Lebenseborn
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 scien
German and American eugenics advocates both believed science could solve social problems, tended to measure the worth of the individual in economic terms and felt mental illness a threat to society grave enough to warrant compulsive sterilization. For while arguments based upon history are instructive and important, those who see no analogies between our times and earlier times are unlikely to find warnings about the past sufficiently forceful to shape future behavior or public policy (Caplan, 1992; 1994). advocates of sterilization worried that the survival of old-stock America was being threatened by the influx of "lower races" from southern and eastern Europe. The order created a large controversy among the people. More recent efforts to shift the genetic norms of populations exemplified by the attempt to encourage those with the 'right' racial makeup to reproduce as is evident in the ethnically selective pronatalist policies espoused by governments in many parts of the world are less obviously coercive but still involve a great deal of cultural and societal pressure. They found 300 children from the ages of six months to six years. If most people agree that parents have a right if not a duty to try and maximize the well-being and happiness of their offspring, then it is not likely that the record of historical abuses carried out in the name of negative population eugenics will hinder efforts to incorporate genetic information into procreative decisions about our children and their immediate descendants. For many of them, their parents' identities remained a mystery and their journeys and rediscovery have revealed horrible truths about their origins. 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. Eugenics sprang from the philosophy known as social Darwinism, which envisioned human society in terms of natural selection and suggested that science could engineer progress by attacking supposedly hereditary problems including moral decadence, crime, venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcoholism. Searching for love, they have found heartache - they were victims on the other side of a twisted scheme to produce a Nazi super race. In a policy formalized by Hitler in 1942, German soldiers were encouraged to fraternize with native women, with the understanding that any children they produced would be provided for. 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). 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.
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Acceptance Essays
