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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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24 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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Nazis. “Eugenics” is a term coined by Francis
Galion in 1883 to denote the principle of strengthening a biological group on
the basis of ostensible hereditary worth; despite its evolutionary claims and
later reference to genetic laws, eugenics has no scientific standing.)
But the German version of eugenics had a characteristic tone of
romantic excess, as in Lenz’s earlier (1917) declaration, in a thesis
written for his professor, Alfred Ploetz (a social-Darwinist and the founder,
in 1904, of the German Society for Racial Hygiene), that “race was the
criterion of value” and “the State is not there to see that the
individual gets his rights, but to serve the race.” Lenz understood his
advocacy to be one of “organic socialism” and feared that, without a
radical eugenics project, “our [Nordic] race is doomed to
extinction.”5
For Germans like
Lenz in the 1920s, establishing widespread compulsory, sterilization became a
sacred mission — a mission that led them to embrace National Socialism,
with its similar commitment. While American and British advocates of eugenics
sometimes approached this German romantic excess, the political systems in the
two countries allowed for open criticism and for legal redress. In Britain
there was continual legal resistance to coercive sterilization; and in the
United States, legal questions could be raised concerning individual rights and
limited knowledge about heredity, which eventually led to the rescinding or
inactivation of sterilization laws in the states where they had been passed.*
In Nazi Germany, on the other hand, the genetic romanticism of an extreme
biomedical vision combined with a totalistic political structure to enable the
nation to carry out relentlessly, and without legal interference, a more
extensive program of compulsory sterilization than had ever previously been
attempted. Indeed, the entire Nazi regime was built on a biomedical vision that
required the kind of racial purification that would progress, from
sterilization to extensive killing. †
As early as his publication
of Mein Kampf between 1924 and 1926, Hitler had declared the sacred racial
mission of the German people to be “assembling and preserving the most
valuable stocks of basic racial elements [and] ... slowly and surely raising
them to a dominant position.” He was specific about the necessity for
sterilization (“the most modern medical means ”) on behalf of
an immortalizing vision of the state-mediated race (“a millennial
future”). And for him the stakes were absolute: “If the power
to fight for one’s own health is no longer present, the right to live in
this world of struggle ends.” 9
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* In observing Nazi
sterilization policies, the Journal of the American Medical Association did not
so much express outrage as it contrasted America’s “more gradual
evolution of practice and principles” regarding sterilization.6 Ardent American sterilizers, such
as Dr. Joseph S. De Jarnette of Virginia, could, even complain: “The
Germans are beating us at our own game.”7
† Thus Daniel J. Kevles reports:
“Within three years, German authorities had sterilized some two hundred
and twenty-five thousand people, almost ten times the number so treated in the
previous thirty years in America.” 8
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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