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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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28 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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Rüdin became a close associate of Alfred Plotz in
establishing the German Society for Racial Hygiene. Rüdin was an
indefatigable researcher and saw as his mission the application of Mendelian
laws and eugenic principles to psychiatry. A former student and associate of
his told me that “the aim of his life” was to establish the genetic
basis for psychiatric conditions, and that “he was not so much a fanatical
Nazi as a fanatical geneticist.”
But a Nazi Rüdin did become,
joining the Party in 1937 at the age of sixty. From his prestigious position as
director of the Research Institute for Psychiatry of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society
in Munich, Rüdin worked closely with a regime whose commitment to genetic
principles he applauded, and was one of the principle architects of the
sterilization laws. He became a significant source of scientific legitimation
for the regime’s racial policies (including consultations with Hans F. K.
Günther, the leading Nazi anthropologist-publicist on racial matters,
whose intellectual repute was generally held to be very low). Rüdin was
not involved in the direct medical killing of the “euthanasia”
program; but a younger associate to whom I spoke had the impression that his
teacher, though not without doubts about the program, could well have favored a
version of it with careful medical control.
In a special 1943 issue of
his journal, Archive für Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archive
of Racial and Social Biology), celebrating ten years of National Socialist
rule, Rüdin extolled Hitler and the movement for its “decisive …
path-breaking step toward making racial hygiene a fact among the German people
... and inhibiting the propagation of the congenitally ill and inferior.”
He praised both the Nuremberg Laws for “preventing the further penetration
of the German gene pool by Jewish blood,” and the SS for “its
ultimate goal, the creation of a special group of medically superior and
healthy people of the German Nordic type.”21
A close relative, also a physician, told
me that Rüdin felt it “necessary” to write those things and, in
response to my question whether he had meant them at the time, answered,
”Well, half and half.” While Rüdin apparently did eventually
become disillusioned with the regime, he could never (according to a former
colleague) bring himself to resign his positions but sought always to work from
within.*
No one I spoke to thought Rüdin a cruel person; to the
contrary, he was seen as decent and dedicated to his work. Yet he not only
served the regime but, in his person and scientific reputation, did much to
effect the medicalization of racial policies — not quite those of killing
but of suppressing in specific groups the continuity of life. He also
demonstrates, |
__________
* Rüdin’s
defenders later claimed that he contested the “euthanasia” program
from within. This is unlikely, as efforts in 1940 of two psychiatrists to
enlist Rüdin, and through him the German Psychiatric Society, for
opposition to the killing met with no success (see pages 88-89). Rüdin
received two high awards from Hitler as the “pathfinder in the field of
hereditary hygiene.”22
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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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