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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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40 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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[con…] demning the “euthanasia” program,
and is said to have responded, “At last somebody has had the courage to
speak out.”59
The Regime as a
Healing Movement
Medical Gleichschaltung attempted to
combine Nazification policies with a claim to continuity with older traditions
of medical healing. Thus, even while investing administrative medical authority
in recognizable professional mediocrities, the Nazis courted, often
successfully, doctors with high professional reputations. And while the Nazis
terrorized potential medical opponents, they also exhibited a certain
élan in extending various forms of medical care to the entire German
population. And at the same time that they developed a policy of sterilizing or
killing people considered unfit for a society of the strong, the Nazis boasted
of spectacular operative results and humane employment arrangements for people
who had lost hands or limbs, especially in combat. In these ways, most doctors
could continue to view themselves as authentic physicians, whatever the degree
of Nazification of their profession.
At advanced six-week training
programs for future medical leaders, doctors were instructed in both Nazi
biomedical principles and German public health needs. And ordinary doctors were
required to take three-week courses every five years on recent medical
developments. The medical true believers, such as Professor Franz Hamburger of
Vienna, considered National Socialism to mean “a revolution in every
sphere of our civilization and culture,” including “a real
renaissance of medical science, on Nazi foundations.”60 The Nazi regime sought international medical
prestige and proudly sponsored international conferences, but at the same time
turned inward, covered over things they did not want seen by physicians
elsewhere in the world, and had a policy against doctors accepting Nobel Prizes
out of fear that these might be given to Jews or Social Democrats and also
because anything “international” rather than völkisch was
suspect.
Perhaps the most severe conflict between the Nazi biomedical
vision and the traditional medical profession was in relation to nonmedical
healers, known as “healing practitioners” (Heilpraktiker) and
“healers” (Heilkundiger). These groups generally stressed the
outdoor life, natural foods, and overall reorientation in living; they often
flouted established medical practice and sometimes treated serious diseases
with dubious therapies. Long active in Germany, these healers appealed to the
regime’s biological romanticism and mysticism and found their strongest
supporter in Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess, the most intense biological
mystic in the Nazi inner circle. Gerhard Wagner praised their “biological
insights” and repeatedly sought a “synthesis of the one-sided old
school medicine and the nature cure methods” as consistent with the
National Socialist concept of “natural and biological laws controlling all
events.”61 With that kind of
sponsorship, joint conferences of the healing |
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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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