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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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30 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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| The Nazification of
Medicine |
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Nazification of the medical profession — a key aspect
of the transition from sterilization to direct medical killing — was
achieved by a combination of ideological enthusiasm and systematic terror. An
influential manual by Rudolf Ramm of the medical faculty of the University of
Berlin proposed that each doctor was to be no longer merely a caretaker of the
sick but was to become a “cultivator of the genes,” a “physician
to the Volk, ” and a “biological soldier.” While Ramm
harked back to traditional forms of medical idealism (“inner calling, high
ethics, profound knowledge . . . sacrifice and dedication”), he favored
abandoning the old “liberal-materialistic spirit” (associated
especially with the harmful influence of Jews in the profession) and acquiring
instead “the idealistic Weltanschauung of National Socialism.”
Thus, the physician could carry out what Gerhard Wagner identified as the task
of his Public Health Office: the “promotion and perfection of the health
of the German people ... to ensure that the people realize the full potential
of their racial and genetic endowment.”24 Ramm went on to speak of “breakthroughs in
biological thinking” under National Socialism that enabled medical leaders
to take an important part in projects to reverse racial decay such as the
Nuremberg Laws and the sterilization program. To carry these programs out
properly, the individual physician must become a “genetics doctor”
(Erbarzt). He could then become a “caretaker of the race” and
a politician of population. By following public care functions of preventing
“bastardization through the propagation of unworthy and racially alien
elements ... and maintaining and increasing those of sound heredity he could
attain the national goal of keeping our blood pure.”25
Ramm also discussed the virtues of
sterilization and labeled “erroneous” the widespread belief that a
doctor should under no circumstances take a patient’s life, since for the
incurably sick and insane, “euthanasia” was the most “merciful
treatment” and “an obligation to the Volk.” That
obligation was always central. The physician was to be concerned with the
health of the Volk even more than with individual disease and was to teach them
to overcome the old individualistic principle of the right to one's own body
and to embrace instead the duty to be healthy. Thus, Johann S. spoke to me with
pride about the principle of being “doctor to the Volkskörper
[‘national body’ or ‘people’s body’]” and of
“our duty ... to the collectivity.”
Ramm’s manual also
specified that a doctor was to be a biological militant, “an alert
biological soldier” living under “the great idea of the National
Socialist biological state structure” (see also page 130). For it claimed
that “National Socialism, unlike any other political philosophy or Party
program, is in accord with the natural history and biology of man.”
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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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