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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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41 |
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| Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical
Vision |
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practitioners and traditional medical groups were held and
various forms of integration were projected. But these were resisted by
traditional medical-academic groups; Wagner was forced to retreat from his
integrative efforts, and his successor had considerably less sympathy for the
healing practitioners.
The regime’s fundamental conflict here
could never be resolved: on the one hand, its attraction to these healers,
seemingly consistent with the visionary National Socialist claim to harmony
with nature and biology; on the other hand, its equal claim to continuity with
scientific and medical tradition and its pragmatic commitment to mobilizing
physicians for its medicalized approach to race and society. Clearly,
traditional medicine won out, but the regime's continuing relationship to
healing practitioners and their massive numbers of clients contributed to its
aura as a “healing” movement.62*
Jewish Doctors as Anti-Healers
This claim to special healing power on the part of the “new
German medicine” depended upon not only excluding Jews but rendering
Jewish doctors a special medical antitype. In one cartoon (originally printed
in the notorious journal Der Stürmer), there appeared caricatures
of evil Jewish doctors performing abortions on young Aryan women and thereby
subverting the Nazi campaign to create pure Aryan children. In another cartoon
sequence, with the legend “What happened to Inge when she went to a Jewish
doctor,” little Inge is warned by the Nazi Girls League against going to
him but does anyhow and encounters a frightening creature threatening to attack
her. While claiming to be a healer, that is, the Jewish doctor threatened
innocent Aryan girls with physical harm, rape, or abortion, undermined pure
German womanhood, and was the enemy of Aryan racial revitalization.63
Moreover, these vulgar images were
legitimated in writings by physicians. An article purporting to be a
professional overview of the history of Jews in medicine went back to the time
of Moses to focus on the Jewish Volk, on its policy of
“preservation of purity” and refusal of “contamination” by
intermarriage. The Germans were therefore correct in “holding them to this
law” and in “guarding against mixing of our blood with Jews.”
The medical author then associated Jewish doctors with corrupt commercialism,
socialism, and Marxism, self-serving networks of mutual referral, and
atomization of medicine in which one focuses on chemistry and physics and
“treats sicknesses and not sick people” while
“forgetting |
__________
* In 1939, as a lasting
expression of its relationship to the “nature movement,” the Nazis
opened a new hospital outside Munich that was to epitomize many of the
principles of the “new German medicine”: for example, common dining
halls, outdoor bathing pools, special indoor physical-therapy centers, and
recreation centers. These features would aid physical and mental
rehabilitation, prevent “diseases of civilization,” and strengthen
“natural. forces of resistance” to diseases that were both physical
and psychological. Not a “hospital,” it was a “house of
health” (Gesundungshaus). |
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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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