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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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16 |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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you reconcile that with your [Hippocratic] oath as a
doctor?” His answer was, “Of course I am a doctor and I want to
preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous
appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body
of mankind.”9
The medical
imagery was still broader. Just as Turkey during the nineteenth century
(because of the extreme decline of the Ottoman empire) was known as the
“sick man of Europe,” so did pre-Hitler ideologues and Hitler himself
interpret Germany’s post-First World War chaos and demoralization as an
“illness,” especially of the Aryan race. Hitler wrote in Mein
Kampf, in the mid-1920s, that “anyone who wants to cure this era,
which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to
make clear the causes of this disease.”10 The diagnosis was racial. The only genuine
“culture-creating” race, the Aryans, had permitted themselves to be
weakened to the point of endangered survival by the “destroyers of
culture,” characterized as “the Jew.” The Jews were agents of
“racial pollution” and “racial tuberculosis,” as well as
parasites and bacteria causing sickness, deterioration, and death in the host
peoples they infested. They were the “eternal bloodsucker,”
“vampire,” “germ carrier,” “peoples’
parasite,” and “maggot in a rotting corpse.” The cure had to be
radical: that is (as one scholar put it), by “cutting out the ‘canker
of decay,’ propagating the worthwhile elements and letting the less
valuable wither away, . . . [and] ‘the extirpation of all those categories
of people considered to be worthless or dangerous.’” 12
Medical metaphor blended with concrete
biomedical ideology in the Nazi sequence from coercive sterilization to direct
medical killing to the death camps. The unifying principle of the biomedical
ideology was that of a deadly racial disease, the sickness of the Aryan race;
the cure, the killing of all Jews.
Thus, for Hans Frank, jurist and
General Governor of Poland during the Nazi occupation, “the Jews were a
lower species of life, a kind of vermin, which upon contact infected the German
people with deadly diseases.” When the Jews in the area he ruled had been
killed, he declared that “now a sick Europe would become healthy
again.”13 It was a religion of the will
— the will as “an all-encompassing metaphysical principle”;
14 and what the Nazis “willed” was
nothing less than total control over life and death. While this view is often
referred to as “social Darwinism,” the term applies only loosely,
mostly to the Nazi stress on natural “struggle” and on “survival
of the fittest." The regime actually rejected much of Darwinism; since
evolutionary theory is more or less democratic in its assumption of a common
beginning for all races, it is therefore at odds with the Nazi principle of
inherent Aryan racial virtue.15
Even
more specific to the biomedical vision was the crude genetic imagery, combined
with still cruder eugenic visions (see pages 23-24). Here Heinrich Himmler, as
high priest, spoke of the leadership’s task as being “like the
plant-breeding specialist who, when he wants to breed a pure |
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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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