Race, Eugenics, and the Holocaust
Jonathan Anomaly
Abstract
Abstract This chapter will focus on how the Holocaust shaped the concepts of race and eugenics in bioethics. I will begin with a brief account of how these terms were used before the Second World War, and then discuss how the Nazi eugenics programs and the Holocaust altered how scholars think about race and eugenics. In particular, I will discuss the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and 1950 Statement on Race, which signaled a change in how race and eugenics would be used in the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, I will consider how liberal eugenics in contemporary bioethics differs from older forms of eugenics, and how newer views about human populations (as genetic clusters) differ from older views of race. In doing so, I will explore how the Holocaust shaped modern taboos related to human genetics research.