Description
Michael Nutkiewicz illuminates a key historical moment in the United States and Germany when science supported racial and social discrimination. In the early decades of the 20th century, the American eugenics movement led to forced sterilization. In Germany, where eugenics was known as “racial hygiene,” the government instituted sterilization and euthanasia. American eugenics and Nazi racial hygiene illustrate a peril always implicit in science. Their lessons are well worth our continued contemplation.
Michael Nutkiewicz taught Jewish history at UNM. He directed the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, was senior historian at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, led the Program for Torture Victims in Los Angeles, and managed the refugee resettlement program at Catholic Charities New Mexico. He was director of Oasis Albuquerque from 2010-2014. Nutkiewicz’s translation of Gumener’s memoir, A Ukrainian Chapter: A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir of Sorrow, was published in 2022.