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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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38 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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[Ger…] man-centered history), regulations for faculty
(getting rid of Jews and the ideologically recalcitrant and promoting faculty
members who manifested Nazi enthusiasm), as well as student and admission
policies (excluding Jews and Social Democrats and favoring stellar members of
the Hitler Youth, the SA, or the SS).53 .
Equally important was Gleichschaltung from below: militant
behavior on the part of the National Socialist Student League, which organized
early, soon came to dominate or replace traditional student groups and formed
an arrogant subculture with intense camaraderie and more than a tinge of
violence. Its members broke up lectures that displeased them, and understood
their task as opposing all teaching that was not rooted in National Socialist
doctrine. When the Education Ministry found it necessary to tone down the
students, it passed the mantle of Gleichschaltung from below to the Nazi
League of University Instructors, whose leader understood his organization to
be “the appointed trustee of the National Socialist Party at the
universities to see that universities and scholarship are not only painted
brown [the Nazi color] but really made over to fit the pattern of National
Socialism.”54
Medical students
were told that they required “the synthesis of the marching boot and the
book”: that is, concrete involvement in military or paramilitary training
as students and commitment to an all-out “war” against alleged
enemies of Germany or National Socialism. Becoming a biological soldier, then,
meant placing one’s body and mind in the service of the militarized and
ideologized authority of the state.
The Nazis sought to combine their
radical alterations of universities with the claim to be part of ennobling
tradition. A dramatic effort at this legitimation was the elaborately, staged
550-year jubilee celebration at the University of Heidelberg in June and July
of 1936. The rector of the university stressed “the devotion of the new
Germany, to the task of universal civilization and its sponsorship of high
intellectual achievement in all fields of learning.” Delegations came from
all over the world, including representatives from eight universities in the
United States Among the Americans who received honorary degrees were Harry. H.
Laughlin, Davenport’s assistant at Cold Spring Harbor and a tireless
polemicist against immigrant groups he considered biologically in inferior; and
Foster Kennedy, a physician advocate of putting to death “the utterly
unfit” among young retarded children.55*
Both men were sympathetic to the Nazi sterilization laws.
In addition
to purges of Jews and the politically unacceptable, medical faculties
de-emphasized basic research, shortened the time of medical study to produce
more doctors for the state, and modified the classical |
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* At the celebration,
Harvard University delegates invited German universities to send
representatives to their two-hundredth anniversary celebration later that year.
British universities showed greater ethical sensitivity in refusing to send
delegates to Heidelberg, after an exchange of correspondence in the London
Times in which it was declared that “Heidelberg stands in the
forefront” of German persecution of professors and lecturers for racial,
religious, and political reasons.56
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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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