Two recent programs produced by Denver’s Mizel Museum make it clear the red lights are flashing, folks.
The critical message that a noted Holocaust researcher offered last week is that Americans must take action to keep history from repeating itself.
Better hurry.
“When we study the Holocaust, it’s very important to remember that these crimes were perpetrated largely by ordinary, average citizens,” Holocaust researcher and historian Shelley Klein said during a broadcast interview last week with Mizel’s Meg Robbins. The interview followed a similar, earlier session with Holocaust survivor Adela Dagerman, who grippingly retold how she and her family, and others like her, were abused and murdered by German Nazis as they rose to power.
The virtual interviews are part of a Mizel Museum’s “Eyewitness to History” virtual program focusing on the education and providing accurate details about the calamity in an effort to prevent hatred and genocide.
The interviews were essentially case studies in “been there, done that” in how millions were abused, tortured and murdered because of eugenics, a completely debunked, faux-science scheme that blends the worst of racism, corruption and ignorance into a recipe for genocide.
If you’re reaching back to your fuzzy high-school history, eugenics is a 19th-Century pseudoscience that insists that some humans are genetically broken and destined for a life of crime, stupidity, mental illness and malevolence, and that everyone except for white people are doomed to be plagued by their broken genome.
Well before the Nazis were rounding up Jews, they were selectively culling their nation by first sterilizing what eugenicists deemed as inferior human seed stock. These included people with mental disorders, disabilities or people convicted of crimes. It was a national effort to “get tough on crime” and reel in spending on social problems, like aiding poor people.
As the Nazis rose to power, they quickly accelerated the eugenics program to not just sterilize inferior humans, but to “euthanize” them.
The so-called T-4 “treatment” centers were redesigned to become mass-murder centers, using showers converted to gas chambers or just murdering tens of thousands of “undesirable” disabled people via lethal injection or drug overdoses.
“This wasn’t just happening in Germany,” Robbins said. “Eugenics spread across Europe and North America, influencing everything from public health policies, school systems, immigration laws and court decisions. In the United States, famous public figures supported eugenics, including President Theodore Roosevelt.”
American eugenics led to Native American “boarding schools,” which imposed forced sterilization and abuse, all based on fake science that tabbed Native Americans as genetically damaged goods.
Then it spread beyond that to all kinds of hospitals and asylums where more than 60,000 Americans were forced to be sterilized.
“These were not fringe ideas, but ones that were embedded within governments, education and scientific institutions, systems often regarded as authoritative and trustworthy,” Robbins said.
The white supremacists and eugenics cult got away with it by marshalling the federal government and using the media to “legitimize” their scam.
Seem familiar? If it sounds very much like the Trump administration’s push to delegitimize real science and real journalism, it sure as hell is.
With endless waves of propaganda and desensitizing the German nation, the Nazis were able to cartwheel their ghastly eugenics scheme into the Holocaust and the decimation of more than 6 million Jews, political dissidents, gays and other “undesirable” humans.
And the kinds of things the eugenics cultists hammered on?
“They’re sick people, and a lot of them were let in here,” Trump told an eager Fox News personality in March, talking about American immigrants. “They shouldn’t have been let in. Others are just bad. They go bad. Something wrong — there’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly, they’re not exactly your genetic,” Trump told the white reporter.
It was hardly the first time he played the eugenics card.
“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers,” Trump infamously and erroneously said at the end of the 2024 presidential campaign. “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Like “bad blood” and “they’re eating the dogs.”
Klein and real scientists just like her are cautioning everyone here, and across the nation, to stop being distracted and pay attention to what’s happening.
In the 1930s, the German government unveiled solid policies backed by huge propaganda campaigns insisting that “undesirable” people like disabled and poor people, were costing German taxpayers vast sums of money and were responsible for the majority of crimes.
“It’s really powerful, because it illustrates how the Nazi regime framed eugenics, not only as a biological issue, but also as an economic burden, appealing to fear, scarcity and financial responsibility,” Robbins said. “That messaging encouraged ordinary citizens to view certain citizens, certain people, as costly liabilities, rather than human beings with rights.”
The message that was driven home to Germans, even in public school curricula, is that not all life is worthy of life.
The policy took hold and grew into the Holocaust, and much of Germany took part in it.
“We often think about people who were directly working in the camps, guards, commandants, soldiers, but what we don’t think about are the engineers who designed and repaired the gas chambers,” Klein said. “We don’t think about the companies that produced the gas itself, or the companies that produced the crematoriums, or the railroad companies. There were a lot of people involved in this, a lot of professionals who actively contributed their talents to this project of genocide.”
Klein said that research has made clear that most Germans never saw themselves as participants in the Holocaust; they saw themselves as unaffected bystanders and patriots.
“We forget that this was a long road,” Klein said. “We specifically forget about the transformation of Germany that happened in less than a couple of years. Germany went from a very liberal democracy to a dictatorship in about 14 months.”
The take-home? Don’t let history repeat itself, especially when the warning signs for Americans are the same ones Germans ignored.
“The lesson for all of us is that we can lose our freedom and democracy very quickly,” she said. “It’s up to all of us to protect our democracy, protect our institutions and be as involved as we can in our own civic system.”
The lights are flashing, folks. What are you going to do about it?
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