Haunting photographs reveal the dark story of eugenics

These are the horrifying photos from the heyday of the Eugenics movement that the world wants to forget. Before the atrocities of Nazi Germany, eugenics - the system of measuring human traits, seeking out the desirable ones and cutting out the undesirable ones - was once practised the world over. In the decades following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's'On the Origin of Species', a veritable craze for eugenics spread through Britain, the United States and Europe. Bruno Beger was a German racial anthropologist who worked for the Ahnenerbe, a project in Nazi Germany to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. In this image taken in 1938, Dr Beger is measuring a Tibetan woman's head to demonstrate what he believed were the'inferior' characteristics of her race Advocates of eugenics made significant advances during the early twentieth century - and claimed that'undesirable' genetic traits such as dwarfism, deafness and even minor defects like a cleft palate needed to be wiped out of the gene pool.