|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
36 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
| |
Treitschke’s stress was on the “intrusion”
of Judaism into what had to be a “Christian-German state,” and on the
danger that the children of these alien people from the East (that is, eastern
Europe) “would one day dominate” Germany’s institutions,
especially the economy and the press.46 That
fear of Jewish “domination” seemed to many German doctors to have
been borne out in their profession. In large cities, Jewish doctors could
constitute as much as 50 percent of all physicians. And although they made up
about 13 percent of physicians in Germany in general, even that far exceeded
their general percentage of the population. Beyond their numbers, many
German-Jewish physicians had achieved great prominence and worldwide fame as a
result of their scientific accomplishments. The situation was especially
intolerable to the Nazis, who were relying on the profession to articulate and
carry out their bold and malignant biomedical vision. That expectation of
“racial leadership” was what led Hitler to lay particular stress on
“the cleansing of the medical profession.”48
The essential violence in hard-core Nazi
doctors’ attitudes toward Jewish colleagues in the new Third Reich was
expressed, within two months of Hitler’s becoming chancellor, during an
anti-Jewish boycott campaign. In Berlin, on 1 April 1933, they used such
tactics as contacting Jewish colleagues for ostensible consultations and having
them picked up by car (sometimes supplied by the same German doctors), in which
they were taken to remote places and beaten and left bleeding — or else
threatened and humiliated them by making them run the gauntlet, hitting them
with sticks, and exposing them to the sound, of fire.49 At early professional conferences, there were
indications of what was to come, as doctors in the chair spoke of “a
foreign invasion. . . from the East [that] constitutes a menace to the German
race,” and of the “imperative necessity that this menace be ...
suppressed and eliminated.”50
Official measures against Jews also began in early 1933: prohibition
— at first with exceptions, which were gradually eliminated — of
Jewish doctors from joining (and eventually from continuing earlier association
with) the important national health insurance panels; step-by-step limitations
on Jewish medical practice — early prohibition of all Jewish medical
practice would have decimated German medical care — until, on 3 August
1939, as a “fourth amendment” to the Nuremberg Laws, the medical
licenses of all Jewish doctors were nullified. There were characteristically
legalistic definitions of who was a “non-Aryan” or Jew; and
prohibitions, during periods when Jewish doctors were allowed to practice or to
see non-Jewish patients, and parallel discouragement and subsequent prohibition
of Aryan doctors from seeing Jewish patients. Eventually, Jewish doctors were
not permitted to be referred to as physicians but only as “treaters of the
sick,” and Jewish surgeons as “specialized treaters in surgery.”
Before being forced to leave, or being incarcerated or killed, Jews had to be
divested of their membership in the anointed fraternity of
physician-healers.51 |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 36 |
Forward |
|
|
