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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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125 |
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| Participants |
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| permit killing any individual or group in any way at any
time to further the vision of purifying and curing the Aryan race. |
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| Biological Romanticism:
Johann S. |
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While Johann S. was not much involved in the
“euthanasia” project, he lived out the full history and ideology of
Nazi medical leaders. During about twenty hours of conversation over three full
days, I found this canny, energetic, and fanatical old man, living in
prosperous rural surroundings, to be the most unregenerate Nazi among all the
doctors I interviewed. His life uniquely reflects the special Nazi blend of
violent nationalism and visionary biology.
Soon after we sat down for
the first time, he referred to a recent television program about a plan for a
physicians’ academy bridging the split between pre-clinical theory and
clinical work, and declared that he had been working on such a plan during the
Third Reich, at which time “doctors formed a tightly knit, completely
self-contained medical organization” that integrated all health
organizations and private institutions into “a complete medical
sector.” That set the tone of the interviews: nostalgia for the beautiful
Nazi medical experience and justification for its failure, with no faltering in
his embrace of the original vision. Indeed, he had spent virtually his entire
medical life — as a medical “old Nazi,” and a medical official
in the upper reaches of the regime — pursuing and implementing that
vision.
Johann S. described himself the “son of a doctor”
— his medical family traceable back to the early seventeenth century and
having ties to ordinary people (as veterinarians and blacksmiths) before
emerging as part of the progressive rural élite (both grandfathers were
National Liberal members of the Reichstag). As a child, he was involved with
all forms of animal life; and when I asked him what subject interested him
most, he answered emphatically, “Always, in life, in biology.” When a
little older, he began to read Bölsche and Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel, a
towering figure in German biology and an early Darwinian, was also a racist, a
believer in a mystical Volk, and a strong advocate of eugenics who
“can be claimed as a direct ancestor” of the Nazi
“euthanasia” project.36 Wilhelm
Bölsche was a literary critic who became a disciple and biographer of
Haeckel and was known to have provided Hitler with “direct access to major
ideas of Haeckelian social Darwinism” (see pages 441-42).37
When S. was eleven, his father moved his
medical practice from the country to a large city — a move his son came to
associate with a loss of idealized rural communal life, or
Gemeinschaftsleben (“We would always have a friend dropping in to
share what was on our table . . . . Our coachman would sit with us, . . . live
with us”) and the discovery of the |
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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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Page 125 |
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