“Deadly Medicine” exhibition is both provocative and disturbing

Exhibition sheds light on how the Nazi’s developed its therory of “superior race”

The `Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race’ exhibition is currently on show at the new gallery space at the Lüderitz Maritime Museum in Lüderitz in !Nami#Nus Constituency in Karas Region. The exhibition was officially launched in the region by Cllr. Jan Scholtz, the Chairperson of the //Kharas Regional Council, speaking on behalf of the Governor, Hon. Lucia Basson. The exhibition opened on 6th August and will run until 30th August 2019 and is a significant contribution to anti-racist education in Namibia.
The speech explained that the exhibition is provocative and disturbing, but very important and relevant to Namibia. The educational exhibition traces the way in which ideas of `Race’ were constructed.
Cllr Scholtz pointed out that the discredited `science’ of Eugenics which formed the basis for the racist belief that some races were superior to others was developed by Francis Galton, one of the first British visitors to Namibia. The exhibition also refers to the German scientist, Dr Eugene Fischer, who wrote about the Rehoboth Basters and then returned to Ger-many and became the Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics.
The exhibition was developed by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and so the bulk of the exhibition focuses on the way in which eugenics influenced the Holocaust. The Nazi regime in Germany was founded on the conviction that “inferior” races, including the so-called Jewish race, and individuals had to be eliminated from German society so that the fittest “Aryans” could thrive. The Nazi state fully committed itself to implementing a uniquely racist and anti-Semitic variation of eugenics to “scientifically” build what it considered to be a “superior race.” By the end of World War II, six million Jews had been murdered. Millions of others also became victims of persecution and murder through Nazi “racial hygiene” programs designed to cleanse Germany of “biological threats” to the nation’s “health,” including “foreign-blooded” Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), persons diagnosed as “hereditary ill,” and homosexuals.
Anyone requiring more information about the exhibition should contact: Ms. Nehoa Kautondokwa at MAN on museums @iway.na or 061-302230.