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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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42 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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the patient.” More than that, Jewish obsession with
sexology and defense of homosexuality, along with the creation of Freudian
psychoanalysis — all these were aspects of “sexual degeneration, a
breakdown of the family and loss of all that is decent,” and ultimately
the destruction of the German Volk.64
Beyond the ordinary Jewish menace, the Jewish doctor became a more
formidable threat to the German Volk, the embodiment of the anti-healer
who must be dealt with if medicine was to join in the great national healing
mission, and the advance image of what Nazi doctors were actually to become:
the healer turned killer.
Positive and
Negative Eugenics
Sterilization policies were always associated
with the therapeutic and regenerative principles of the biomedical vision: with
the “purification of the national body” and the "eradication of
morbid hereditary dispositions.” Sterilization was considered part of
“negative eugenics”: subsequent ordinances also prohibited the
issuance of marriage licenses in situations where either party suffered from
contagious disease, had been placed under a legal guardian, was afflicted with
significant mental disturbance, or fell into any of the categories of
hereditary disease listed in sterilization ordinances. These restrictions were
“balanced” by programs of “positive eugenics” —
encouraging large families and constructive health practices among Aryan
couples, etc. — because “generations may come and go, but the German
people shall live on forever.”65
Always at issue for the medical profession was its role in protecting
and revitalizing the genetic health of the Volk. Doctors were given
special status on commissions created to approve marriages on the basis of
Nuremberg racial statutes, even as the profession expanded its role in social
programs and preventive work; at the same time, doctors continued to engage in
private practice and to maintain their high earning power, aided by the
elimination of Jewish medical competition. The Physicians’ Law formalized
the authority structure and its special status in the regime, reaffirming its
“vocation” of preserving and improving the “good heredity,”
“racial stock,” and general health of the German Volk. Subsequent
laws, far from not diminishing this status, increased the requirements of
physicians as “public servants” and “biological state
officers,” restricting such things as their traditional professional
confidentiality with patients should the regime require information.66
This commitment to “positive
eugenics” — or “the battle for births,” as it was sometimes
called — was inseparable from “negative eugenics” —
sterilization and, eventually, “euthanasia.” Abortions were
prohibited, but sterilization courts could rule that pregnancy could be
interrupted for eugenic reasons in a “racial emergency” situation:
that is, if the future child was likely to inherit certain defects or (in all
probability) had mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) parentage. |
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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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