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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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483 |
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| Genocide |
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is the view of Moses as “an enlightened public health
administrator, rather than as a spiritual leader” because certain of his
precepts enhanced individual bodily health.78*
Medical materialism can overlay symbol
systems that closely parallel those of primitive purification rituals. But in
its concrete focus the body, on biology, medical materialism lends itself
directly to purification projects that kill in the name of healing. Medically
oriented purification included getting rid of the incurably ill and
hereditarily impaired as well as those considered sexually deviant, notably
homosexuals.
In their principle of taking over evolution from nature in
order to prevent humanity from being “annihilated by degeneration”
(in Lorenz’s words [see page 134]), the Nazis were putting forward their
sweeping version of biological — one might say evolutionary —
purification. Doctors became the professional purifiers, once they themselves
had undergone purification (Hitler’s stress on the “cleansing”
of the medical profession — which meant getting rid of Jews and political
opponents — so that it could assume “racial leadership”), the
“alert biological soldiers” on guard against anything strange or
deficient and therefore defiling with its contagion. Scientific racism and
mental hygiene were the medical-materalistic principles by which the Nazis
murdered in the name of purification. Above all, on had to “purify the
blood,” an image that in its full meaning and with its related expressions
(“blood and soil,” “blood flag,” “Order of the
Blood,” and “thinking with the blood”) suggests what one
commentator called “the mysterious relationship of organic to inorganic
nature.”79 “Purifying the
blood” becomes a means of rendering sacred the mystical-immortal Aryan
race and community. Paracelsus was again useful here, now as a great purifier
of history itself.† As exemplified by Paracelsus, there had been a
long-standing German tendency, expressed in various youth and adult movements,
toward purification of mind and body. The Nazis called forth that tradition in
a violent attack on all that they saw as defiling in urban life, human
relations, sexual behavior, and social experiment.
The Nazis also
developed the medical-purification method par excellence, applied to
purification of genes and race — that of selections. The pivotal statement
that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology” could be
even more pivotally understood: “National Socialism is nothing but applied
biological purification.” It was from this standpoint that one Nazi writer
declared that the doctor had been “restored to the priesthood and |
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* The term “medical
materialism,” used originally by William James, has been developed in the
manner used here by Mary Douglas. Norman O. Brown, in personal conversation,
told me of a childhood teacher at a church school who impressed his students by
declaring that Moses was a “sanitary officer.” The teacher considered
himself a “modernist” and constantly connected biblical events with
scientific principles.
† The reference is to Richard
Billinger’s Paracelsus, as presented in a drama staged at the
Salzburg Festival in 1943. Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer had written an influential
Paracelsus trilogy in 1925-26, which was taken up by the Nazis; in it
Paracelsus seeks virtually to eliminate history by replacing it with a divine
form of nature. 80 |
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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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