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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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44 |
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Index |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”:
THE GENETIC CURE |
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| the regime. So also did most other professions; but with
doctors, that gift included using their intellectual authority to justify and
carry out medicalized killing. Doctors promoted the idea that collective German
existence was a medical matter, and many succumbed to the temptation
articulated as early as 1922 by the popular writer Ernst Mann.* Mann, in
defending direct medical killing, considered illness “a disgrace to be
managed by health control.” His principle was that “misery can only
be removed from the world by painless extermination of the miserable!” The
entire process, moreover, was to be taken over by the physician — at which
point, “doctors could be the true saviors of mankind.”71 |
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* Ernst Mann was a
pseudonym for Gerhard Hoffman, a critic of mass culture and an interpreter of
science. |
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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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Page 44 |
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