|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
130 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
| |
according to S., “came into conflict with biological
experience, . . . with the laws of life.”
During those heady years
from 1934 to 1939, S. became a missionary for this biomedical vision, making
hundreds of speeches to doctors’ groups, Party meetings and general
audiences. He combined his mystical concept of “biological socialism”
with Nazi leadership principles, especially concerning the hegemony of
physicians as the authentic, practicing biologists in matters of race and
population, judgments about the needs of the people, and much else. As for
anti-Semitic attitudes and actions, he insisted that “the racial question
... [and] resentment of the Jewish race. . . had nothing to do with medieval
anti-Semitism ... but only [with] the aim of self-fulfillment, völkisch
self-fulfillment.” That is, it was all a matter of scientific biology
and of community. Again S. declared nostalgically, “It was a beautiful
time for me.”
Everything changed in 1939, the year Gerhard Wagner
died and the war began. While S. took the Nazi view of the war (as being forced
upon his country by Poles mistreating ethnic Germans), he felt that it
interrupted his biological mission and, indeed, that it “ended the whole
National Socialist movement.” He saw the medical aspect of the movement,
under Conti, Wagner’s successor, increasingly bureaucratized within the
Interior Ministry, with lawyers taking over and Party-based visionaries like
himself having less to say. Even before then, S. had been critical of this
legalistic trend as manifested in the Nuremberg racial laws and the
sterilization program. Rather than its courts and elaborate legal machinery, S.
wanted it run completely by doctors, who alone would decide which people had
dangerous hereditary traits, and who could alter policies according to changing
medical knowledge.
Another villain in the piece was the SS leader,
Himmler, whom S. characterized as “a mere animal breeder . . . [who]
thought he was competent in racial questions,” and who never represented
the real view of the National Socialist Party and was the reason for much
unfair criticism of it. S. arranged to be reassigned out of Berlin in order to
escape the “grotesque” bureaucratic situation.
Concerning
“euthanasia,” he was sympathetic to the concept, emphasizing what a
“blessing” it was for regressed mental patients to be
“released.” But he was extremely critical of the actual project,
considering it a product of “Himmler’s circle,” and its timing a
bureaucratic disaster. He also objected to the Nazi state — the
representative of the whole community, or Gemeinschaft — taking
human life, and seemed to prefer here also that the matter be left
completely to doctors. He believed that the “loudest protest”
against “euthanasia” came from old Nazi doctors who were district
medical officers; that Karl Brandt’s execution at Nuremberg was
“completely unjustified”; and that the responsible people were Brack,
a “failed doctor” who sought only his own advancement, and Bouhler;
also a nonphysician, who implicated Brandt at Nurernberg to save his own neck.
But the whole subject embarrassed S.: from it, he |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 130 |
Forward |
|
|
