12 October 2006
An exhibition on Nazi racial policies created for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has opened in a building in the German city of Dresden where posters were once produced trumpeting the theories that led to the murder of Europe's Jews. The exhibition, entitled "Deadly Medicine - Racial Madness in National Socialism" opened Thursday evening in the 1930s Hygiene Museum. Many of the swastika-stamped posters promoting Nazi theories of racial purity were made in the museum after it fell under Nazi control in 1933, a link that helped the museum persuade the Holocaust Memorial Museum to let one of its exhibits move abroad for the first time. Divided into three sections, the exhibit first shows how eugenics, which purported to improve the human species by controlling heredity, became a global movement in the scientific world starting in 1919. The second part picks up in 1933, when the Nazis began using eugenic theories to justify forced sterilization to establish a "master race." The third section explores how the Nazis ultimately used science as a weapon not only to murder some 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, but hundreds of thousands of others who died under euthanasia programs and other pseudoscientific efforts aimed at eliminating the supposedly unfit. One is the display of artwork by people killed under the Nazis' programs aimed at eliminating the mentally handicapped. The Germans created a separate, small gallery for the pictures. Museum officials say the exhibition is also a timely opportunity to explain racial hatred to young Germans in the eastern state of Saxony, where several neo-Nazi groups have strongholds.