Dear Group,
I do not normally raise alerts about German camps in occupied Poland
during WWII wrongly being called Polish here. Generally over at the
Polish Media Issues group we are able to get a positive reply from
the media responsible.
Sadly in the following case the organisation is refusing to accept
its wording is wrong hence I am calling on the Polonia at large to
express their views on this article and hopefully support us in
getting this corrected.
The article is generally very good and the Germans are clearly
mentioned BUT it still wrongly refers to the camps.
If you have time please express your views by writing to
corrections@startribune.com.
Regards
Jan Niechwiadowicz, Moderator Polish Media Issues Yahoo Group
Reply from Editor: The Auschwitz concentration camp was in occupied
Poland. Because there were concentration camps all over Europe
during WWII, the reference was to locate this particular
concentration camp among the many. If the writer had been describing
a particular camp in occupied Austria, she might have described it
as an Austrian camp. Also, the notoriety of Auschwitz as a Nazi
concentration camp -- undoubtedly the best-known concentration camp
by name -- and context of the story erases even the slightest
possibility there would be confusion about who was running the camp.
Originally Article:
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/15948397.htmlAt the dawn of the Nazi era, a prominent Minneapolis physician sent a
letter to Adolf Hitler, praising his "plan to stamp out mental
inferiority among the German people."
At the time, Dr. Charles Dight was an influential public leader, a
former city alderman who had founded the Minnesota Eugenics Society.
As such, he believed that the "feebleminded"
were unfit to have
children. He didn't hide his admiration for the German chancellor.
"I trust you will accept my sincere wish that your efforts along that
line will be a great success," he wrote on Aug. 1, 1933, "and will
advance the eugenics movement in other nations as well as in
Germany."
Dight died before he could see where that movement would lead.
The lure of eugenics -- the idea that science could improve on
humanity by weeding out "undesirable traits" -- is the focus
of "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," an exhibit opening
tomorrow at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
The traveling collection of books, artifacts, posters, historic
newsreels and interviews with survivors was produced by the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and runs through May 4
in St. Paul.
It explores how highly educated people on both sides of the Atlantic,
such as Dight, were swept up in the
eugenics movement of the early
20th century. In the United States, that led to forced sterilizations
in mental institutions, including thousands of Minnesotans.
In Nazi Germany, mass sterilization was just the beginning.
"This exhibition was designed to answer one of the big 'how was the
Holocaust possible' questions," said Susan Bachrach, curator of the
exhibition at the Holocaust Museum. "One of the answers has to do
with the role of physicians and scientists."
"Deadly Medicine" documents how doctors ended up committing barbaric
acts in the name of science.
Today, people such as Margot de Wilde of Plymouth still bear the
scars. This week, she will share her story at an exhibit preview for
local teachers.
Surviving Nazi experiments
De Wilde, now 86, fled her native Berlin in the early 1930s, just as
the Nazis were coming to power.
Her parents, who were Jewish, thought the family would be safer
in
Amsterdam. That changed when Germany occupied Holland in World War
II.
De Wilde, 21, was arrested with her first husband, Lodewyk Meyer, and
his family while trying to escape to Switzerland. By the summer of
1943, she was on a cattle car to Auschwitz.
Arriving at the notorious Polish concentration camp, she heard
someone call for young married women to step forward. She did.
De Wilde ended up in a barracks for women used in medical
experiments. She never saw the doctors, who sent other prisoners to
do their work.
"You were just called by number down to the room," she said. "They
took X-rays and then inserted fluids into the vaginal area, and we
didn't know what it was. We thought either artificial insemination or
sterilization. And this was indeed the sterilization.
" To this day,
she has no idea what the fluid was.
"It didn't hurt," she remembers. "But I never had children. So it
must have
worked." She witnessed even more brutal experiments, where
many women died.
The Germans, she later learned, were searching for ways to sterilize
mass numbers of people. Somehow, she knew she would survive. Her
husband did not.
Breeding better humans
The idea of eugenics in the early 1900s was that science
could "improve the human race," said Stephen Feinstein, director of
the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, which is sponsoring the exhibit. The assumption was that
certain people were fitter than others by birth, and if well matched,
would produce the fittest children.
The theory had a certain rational appeal, said Bachrach. "If you
could breed better animals, why couldn't you breed better human
beings?"
But scientists quickly turned to the flip side: What about the "least
fit"?
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