efore eugenics pseudoscience about race
selective breeding of humans can make
the world a pure place when saying
that's scary
those words are near truer than of the
main man today or tomorrow phone fetish
or i'm indy neidell and this is the
world dictionary today featuring autumn
our free hair pond fair sure i'm gonna
go out on a limb and start off the day
by proposing that if it's world war ii
and you're josef mengele is boss you're
probably kind of a dick but let me
backtrack German biologists and
geneticists funfair Shore was born into
a family that was originally Dutch was
also noble and young autumn r was a
barren fly hair from birth
now that birth was in 1896 the year of
the first modern Olympics and the year
radioactivity was discovered Utah became
a state the first automobile accident
occurred yep Henry wells hit a cyclist
in New York true story and let's see oh
yes
the Supreme Court affirmed the
legitimacy of separate but equal racial
separation in Plessy v Ferguson and the
golden age of segregation could begin
back to fare sure he served with the
German Army in the First World War
rising to Leutnant and he began to study
medicine in 1919 he received a doctor in
1923 and a habilitation which I had to
look up in 1927 it is the qualification
to conduct self-contained university
teaching and is the highest
qualification issued in many european
higher education systems the things you
learn that same year fair sure became
the head of the human genetics
department at the newly founded Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human
heredity and eugenics in Berlin this
institute was and would continue to be
heavily funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation why you ask would an American
philanthropic foundation fund this
particular Institute well eugenics was a
pretty hot topic at the time an American
scientist had been digging into heredity
research for years thing is I have to be
clear here eugenics is not really the
study of genes it's a belief system kind
of a religion that you can improve
humans by selectively breeding it was
already well clear at this time that it
was not science now
genetic research which is science
has led to all sorts of benefits for
mankind over the years but that was not
eugenics and there was a real dark side
to what eugenics proposed series of
racial superiority were quite common at
the time and the Institute during the
whole Nazi era was associated with the
racial hygiene and Nazi eugenics
theories advocated by Institute leaders
fritz lens and igan fischer in the
states there was also stuff like that
going on in fact in the first half of
the 20th century 60,000 people were
sterilized in the United States many
without knowing what was being done to
them but today our focus is on Germany
and fair sure who just happened to be
heavily funded for many years by
rockefeller fair share was a religious
man and in 1935 joined the confessing
Church which arose in response to the
Nazi drive to create an official state
church he did though join the Nazi Party
in 1940 now I'll talk more about World
War 2 in a minute though I will throw
out the bizarre side note that during
the war he was accepted as a member of
the American eugenics Society alright
man he was not tried for any war crimes
after the war and in 1951 became
professor of genetics at the University
of Munster like many of the former Aryan
purity geneticists of the Nazi period as
well as some of his American colleagues
first Shore successfully recast himself
as a genetics researcher post-war and
avoided association with eugenics and
with the Nazis in fact in his
denazification hearing by the Allies he
was marked as a Nazi fellow-traveller
which meant he didn't support the regime
but didn't oppose it he was fine 600
marks in the 1950s and 60s up to his
death in 1969 in an automobile accident
seventy three years after the first one
ever
fair shoe were launched and led research
projects on the effects of nuclear
radiation on people an accident
overdose of gamma radiation alters his
body chemistry
now when David Banner grows angry or
outraged a startling metamorphosis
occurs
yes autumn or funfair she was trying to
find a cure for the Hulk okay not that
but he did become involved with ethical
questions and argued that genetics
should be based on human dignity he also
warned against scientists trying to
genetically engineer improved human
beings gentlemen we can rebuild him we
have the technology we have the
capability to make the world's first
Bionic Man yes autumn are fun fair sure
was very much against creating the Six
Million Dollar Man okay all kidding
aside let's look at the serious stuff
for a minute because so far he doesn't
seem like too much of a dick other than
circumstance you know like like
happening to have a genetic Institute in
Germany in the Nazi era and during the
war that doesn't automatically make you
a dick but flesh shua wasn't just an
innocent bystander he wrote in the bots
a genetics journal that he himself
edited that Germany's war would yield a
total solution to the Jewish problem he
was a strong advocate of compulsory
sterilization programs and from 1935 to
1942 was the director of the Institute
for genetic biology and racial hygiene
he was the director of Kaiser Wilhelm
for the last three years of the war
though and his former student became a
longtime assistant of his that man was
Josef Mengele when Mengele arrived in
Auschwitz in 1943 fair she were notified
the German research society that Mengele
was joining him in their branch of
research as captain and camp physician
at Auschwitz fair she wrote
anthropological testing of the most
diverse racial groups in this
concentration camp is being carried out
well yeah it was C Farah was a leading
scientist in twins research and the war
had made it difficult to find twin
materials his words to study and mangle
his new position was going to be a big
help with that soon Mengele began
sending research material to Fair Shore
for study let's see there was the
internal organs of dead children
skeletons of murdered Jews the whole
bodies of murdered Romani and of course
blood samples of twins that have been
intentionally infected with typhus lots
of stuff
like that Mangala would keep his eyes
peeled for twins arriving at Auschwitz
and perform horrific experiments on them
sending the reports back to Fair Shore
for evaluation eyes skulls and other
body parts were often also sent for
evaluation as well as journalist Edwin
black wrote of fair Scheuer and mangle
as justification for their work with
twins you could unlock the mysteries of
defective reproduction and also with
twins you could discover the secret to
multiplication of the master race when
the war ended the Institute's lab
materials and its thousands of files
were hidden or destroyed and were never
obtained by the Allies to use his
evidence in war trials but if you want
to know what the Germans thought of fair
sure in 1946 he wanted to rebuild the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Frankfurt
and the Commission to make the decision
which rejected it said that fair sure
should be considered not as a
collaborator but one of the most
dangerous Nazi activists of the Third
Reich that is what the Germans thought
of him so yeah he was probably a real
dick but let's see how he stacks up on
our actual scale in terms of
achievements he was a pioneer in
genetics and genetics has done much to
help modern life in terms of cures for
diseases and even modified foods that we
eat today as a negative a lot of people
aren't really sold on the modified foods
bit he was a pioneer in a study of
inherited diseases he was a pioneer in
twin methodology he did excellent
research on the effects of radiation
upon humans he did a lot of bad stuff
too he advocated the forced
sterilization of huge numbers of people
he was involved in the actual
sterilization for example in 1937 he and
his colleagues analyzed 600 children
descended from French African soldiers
who had settled in Germany after World
War one the children were sterilized
after analysis he directly and
indirectly used research materials
obtained by his assistant Josef Mengele
at Auschwitz concentration camp he was
fully cognizant of Mengele x' work he
was complicit in horrible experiments
involving thousands of people mostly
children and mostly who died after
unimaginable torture so his general evil
is hardly
mitigated by his achievements and just
for the scale of his badness we'll give
him a three out of three in terms of
being a dick though he espoused a racist
pseudoscience that had already been
discredited in his time he worked
actively to advance the theories of
racial hygiene he directly collaborated
with Mengele by using the results of his
experiments that is pretty much a three
out of three on the dick scale and
remember this was mastication as to
humanity that gives him that gives him a
maximum three overall score that is the
maximum on the overall scale which means
he makes it as a first-class dick that's
it for today if you know of any Dick's
throughout history that we should talk
about let us know who they are in the
comments and tell us why remember living
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