Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was a research institute that was founded in Berlin, Germany in 1927. It studied how traits, such as eye color, hair color, and physical features, can be passed down from parents to their children. Eugenics is a belief that humans can be improved by encouraging people with good traits, such as intelligence, to have more children, while at the same time discouraging people with bad traits from having children. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute studied how eugenics could be used to create better humans and scientists there worked to find ways to make sure only people with the best traits had children. These ideas were wrong and dangerous, and the Institute was eventually closed in 1934.