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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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37 |
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| Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical
Vision |
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In addition, German doctors were discouraged from making
reference in their scientific papers to work by Jewish doctors. When necessary
to refer to such work, they were required to prepare a separate reference list
for Jewish sources — as if to “keep the races separate” and
thereby protect Aryan medicine from the Jewish taint in this ultimate form of
scientific-literary segregation. In all these ways, given the German shortage
of doctors over much of this period, pragmatic need was overruled by
ideological requirement. Indeed, Nazi medical leaders conveyed the sense that
only after this purification of their profession could they begin to call upon
that profession for the realization of the biomedical vision.
Academic Medicine
Academic
medicine, as part of the overall university structure, was an important focus
for Nazi organizational therapy. The “disease" to be cured was what Josef
Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, called “flabby
intellectualism,” and what the education and culture minister, Bernhard
Rust, called “disastrous concepts of liberty and equality,” or what
one educational reformer identified as “any autonomy and freedom of the
teacher.” Even before the Nazis, German universities had been bastions of
conservative or reactionary political thought which tended to deify the concept
of the state. But the Nazis made clear that they wanted something more. As
Bavarian professors were told by their new minister of culture: “From now
on, it will not be your job to determine whether something is true, but whether
it is in the spirit of National Socialist revolution.” Universities were
to become (in the words of one historian) “intellectual frontier
fortresses” and “bodies of troops”; professors were to develop
“trooplike cooperation.”52
Again, with their combination of visionary idealism and terror, the
Nazis attracted considerable support from leading German professors: for
example, 960 prominent German educators signed a public vow to support Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi regime, which was published in the fall of 1933. Among the
notable figures in that list were the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the
world-famous Berlin University-Charité Hospital surgeon Ferdinand
Sauerbruch.*
The coercive side of Gleichschaltung from above
stressed what was called the "Führer principle" (Führer
meaning “leader” in general), appointing reliable Nazis of dubious
professional attainment as rectors and deans, so that they became in effect
extensions of the regime's similarly directed Education Ministry. The ministry
set overall policies concerning subjects taught (for example, more stress on
racial biology and ideologized Ger- […man] |
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* Sauerbruch’s ardor
for the regime subsequently diminished, and he was ultimately relatively
even-handed in making use of his power within medical circles. Eventually,
through contacts with Karl Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, he became
tangentially involved in resistance to Hitler (see page 91).
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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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