Homo Sapiens 1900

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Homo Sapiens 1900 is a 1998 Swedish documentary by Peter Cohen about eugenics in Europe in the early 20th century. Eugenics is the idea of “improving” the human race by controlling who should reproduce. It has two parts: positive eugenics (encouraging the best to have children) and negative eugenics (trying to stop those considered unfit from having children).

The film starts with a 1916 clip from The Black Stork, showing a doctor who lets a deformed newborn die, arguing that sometimes saving a life is a crime. The film says this was based on a real case.

In the United States, Charles Davenport helped start the Eugenics Record Office to collect data and promote negative eugenics. Compulsory sterilization laws began in 1907 and spread to many states, sterilizing tens of thousands of people.

In Sweden, during the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics became part of public policy. Sweden created the Institute of Race Biology in 1922 and passed sterilization laws in 1934. Unlike the US and Nazi Germany, Sweden relied more on persuasion than force, but the aim was the same: to shape the population according to ideas about racial quality. Large studies of people, with photos and measurements, were conducted.

The film also looks at the Soviet Union, where genetics clashed with the state’s ideology. In Moscow, scientists gathered brains, including Lenin’s, to study intelligence and heredity.

Germany opened the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in 1927 to study heredity, environment, and crossbreeding and to promote policies for racially “sound” individuals. Genetics was increasingly used to support eugenics ideas there as well.

As genetics began to challenge eugenics, many of its claims weakened, but the era still saw forced sterilizations and, in the worst cases, extermination.