The Holocaust Museum in D.C has mounted a major exhibition in Dresden, Germany about the “scientific” eugenecist interest throughout the West that provided the springboard for the Nazi exterminators.
By the beginning of World War II, a number of doctors were eager to further the study of eugenics. Although the story of Josef Mengele’s medical experiments at Auschwitz is well-known and poignantly evoked in the exhibit by interviews with twins who survived, thousands more doctors and geneticists participated in sterilization and euthanasia programs or benefited directly from the Holocaust. “During this period where power was abused, this profession — so respected today — allowed itself to be corrupted,” Bachrach says. The exhibit includes pictures of some of the thousands of congenitally ill infants who were secretly killed by their doctors beginning in 1939. During “Operation T-4,” a sort of test run for the death camps, tens of thousands of psychiatric patients were gassed in the cellars of mental institutions around Germany in the early years of the war.