, who wore yellow, and the Sinti and Roma, who wore brown. Ironically, the criminals were a class that was treated the best out of all the prisoners, and wore green.
Another section of the tour dealt with the medical experimentation that occurred in the camp. The Nazi doctors were creative in finding ways to perform terrible experiments on the prisoners, especially those at the bottom of the social pyramid, who did not hold up to the standards of the model Aryan—someone who was tall, white, blond, and blue-eyed. If they deemed you inferior, they would sterilize you. This would happen especially to women via radiation burns on their ovaries. The scientists committed other gruesome acts such as injecting eyes with blue dye or bleaching the skin of Sinti and Roma. Our guide also talked about one particular doctor who enjoyed collecting tattoos, which actually used to be displayed as part of the memorial exhibit. However, they were later removed as a gesture of respect to the previous owners of the skin, which became sort of an object of wonder for visitors. On hearing this, I thought back to our discussion in Sophomore Tutorial about including human remains as part of a museum, and how to go about presenting the history of science to the public in an ethical way. It seemed that in this case the situation got too out of hand, which was food for thought as I contemplated the ways in which Germany as a country tried to display this dark part of their history in order to teach certain lessons, yet without making it into a spectacle.
Although I started off my research on a somber note, it was important to keep in mind the heavy consequences of a science that, taken face-value, sounded straightforward enough. Follow along as I write next about my visit to the memorials to victims of the Holocaust and to the German Historical Museum in Berlin!
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| A map of the grounds of Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum. |
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| A building used to conduct experiments on the prisoners. The sign on the side of the building reads "Pathologie." |
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