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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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39 |
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| Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical
Vision |
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curriculum to give greater stress to military medicine,
population politics, and racial biology.57
Resistance to these changes within medical faculties was extremely
limited. One notable example of courageous intellectual opposition was that of
Karl Saller, a promising anthropologist who, even prior to the Nazi regime, had
been critical of concepts of a Nordic race as a fixed biological entity. In his
writing he had the temerity to insist that in all races there was a continually
changing gene pool, a constant state of flux, and that the German race had
become entwined with many others and contained extensive Slavic influences.
That thesis questioned the very basis of the Nazi biomedical vision; and no
less a personage than the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich initiated an order
prohibiting Saller from teaching, which forced him to leave his post at the
University of Munich. At his farewell lecture, he repeated his scientific views
and stated that his love of truth and sense of honor prevented him from
renouncing them. A handful of other anthropologists were slowly forced to leave
university positions, but Saller was notable in speaking out so forthrightly.
While many anthropologists, as well as biologists and physicians, must have
agreed with his views, they tended to remain silent, and he found himself
generally rejected and avoided by former colleagues and friends.58
Occasionally, during lectures,
physicians reasserted intellectual and ethical positions at odds with the
regime's practices. One anti-Nazi doctor I spoke to told how one of his
teachers, Professor Karl Kleist, had refused to serve on a
“euthanasia” commission and had declared to his students, “just
imagine, they want to have me, an old doctor, commit a crime with my own
hands.” The professor was said to have been denounced on the spot by
student activists, though he was subjected to no punitive measures, possibly
because of his seniority. Most anti-Nazi physicians during lectures tended to
speak cautiously, more by innuendo. It is possible that Professor Kleist did so
as well but that his former student, to whom he was a hero, wishes to remember
him as having been even bolder than he was.
Perhaps the most moving of
all expressions of opposition in Nazi Germany involved three medical students
and a few additional students from other faculties at the University of Munich,
in the dramatic White Rose resistance group. Over several months during 1942 to
1943, the group issued bold leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime and its immoral
behavior (“For Hitler and his followers there can be no punishment on this
earth which will expiate their crimes”), and calling for the German people
to overthrow the regime and restore their good name. The leaflets also
declared: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White
Rose will give you no rest.” The students were eventually discovered and
condemned by a Nazi “people’s court”; most were beheaded.
Significantly, one of the group’s leading figures, Hans Scholl, had been
inspired by a sermon of Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster, con-
[…demning] |
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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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