The deadly medicine of the Holocaust
From CNN's Brian Todd in Washington:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In the infancy of a wicked regime, the very first year of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship, the new German chancellor signed a chilling mandate: the law for the prevention of genetically diseased offspring.
Thousands of children would not survive the application of the law. Simon Rozenkier did -- but only after Nazi doctors made sure he would never have children of his own.
"I understand German and they said, 'We don't want to kill him, but lets make him so he's not ... how do you say, that he not be productive," Rozenkier says.
Striving to create a pure, Nordic populace, Hitler and his cohorts seized upon science, espousing "the idea that you could breed better human beings," says Susan Bachrach, the curator of the new "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Eugenics is the concept of changing the genetic makeup of a population, mainly through controlling marriage and reproduction. It was attractive to the Third Reich, which issued instructional films and encouraged Aryans to couple-off and strengthen the bloodlines.
The Nazis wanted to rid their population of those they deemed inferior. In the regime's early days, that meant not only Jews, but also anyone from the depressed to the paranoid to the so-called "feeble-minded" to people of mixed race.
"This provided a new opportunity to carry out policies in the name of the fatherland and using the argument that certain groups were just an enormous burden on German resources," Bachrach says.
The "Deadly Medicine" exhibit, which recently opened at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, takes you through this purposeful, regimented slaughter.
The Nazis gathered the "undesirables," told their families they were being taken away for special care and went to work.
Some 400,000 were forcibly sterilized and 200,000 were killed. The most popular methods were lethal injection, heavy sedation and later, gassing.
As the Nazis rolled through Europe, the program extended to the concentration camps -- and people like Simon Rozenkier, a Polish teenager who'd survived the Jewish ghettos, was sent to Auschwitz in 1943.
"Being in Auschwitz, they gave me shots, you know, and sent me to Block 10. So they gave me ... They call it in German 'einish vuten', so I should be stronger, able to work," Rozenkier says.
He didn't know it at the time, but the shots made him sterile.
Others at Auschwitz and elsewhere were murdered, their bodies dissected for research.
The twisted, horrifying story the exhibit tells turns surreal with portraits of the hands-on perpetrators.
The most notorious name attached to Nazi physical experimentation: Dr. Josef Mengele. He was a significant part of the program to alter the genetic makeup of Germany, but was really just one in a long line of accomplished doctors who bought into the Nazi ideal of biological purity.
Geneticist Otmar von Verschuer was a mentor of Mengele's who shared his fascination with twins -- a driving force behind the sterilization program. Eugen Fischer, a prominent anthropologist, galvanized the program to eliminate racial mixing. Dr. Ernst Wentzler, a respected pediatrician, ordered the killing of several thousand children. Dr. Julius Hallervorden, a well-known neuro-pathologist, once acknowledged receiving the brains of nearly 700 executed children for research.
"It was an opportunity for their ideas and research to become public policy," says Bachrach.
A doctor's opportunity, a child's demise -- perhaps the most disturbing visual in this exhibit is its tribute to the youngest victims.
Simon Rozenkier remembers the children and remembers how close he came to joining them.
Liberated from the camps, Rozenkier came to the United States, joined the Army, served in the Korean War, got married and adopted a newborn girl. He'd met Dr. Mengele and his colleagues at Auschwitz -- and suffered at their hands.
"I want to know what happened to them. That bothers me. The war is over. Where did they go?" Rozenkier asks.
Most of these torturers were never prosecuted. They faded into society and some practiced traditional medicine again.
But their legacy did not escape.
