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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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23 |
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| Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical
Vision |
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No wonder that Fritz Lenz, a German physician-geneticist
advocate of sterilization (later a leading ideologue in the Nazi program of
“racial hygiene”), could, in 1923, berate his countrymen for their
backwardness in the domain of sterilization as compared with the United States.
Lenz complained that provisions in the Weimar Constitution (prohibiting the
infliction of bodily alterations on human beings) prevented widespread use of
vasectomy techniques; that Germany had nothing to match the eugenics research
institutions in England and the United States (for instance, that at Cold
Spring Harbor, New York, led by Charles B. Davenport and funded by the Carnegie
Institution in Washington and, by Mary Harriman); and that Germany had no
equivalent to the American laws prohibiting marriage both for people suffering
from such conditions as epilepsy or mental retardation, and between people of
different races. Lenz criticized America only for focusing too generally on
preserving the “white race” instead of specifically on the
“Nordic race” — yet was convinced that "the next round in the
thousand year fight for the life of the Nordic race will probably be fought in
America.”¹* That single reservation suggests the early German focus
on a specific racial entity, the “Nordic” or “Aryan race,”
however unsupported by existing knowledge.
There had been plenty of
racial-eugenic passion in the United States, impulses to sterilize large
numbers of criminals and mental patients out of fear of “national
degeneration” and of threat to the health of ”the civilized
races,” who were seen to be “biologically plunging downward.”
Associated with the American eugenics movement was a biomedical vision whose
extent is suggested by the following quotation from a 1923 book by A. E.
Wiggam: “The first warning which biology gives to statesmanship is that
the advanced races of mankind are going backward; ... that civilization, as you
have so far administered it, is self-destructive; that civilization always
destroys the man that builds it; that your vast efforts to improve man’s
lot, instead of improving man, are hastening the hour of his
destruction.”³ †
(A clear distinction must be made
between genetics and eugenics. Genetics was, and is, a legitimate science,
though one with limited development at the time [it began as a science with the
recognition of Mendel’s laws in 1900]; its principles were crudely, often
falsely, applied by the |
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* Lenz did not at this point
infer anti-Semitism from his belief in racial differences. Citing him, among
others, George L. Mosse has argued that “there is no warrant for the claim
to seem the ... doctrine of ‘racial biology and hygiene’ an immediate
forerunner of the Nazi Policy against the Jews.”²
But once the Jews came to be viewed as a race, the connection was
readily made.
† In a
1932 study of the sterilization movement in the United States, J. P. Landman
spoke of “alarmist eugenics” and of “over zealous and over
ardent eugenicists” who “regard the socially inadequate persons,
i.e., the feeble-minded, the epileptics, the mentally diseased, the blind, the
deformed and the criminals as inimical to the human race ... [because] these
peoples perpetuate their deficiencies and thus threaten the quality of the
ensuing generations. It should be our aim to exterminate these undesirables,
they contend, since a nation must defend itself against national degeneration
as much as against the external foreign enemy.”4 |
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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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