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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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35 |
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| Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical
Vision |
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Much of the spirit of Nazi medicine emerged from the
politicized doctors of the Party's original Physicians’ League, whose
leading figure was Dr. Gerhard Wagner. As chief physician of the Reich, Wagner
headed both the Reich Physicians’ Chamber and the Party medical structures
and favored a visionary ideological medicine that was highly racist, socially
and clinically oriented (the Nazi version of a “people's medicine”),
and distrustful of academic medicine and pure science. Wagner was active in
formulating and explaining the sterilization program, and it was to him that
Hitler first (in 1935) told his plans for extensive “euthanasia”
killings; indeed, Wagner was considered by some Germans to have been the
“godfather of the euthanasia programme.”43 When he died in 1939, he was replaced by
Leonardo Conti, a more bureaucratic figure who held a health post in the
Interior Ministry, though also possessing the credentials of an “old
medical fighter.” Eventually, Karl Brandt, who like Conti was an ardent
second-generation Nazi, emerged from more distinguished university connections
to become the dominant medical figure.
“The Jews Are Our Misfortune
”
Systematic persecution of Jewish doctors was bound up with the
Nazi biomedical vision. Through victimization of their Jewish colleagues,
German doctors could combine their own “scientific racism” and
anti-Semitism with their professional and economic incentive of ridding
themselves of formidable rivals. In their part in this solution to what was
called the “Jewish problem,” those German doctors were the heirs to a
long-standing intellectual-professional anti-Semitism having to do with
extraordinary German anxiety over the perceived threat of Jewish otherness to
German society and to the German race and state.
A key image here is
that of the leading late-nineteenth-century historian Heinrich von Treitschke:
“The Jews are our misfortune.” Expressed in 1879, that image
reverberated over generations; a few decades later, a leading anti-Semite could
write that it “became a part of my body and soul when I was twenty years
old.”44* Indeed, several of the doctors
I interviewed referred uneasily, and usually somewhat noncommittally, to
Treitschke’s famous phrase. For that image of Jewish-caused German
“misfortune” encouraged every level of anti-Semitism from the
medieval-mystical kind to modern “scientific racism” to the seemingly
milder, even “reflective” approach favored by educated Germans:
namely, that. there was indeed a serious “Jewish problem” which
Germans had to engage. |
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* Although Treitschke was
originally a liberal sympathetic to John Stuart Mill and the American
Declaration of Independence, his fierce nationalism went even beyond that
customary for the “National Liberals” among whom he initially
belonged. Treitschke gave intellectual legitimation to the anti-Semitic
movement of his time, and insisted (probably correctly) that his belief in the
Jews as Germany’s misfortune would be shared by “men who would
scornfully reject every notion of clerical intolerance or national
arrogance.” 45 |
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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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