National World War II Museum exhibit shows dark side of Nazi ...

The exhibit opening today at the National World War II Museum includes a picture from the 1930s showing Dr. Ernst Wentzler, a Berlin pediatrician, examining a child with rickets. Wentzler, who was renowned for his treatment of this bone disease, invented an incubator for newborns that became known as ?the Wentzler warmer,? said Susan Bachrach, the exhibit?s curator. He also developed ways to treat premature infants and children with birth defects.

But Wentzler had another, darker side, Bachrach said. He was one of three pediatricians who ordered the deaths of thousands of children who didn?t meet the Nazi ideal of health because they might have been afflicted with Down syndrome or profound physical or psychiatric problems.

Wentzler?s dual nature goes to the heart of ?Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,? a look at the development of the German scientific and medical communities? involvement with Nazism?s racist policies. There was, Bachrach said, much more to this misuse of science than Dr. Josef Mengele?s ghastly experiments with concentration camp inmates.

?That was way down the line,? Bachrach said. ?We?re trying to show that this came out of mainstream medicine and science. These were not fringe quacks. ? A fair number of them were not even ardent Nazis.?

What they were doing was based on eugenics, a field of study that supports practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population.

?The creepy thing about this is that these people thought they had the moral high ground,? said Kenneth Hoffman, the World War II Museum?s education director. ?They were doing it for the betterment of Germany. They talked about having a healthy society, but they did it at the expense of anyone who didn?t meet their standard of perfection.?

?Deadly Medicine,? which was assembled by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, will be on view through Oct. 15. Tulane University School of Medicine is its local sponsor.

?It shows the chain of events that got us from this idea of improving the human race to darker and darker steps,? said Bachrach, the Holocaust Museum?s curator of special exhibitions.

The exhibit traces the origins of eugenics to Charles Darwin?s research into evolution, which showed how species adapt to survive. It also demonstrates how ?social Darwinists? went beyond Darwin?s research to contend that people they deemed defective shouldn?t be allowed to have children.

Eugenics, an offshoot of this way of thinking, became popular in the early 20th century, Bachrach said, and its acceptance wasn?t limited to Germany. In 1927, eugenics received the endorsement of the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled that states could order sterilization ?for the protection and health of the state.? That decision still stands, although states have been loath to resort to sterilization.

This exhibit shows how eugenics gained traction with the rise of Nazism and its belief that Germans were superior and that people deemed inferior should be weeded out.

Propaganda posters on display glorify the Aryan ideal, with blond men and women and chubby, happy children. One flier lists ?Ten Commandments for Choosing a Mate,? including finding someone in good physical health, marrying someone ?of Nordic blood? and finding out about a prospective spouse?s heredity.

Head and facial features were measured, and even eye colors were scrutinized to gather evidence that would be used in determining who should be classified as inferior. Blood samples from twins were taken in an attempt to find hereditary clues to criminality, retardation and diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer.

?Even well-meaning people thought this was a solution to solving all kinds of problems,? Bachrach said. ?A lot of these scientists and physicians were mainstream. That?s hard for a lot of people to get.?

?Deadly Medicine? shows how the policy evolved, starting with propaganda exhorting women to have plenty of children and progressing to the sterilization of people deemed unfit to have children and the wholesale slaughter of young people and mental patients. Finally comes the genocide in concentration camps during World War II.

?The exhibit gets darker and darker,? said Bachrach. ?It?s very important to understand how the Holocaust progresses, how doctors and scientists legitimized a lot of this.?

This may be hard for visitors to grasp, Hoffman said. ?Doctors are some of the most loved, respected people in our society, and to see these doctors perpetrating these atrocities is a chilling thing.?

?Deadly Medicine? came to New Orleans at the behest of Dr. Benjamin Sachs, who is not only the dean of Tulane?s medical school but also the son of Holocaust survivors.

?I believe one of the responsibilities of medical school training is medical ethics,? he said. ?There is nothing that focuses the mind more than this exhibit in terms of bioethics.?

The most notorious practitioner of medical torture was Mengele, who was known as ?the angel of death? for his ghastly medical experiments, such as inducing hypothermia and strokes, Sachs said, to simulate conditions soldiers might encounter.

Mengele was fascinated by twins, and he studied them. One survivor of Mengele?s laboratory is Eva Kor, 78, who is scheduled to speak at the National World War II Museum on Sept. 6 at 6 p.m.

Her twin sister, Miriam Mozes, has since died. Kor, who married a Holocaust survivor, lives in Terre Haute, Ind.

?She has dedicated her life to teaching about medical ethics,? Sachs said.

Among the ethical questions the exhibit poses ? but doesn?t attempt to resolve ? is whether to use the data obtained from people who were in no position to give any sort of informed consent.

It also tells what happened to people such as Mengele and Wentzler, the Berlin pediatrician responsible for the deaths of thousands of children.

Mengele fled to South America and died in Brazil in 1979, when he was 67.

Wentzler never was prosecuted. He resumed his pediatric practice after World War II and died in 1973. He was 81.

John Pope can be reached at jpope@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3317.

Source: http://www.nola.com/health/index.ssf/2012/07/national_world_war_ii_museum_e.html

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