The Penn Stater Magazine

Deadly Medicine: Haunting Exhibit Comes to HUB-Robeson Galleries

March 11, 2010 at 6:45 pm Lori Shontz Leave a comment

I’m not going to sugarcoat this: The exhibit I’m going to encourage everyone to see isn’t easy to look at. But Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, which is on display at the HUB-Robeson Galleries until May 2, paints a portrait of the Holocaust that isn’t often seen—and is important to understand. It’s well worth your time to stop by.

The exhibit, from the United States Holocaust Museum, recounts both the role of eugenics in the Holocaust and the role that doctors and the scientific community played in its horrific results. It traces the movement from the 1920s, with a belief that social welfare programs and modern medicine were keeping the “unfit” and “feebleminded” alive—and diluting the gene pool. That, eugenics proponents said, made Germany a weaker nation.

A quote from Joseph Goebbels featured in the exhibit sums up the program: “Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked. … Our objectives are entirely different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.”

The program started with encouraging women to have more babies, then moved to forced sterilization of people deemed “genetically unfit.” It progressed to the killing of children with birth defects, then killing mentally and physically disabled adults in state institutions.

The displays are packed with gripping, horrifying information. There are photos of emaciated children and gas chambers, and propaganda posters with suggestions such as this, one of “Ten Commandments for Choosing a Mate”—”In choosing your spouse, ask about his ancestors. Never marry the one good person from a bad family.”

These photos from the exhibit are of Edith F, a victim of the children's euthanasia program.

The most viscerally affecting part of the exhibit is a video featuring interviews with survivors or victims’ families. I teach a news writing and reporting class in the College of Communications, and my students covered the exhibit’s opening last month. At one point, I found most of the students in the room with the video, transfixed. I joined them, watching as twins who were taken from their mother and experimented on recounted their experience. Blood was drawn repeatedly from their necks and arms, and no one worried if they were in pain. The woman paused and said, softly, “I hate doctors.” It gave me goosebumps.

Many of my students warned about the graphic nature of some of the displays in their news stories. They aren’t easy to look at, but it is important. (And it’s not just Germany; the exhibit includes the eugenics movement in the United States, too.) As Ann Shields ’78, director of the HUB-Robeson Galleries, told my class, “I hope you come away from this generally disturbed and ask, ‘Why and how did this happen?’ How can we learn to not be afraid of something or someone different from ourselves?”

Lori Shontz, senior editor

Entry filed under: Campus events, College of Communications. Tags: Ann Shields, Deadly Medicine, eugenics, HUB-Robeson Galleries, Joseph Goebbels, United States Holocaust Museum.