Holocaust Essays (2284 words) - Eugenics, Applied Genetics

Holocaust The Lebensborn Project The topic of eugenics cannot be discussed without encountering the Holocaust, but this is as it should be. When contemporary geneticists, genetics counselors and clinical geneticists wonder why it is that genetics receives special attention from those concerned with ethics, the answer is simple and can be found in history. The events which led to the sterilization, torture and murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and children of mixed racial heritage in the years just before and during the era of the Third Reich in Germany were rooted firmly in the science of genetics (Muller-Hill, 1988). Rooted not in fringe, lunatic science but in the mainstream of reputable genetics in what was indisputably the most advanced scientific and technological society of its day. The pursuit of genetic purity in the name of public health led directly to Dachau, Treblinka, Ravensbruck and Auschwitz. As early as 1931 influential geneticists such as Fritz Lenz were referring to National Socialism as applied biology in their textbooks (Caplan, 1992). As difficult as it is for many contemporary scientists to accept (Caplan, 1992; Kater, 1992), mainstream science provided a good deal of enthusiastic scientific support for the virulent racism that fueled the killing machine of the Third Reich. When the Nazis came to power they were obsessed with securing the racial purity of the German people. The medical and biomedical communities in Germany not only endorsed this concern with negative eugenics, they had fostered it. Racial hygiene swept through German biology, public health, medicine and anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, long before the Nazis came to power (Weiss, 1987, Muller-Hill, 1988; Proctor, 1988; Kater, 1992). Many in the medical profession urged the Nazi leadership to undertake social policies that might lead to enhancing or increasing the genetic fitness of the German people (Kater, 1992). Eugenics consumed the German medical, biological and social scientific communities in the decade before World War II. Many physicians and scientists were frantic about threats they saw to the genetic health of the nation posed by the presence of inferior populations such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, with a lesser extent a distant threat which was, African peoples (Adams, 1990). The steps they took to protect against the public health disaster of a 'polluted' racial stock were so awful, so immoral, and so heinous that they have rightly, shaped all subsequent discussion of the ethics of both human genetics and eugenics. Steps to eliminate unfit or undesirable genes by prohibitions on sexual relations, restrictions on marriage, sterilization or killing, are all forms of negative population eugenics (Kevles, 1995). Nazi judges and scientists ordered children killed or sterilized who had parents of different racial backgrounds or were thought to have genetic predispositions toward mental illness, alcoholism, retardation or other disabilities. This was done to remove the threat such children posed to the genetic stock of the nation and to avoid having to pay the costs associated with institutionalization and hospitalization (Caplan, 1992). Laws were enacted prohibiting marriages between those whom Nazi race hygiene theory held were likely to produce degenerate offspring. Conversely, on a smaller scale, the Nazis tried to encourage those who satisfied Nazi racial ideals to have more children. The most extreme form of encouraging eugenic mating was the Lebensborn program which gave money, medals, housing and other rewards to persuade ideal mothers and fathers to have large numbers of children in order to create a super-race of Aryan children (Proctor, 1988). The provision of rewards, incentives and benefits to encourage the increased representation of certain genes in the gene pool of future generations constitutes positive population eugenics (Kevles, 1995). Nazi race hygiene theories were false. There is no evidence to support the biological views of the inherent inferiority of races or the biological superiority of specific ethnic groups, which underlay the eugenics efforts of the Third Reich. There is not even any firm basis for differentiating groups into races on the basis of genetics (Harding, 1993). The negative eugenics programs race hygiene spawned were not only patently unethical, since they were completely involuntary and coercive they were also based upon assumptions about genes and race that are not true. The Nazi drive to design future generations