My husband is a drummer. He’s in a band called Zack Mexico, if you want to check them out, by all means. But for years, every September I made the 3 and a half hour drive west to Raleigh, North Carolina to attend the Hopscotch Music Festival downtown. Zack Mexico was often part of the festival, or sometimes we just went for fun. I think I probably went 5 or 6 years in a row until I had kids and then, well you know how that goes. Anyway, every year, we stayed at what was once the Days Inn where McDowell Street and Dawson diverge. It’s now some trendy apartment building. But back then, it was the Days Inn, the crappiest hotel in downtown Raleigh. Like, towards the end there, it was actually pretty gross and sketch but it was markedly cheaper than every other hotel and we were like 20 something so, there you go. It was a fantastic time, some of my fondest memories, carousing about downtown, popping into dive bars, art museums, grand auditoriums to hear all sorts of different music - well known artists, lesser known artists, weird, bizarre, avant garde artists. It was a blast. But in walking around during this 3 day festival every year, just a block from the Days Inn, there was a historical marker sign. You know these - they’ll say something like “In 1776, John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence two blocks east,” that sort of thing. I walked past this one over and over again for years, it was just right there, right by my hotel. And the words on this sign always stunned me, every time, the shock never went away. It reads “State action led to the sterilization by choice or coercion of over 7,600 people, 1933 - 1973, met after 1939 one block east.” Like, what? State action? Forced sterilization? 1973? Why don’t I know about this? But did you know, this forced sterilization wasn’t just a North Carolina thing. It was part of a greater movement, the eugenics movement, that took place during the first half of the 20th century, leading to the forced sterilization of over 60,000 Americans and as many as 400,000 Germans and even inspired the euthanasia program in Nazi Germany that served as a direct precursor to the holocaust? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix, where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. The historical marker sign, I’ll never get over it. Everyone thought I was so weird, like “why are you so obsessed with this sign? We’re going to see a rock and roll show right now, can you get over it please?” But it just haunted me. 7,600 people had the ability to reproduce, a fundamental right of all living things, they had it forcibly removed by the government as recently as 1973? How? How is that possible? And could it happen to me? Could it happen again? And yeah, maybe I am a little weird but this seemed important enough to pause over, every single time I walked past. So what happened? What is eugenics and how did this whole movement start? 

 

According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, eugenics is a quote “immoral and pseudoscientific theory that claims it is possible to perfect people and groups through genetics and the scientific laws of inheritance. Eugenicists used an incorrect and prejudiced understanding of the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to support the idea of “racial improvement.” end quote. I want to point out though, it was not a fringe theory like so many other pseudoscientific theories are. Like, okay, ancient aliens, thats a fringe theory. Eugenics was a widely accepted and believed concept that was taught in universities. So it wasn’t fringe, it was mainstream. Which is terrifying. 

 

Okay so based on the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. Just a quick recap on these two in case you’ve forgotten. Darwin was an English naturalist known for developing the theories of natural selection and evolution in the 1800s. Mendel was a German-Czech biologist who experimented with garden peas to uncover how heredity works and basically laid the foundation for the field of genetics. 

 

So, now enter Francis Galton. Galton was actually a half cousin of Charles Darwin. So Galton took the concept that Darwin had developed, that species improve through the natural selection of favorable traits and the work of Mendel which suggested that traits are passed from parents to offspring and he came up with a new field he named eugenics. This name comes from the Greek word eugenes which means “good in birth.” And the idea here is, “well okay if traits are passed down from parent to offspring, what if we could control which traits are being passed down. What if we could make it so that only good traits are passed down and the bad ones are eliminated.” In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, he wrote quote “Consequently, as it is easy, ….. to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.” end quote. So he introduces this idea of basically strategically breeding humans, to improve the human race. 

 

Okay, so this concept is not technically flawed, he's basically advocating for unnatural selection where it’s not necessarily survival of the fittest, but survival of whoever we choose. But, Galton had some very prejudiced ideas about who was superior enough to breed. He’s a white Englishman in the 1860s, so you know, he’s a product of his time, for sure. But he argued that traits like intelligence were hereditary and that only quote “higher races” could be successful. Which, I’m not saying intelligence isn’t genetically linked, it is to an extent, but Galton was trying to say that it was genetically linked to certain ethnicities, races. And I’ll give you one guess which race he thought was the intelligent one. Yeah.

 

So these ideas began to spread. I mean the man was Charles Darwin’s cousin after all, surely he knew what he was talking about. In 1904 a German biologist named Alfred Ploetz started a journal called Archive for Racial and Social Biology in which he coined the term “racial hygiene.” The point this dude was trying to make was that Nordic and Aryan people AKA white people were genetically superior to other races. This is what Galton was hinting at, dancing around, Ploetz just comes right out and says it in his journal. This idea led to the Society for Racial Hygiene which was established in Germany in 1905 and, around the same time, the Eugenics Education Society was founded in Britain. 

 

Now let’s go to America because eugenics is about to pop off over here but we’ll come back to Germany later, don’t worry. The American Breeders Association had been founded in 1903 to promote the study of genetics and specifically how it ties into plant and animal breeding. Okay, it’s like an agricultural thing. They’re trying to breed better crops and livestock and such using this developing field of genetics. Fine. Then in 1906, they are approached by a prominent biologist at Harvard University named Charles Davenport. Davenport is like “hey guys, you're doing some pretty cool stuff with these animals. I like how fat the pigs are and stuff, the apples are tastier than ever. Great work. How about we extend this little science experiment over here to humans. If you can make a fatter pig, surely you can make a smarter human.” That’s not a direct quote by the way, but, you know, that was the proposition, more or less. And they obviously dug the idea because this is when eugenics took hold in the US. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, quote “Davenport is considered the most important eugenicist in the United States. He was an outspoken racist who believed that abstract traits like intelligence had strict hereditary links,” end quote. And I love when legit sources like this are like “yeah that guy sucked,” cause, I mean some people, there’s just no denying it. 

 

So just one year later, 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass a compulsory sterilization law. This was after previous attempts in Michigan and Pennsylvania had both failed. Indiana was like “sure, why not?” So this law mandated the forced sterilization of people in state institutions who were deemed quote “idiots” or “imbeciles” as well as certain classes of criminals, as if being a criminal is a hereditary trait. They also sterilized women for being quote “feebleminded” or “promiscuous.” Which oh my god ew. Promiscuous? But only women, right? Men can be as promiscuous as they want but women get their tubes tied. Ew, just ew. Feebleminded, that’s a term that comes up a lot when you start looking into eugenics. They were very concerned with getting rid of feeblemindedness which basically just means a low IQ, someone unable to make intelligent decisions. This law in Indiana was in effect from 1907 to 1974 and during that time 2,500 people were forcibly sterilized. By the 1930s, over 30 states had similar sterilization laws resulting in over 60,000 sterilizations nationwide over the next few decades. And that’s probably a very low estimate as, turns out, exact records of the number of sterilizations performed were not well kept. 

 

Let’s go back though, in 1910 Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office with the help of a philanthropist named Mary Williamson Harriman and John Harvey Kellogg and no, that last name is not a coincidence. Kellogg was the cereal dude. He started the Kellogg cereal empire. So this office sent out questionnaires to families to gather data about feeblemindedness, criminality, and alcoholism. They created pedigree charts and trained fieldworkers who traveled around the country gathering information about people, trying to root out who was genetically superior and who wasn’t. And at this time, it had a lot of support from some very prominent scientists of the day including Thomas Hunt Morgan who was an evolutionary biologist and geneticist (although he later withdrew support and became an outspoken critic of eugenics, we’ll come back to that), and Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone guy. 

 

In 1912, the first International Eugenics Congress took place in London, led by Leonard Darwin who was Charles Darwin’s son. This was attended by some big names including Winston Churchill, Alfred Balfour, Alexander Graham Bell, and Reginald Punnet. I feel like this is like the Epstein list or something, no. But, okay, Reginald Punnett, he’s the guy that came up with the Punnett square, flashback to middle school science. That’s the thing that looks like a window, with four squares you draw and then you fill in with the big and little letters, the dominant and recessive genes to predict the likelihood that a particular trait will be inherited. Punnett said quote “the one instance of eugenic importance that could be brought under immediate control is that of feeblemindedness. Speaking generally, the available evidence suggests that it is a case of simple Mendelian inheritance.” end quote. So the dude who invented the Punnett square is essentially suggesting that it’s possible to remove feeblemindedness from the square. That’s compelling. The problem being, of course, that intelligence is an incredibly complex concept based on a lot of factors that can be measured in many different ways and can’t possibly be contained or controlled by Punnetts puny little four square. I think he’s giving himself way more credit than he deserves here. It’s giving feebleminded a bit, Punnett. Watch out dude. Don’t wanna get snipped. 

 

So they want to get rid of feeblemindedness, that’s the main thing. If we sterilize the feebleminded, they won’t be able to pass on the feeblemindedness trait, as if that’s a thing, to their kids and that’ll be that. But this feebleminded concept is inextricably linked to race. Most don’t come outright and say that but there’s an overarching vibe that white people, and also rich people, are genetically less prone to be feebleminded. This sentiment is seen in things like Better Baby contests. This was a thing you guys. This is a thing white people did. These started around 1908. They were contests at state fairs where people entered their baby, in the contest, to see who had the best baby. So they had to be at least 6 months old but no older than 2. Judges judged the babies on their physical appearance and supposed mental capacity and picked a winner. This evolved into Fitter Family Contests because “heck, we’re all awesome, why just judge the baby?” These were common in the 1920s. Families would submit records of family traits and doctors at the contests would perform physical and psychological tests on the family members to determine their “eugenical worth.” And, it may come as no surprise that Fitter Family Contests were sponsored by none other than Davenport’s very own Eugenics Record Office. And of course the winners of these contests were almost always white. I would be very surprised if any non-white families even entered. This is one of the whitest things I’ve ever heard. But it also reflects the underlying link between eugenics and race. 

 

In 1921 the Eugenics Record Office hosted the second International Eugenics Conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, a reconvening of the Epstein list, if you will. But the main focus of this event was immigration. They were very concerned about European immigrants, in particular, who they deemed inferior to native born American citizens. And I don’t get this at all. First of all, every single white American born attendee of this conference was once a European immigrant. If you’re focused on heredity and genetics, I don’t get how you could miss that little detail. That you are a genetic descendant of the very group you are calling inferior. It makes no sense whatsoever and to me just proves that they will twist eugenics into anything that serves their purposes. They want to crack down on European immigrants coming into the US, so they call them genetically inferior. But also, this is an International Eugenics Conference. There are Europeans in attendance? How did that? What must they have thought about the main topic of discussion? None of it makes sense. But I’m not the only one who thinks that, apparently. Davenport invited William Bateson to this event. Bateson was an English biologist who came up with the name “genetics” to describe that field of study. Bateson declined the invite writing quote “the real question is whether we ought not to keep genetics and eugenics separate,” end quote. Burnnn. Basically saying, “don’t get me involved in this, I’m a legit scientist… and also a European, are you sure you even want me there?” It honestly makes no sense. I thought it was a typo. I thought European immigrants was a typo, like surely they meant Mexican or Chinese, but then it was in like all of my sources. European immigrants were believed to be genetically inferior to American born white people. But I think the distinction is northern European vs. southern or eastern European. At this time, there were a lot of Italian and Polish immigrants moving to the US and many of them didn’t speak English which many Americans perceived as a problem. They were referred to as non-Nordic immigrants. Director of the Eugenics Record Office, Harry H. Laughlin spoke in front of the US Congress in 1921 and told them that non-Nordic immigrants were inherently, as in genetically, more prone to be criminals than those from northern Europe and this partially led to the passing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration act in 1924 which limited immigration from southern and eastern European countries and completely banned immigration from Asia while allowing continued immigration from northern European countries. Like, you’re white, you’re just not the right type of white. They were seriously splitting hairs. 

 

In 1926 the American Eugenics Society was established by Harry Laughlin, the director of the Eugenics Record Office who spoke before congress as well as Madison Grant, author of a book called “The Passing of the Great Race” which was very much an inspiration to none other than Adolph Hitler, but I told you we’d be going back to Germany so, I’ll save that for now. The goal of the society was to educate people about the importance of Eugenics. They sponsored Fitter Family contests at state fairs and distributed information about the costs of caring for mentally ill children. At its height, in the 1930s, the American Eugenics Society had around 1,200 members including Margaret Sanger who founded Planned Parenthood, which I find quite interesting. 

 

So that’s kind of what’s going down, officially, politically, in the US regarding the eugenics movement. But it’s not just giving white babies blue ribbons at state fairs and new immigration laws. Remember, during this movement, more and more states are passing forced sterilization acts. They are forcing people, men and women, to undergo medical procedures, surgery, against their will, rendering them unable to reproduce. Many of these people are institutionalized, in jail or hospitals, care facilities. They don’t have a ton of agency as it is. So it’s not all that difficult to force this on them. At first, they’re really focused on disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities like what they’re calling feeblemindedness. But that evolves into physical disabilities like dwarfism, criminality - people who have committed crimes because apparently that was seen as genetic, sexual promiscuity - also apparently seen as genetic, and pauperism which is just being poor. Being poor was seen as a genetic trait and a reason for sterilization, apparently. So, you can see where this becomes problematic and extremely unethical. 

 

A landmark case for the eugenics movement came in 1927 when the State of Virginia decided in an 8 to 1 vote to uphold the forced sterilization of a woman named Carrie Buck per the 1924 Eugenical Sterilization Act. Linda Villarosa writes about this case in a New York Times article called “The Long Shadow of Eugenics in America,” saying quote “By the 1930s, women became a majority of the victims, sterilized in mental hospitals and prisons and under court orders. This shifting gender pattern resulted from a rising concern about the fitness to parent, with a focus on mothering, as well as the development of a safer, standardized tubal-ligation procedure for sterilizing women. The movement was codified in 1927, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of the state of Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a 20-year-old white woman. Born in 1906 to a mother living in poverty in Virginia, Buck was sent to a working-class foster home, where at age 16 she was raped by an extended-family member. Her foster parents took custody of Buck’s daughter and successfully petitioned a local court to confine Buck at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded — though she was neither epileptic nor intellectually disabled. There she was sterilized without her consent. Writing for the majority in the landmark Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” He added, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” end quote. 

 

In 1932, they attempted to hold the third International Eugenics Conference, but fewer than 100 people attended. It was a total flop. And that’s because, by this point, many reputable scientists were openly against the eugenics movement, even those that had originally been supportive. They started to doubt how scientific eugenics actually was. They felt eugenicists were overly simplifying how genetics work in order to fit their own racist and classist biases, which yeah, and also that their experiments were highly flawed. They weren’t taking into account economic and environmental factors when considering what leads to someone becoming a criminal, or poor, or promiscuous or whatever. It was flawed science and many were starting to finally realize that. 

 

And part of what helped turn public opinion against eugenics starting in the 30s was the realization that eugenics policies in the US, and specifically California, had inspired far more horrific acts over in Germany. According to Dr. Laura Rivard, a biology professor at the University of San Diego, quote “In particular, California’s program was so robust that the Nazi’s turned to California for advice in perfecting their own efforts. Hitler proudly admitted to following the laws of several American states that allowed for the prevention of reproduction of the ‘unfit.’” end quote. The National Library of Medicine also reports quote “What is often not appreciated is that Nazi efforts were bolstered by the published works of the American eugenics movement as the intellectual underpinnings for its social policies. One of Hilter's first acts after gaining control of the German government was the passage of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in July 1933. The Nazis, when proposing their own sterilization program, specifically noted the “success of sterilization laws in California” end quote. So, when Americans realize this, they’re like, “oh you’re doing what over there? And your saying it was all our idea? No, nope. Not on board with this mess.” And the Eugenics Record Office officially closed in 1939 due to a lack of funding. 

 

So what were they doing over in Germany? Do you really want to know? You probably don’t actually it’s pretty horrific, but okay. This information is coming from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia. Before World War I, Germany was pretty on par with Britain and the US as far as its involvement in the eugenics movement. You know, they dabbled. But after World War I, Germany’s economy was just destroyed. They were in bad shape. They started to blame this on the theory that all of the valuable Germans, those with valuable genetics, had died in the war and the majority of those left were of lesser stock, so to speak. They hadn’t fought in the war because they were in prison, or mental institutions, hospitalized, or otherwise unable to fight. So a big part of what made these people undesirable was disability but also race as antisemitism began to surge in Germany. So in Hitler’s Germany, the Nazis began the forced sterilization of anyone who was seen as “hereditarily ill” - with mental, physical, or social disabilities. This resulted in the forced sterilization of an estimated 400,000 Germans.

 

But that’s really not even the worst part because the sterilization program led to the euthanasia program. Yeah, they took it to the next level. Instead of preventing people from having quote “unfit” offspring, they just went ahead and started murdering the unfit offspring. And this next bit is heavy, so trigger warning. This started in 1939, about 2 years before Nazis started killing Jewish people, just for being Jewish. It started with disabled people, Aryan, Jewish, whatever. Nazi’s believed that anyone with a disability, mental or physical, was a financial burden on the state and quote “life unworthy of life.” They began a secret killing operation that targeted disabled children. And, once again, huge trigger warning. If you don’t want to hear about the murder of children, maybe skip this part. On August 18th, 1939, they issued a decree requiring all doctors, nurses, and midwives to report newborns and any children under the age of 3 who showed signs of being mentally or physically disabled and they started to encourage parents of disabled children to admit them to these special pediatric clinics that had sprung up throughout Germany and Austria. Like, “bring them to the clinic, they’ll get the care they need there. You need some support in caring for this disabled child. We’re here to help.” In reality, these clinics were killing wards where the children were murdered by either lethal overdoses of medication or starvation. 

 

At first it was just children under 3 but eventually they included anyone under 17 in this disabled child killing plot. An estimated 10,000 children were euthanized AKA murdered during World War II. And then, they extended this program to also killing disabled adults. This was a top secret program that was code named T4 after the street address of the program’s coordinating office in Berlin Tiergartenstrasse 4. So these secret T4 operatives established 6 killing locations, gas chambers, all over Germany. And they started distributing questionnaires to citizens. Sound familiar? Yeah this was the brainchild of the American Eugenics Record Office. Davenport, you Ahole. They sent these questionnaires to public health officials, hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes. They tried to make it seem like they were just gathering statistical data, like census stuff, but they asked these health professionals to identify specifically anyone with, here’s the list, okay, they were looking for anyone “suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders, those not of German or related blood, the criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds, and also those who had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years.” They evaluated the forms they got back and started removing people from these care facilities. They transported them by bus or train to one of their gas chamber facilities where the person was killed within hours of their arrival. The gas chambers were set up to look like showers, but instead of water, it was bottled carbon monoxide gas. They then cremated the bodies and piled all the ashes together in one big pile. Then they scooped the common ash pile into urns which were sent to individual families with some bogus story about how their loved one had died. 

 

The Holocaust Encyclopedia reports quote “According to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941. The Euthanasia Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers. Historians estimate that the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals.” end quote. 

 

So Hitler’s Euthanaisa Program stemmed directly from the eugenics movement. What started as sterilization of the unfit turned into euthanasia of the unfit. And then it evolved again as justification to euthanize Jewish people and gypsies. Once you’ve decided that certain people, in this case disabled people, do not deserve to live and actually the whole world would be better if they were eliminated, it’s not that far of a leap from disabled people to Jewish people. Once you’ve already decided and been indoctrinated with the idea that Jewish people are inferior too, at that point it becomes about the greater good. It’s very Grindelwald, where my Harry Potter fans at? But no it is, it’s actually very Grindelwald because that whole plot point is based on Nazi fascist’s flawed thinking, that they were actually doing something right, something good for the world in murdering 6 million people. That idea stems from eugenics.

 

But over in America, this pill hit hard, the realization that our policy had actually inspired similar forced sterilization in Germany that led to the murder of disabled people and then the mass genocidal murder of Jewish people. It was a horrifying reality and it’s part of the reason many Americans do not know about the eugenics movement to this day. It became a dirty little secret that no one wanted to talk about. And yet, forced sterilization continued in some states, including North Carolina until the 1970s. And while even Germany has acknowledged and issued full apologies for its sterilization and euthanasia programs, only 8 US states have issued official apologies out of 30 something that participated. Only 3 have created historical markers, Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina (that one near the old Days Inn). And only 3 states are offering reparations to victims of forced sterilization - Virginia, California, and, I’m proud to say, North Carolina. 

 

So here, it is still very much a dirty little secret which is the reason why I found that seemingly insignificant sign in downtown Raleigh so shocking. Because we should all know about this. It’s scary that we don’t all know about this. That something that directly led to the murder of 6 million people is being kept a secret from the masses. If we don’t know about it and the horrors that this slippery eugenics slope potentially leads to, then how can we avoid repeating it in the future? Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, was admittedly a flawed human. But, I don’t think he foresaw what he viewed as a legit scientific field, eugenics, leading to the holocaust. America didn’t foresee it either which is why we were so horrified to learn that Hitler had based his eugenics policies off of ours, that we had helped pioneer Nazi programs. Because sometimes it's only in hindsight that you finally see how problematic a movement is. But if we erase that hindsight by burying the eugenics movement and never talking about it, are we doomed to repeat it? It’s a slippery slope and the ways that genetics and eugenics mix and mingle in the medical field can be sketchy and slightly controversial.

 

For example, when you are pregnant, you can have genetic testing done. I actually don’t remember it being a choice, they just did it. They draw blood and they analyze it for all kinds of stuff but one of the things they do is a screening for Down Syndrome. And if they determine that your baby has Down Syndrome, based on this genetic analysis, you can choose to terminate the pregnancy. That’s eugenics. There’s no denying that’s eugenics. And I’m not saying it's wrong. I’m not trying to place any judgment on that decision. I’ve never been in that position. I can not and will not judge those parents. But it is eugenics. It is either selecting or euthanizing a fetus based on a genetic disability. And a question of ethics arises because it’s a slippery slope. Where does it end? Where do we draw the line? It gets really blurry really quick. 

 

Then there’s genetic selection through IVF. You can choose an embryo to implant based on whether it’s male or female. And I’m, once again, no judgment from me. I have two boys already. If I was going to have a third kid and I got to choose, I would definitely choose a girl, no but, really, I’m not saying it’s wrong. But I am calling it sketchy. Because it’s, once again, a slippery slope. So gender is okay, I mean I guess, but where do we draw the line? What other genetic factors can we select for with IVF? What if we could choose an embryo based on physical ability, intelligence, factors like that. Who determines which traits are valuable and which are inferior? Is that ethical? Is it dangerous? Messing with science like that? Plus who can afford to do that? Poor people can’t afford IVF. So then you have this issue of only wealthy people being able to choose these traits that are seen as valuable. You can see how that would lead to an increased disparity between social classes, where poor people stay poor and rich people stay rich. 

 

Interfering in this way seems to send out shockwaves, the butterfly effect, right, the theory that even a tiny change in one system can result in massive changes and even complete upheaval down the line. It’s in movies about time travel when they go back in time and they change one seemingly insignificant little thing and then when they return to the modern time, everything is different. And you couldn’t have known that that action, tweaking that one thing could have such an impact down the line. It’s only in hindsight that you see the connections. It’s only in hindsight that we see the connection between the eugenics movement and the holocaust. So, please share this story. People need to know what happened here. They need to see the connection. We can’t bury the hindsight on this one. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. Those images are also always available through my website historyfixpodcast.com by the way. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, and go ahead and tell a friend or two about it, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from the National Human Genome Research Institute, Scitable by Nature Education, the National Library of Medicine, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia, and the New York Times. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.