Nazi Medicine, Part 3.
- Apr 6
- 2 min read
A major goal of the Nazi philosophy was to erase the boundary between healing and killing for physicians. Both political leaders and doctors were heavily influenced by the work of Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche entitled The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. The case was made that killing was an allowable act for “empty shells of human beings”, those with psychiatric problems, brain injury, low IQ, etc., and as we saw last week with Luise, once that threshold was crossed, ever-widening criteria became not only acceptable, but commonplace. There were 30 killing centers across Germany to save on transportation costs, and in these centers, first babies, then toddlers, then “half-breeds” were murdered.
All these changes in medicine were occurring, of course, within a society obsessed with race. This was not “race” as we define it today. Groups of people were considered “races” – for example, the Slavic race, the Nordic race, the Jewish race, and the Aryan race. Hitler believed that true Germans were Aryan, descended from the Nordic race, and endowed with strength and high intellect and destined to rule over other lesser races. He believed that Germany had lost its preeminence through intermarriage and the inclusion of “lesser” peoples in German society.
Stop and think for a moment about this core belief and combine it with the concept of killing as a healing measure for the society as a whole, and the Holocaust begins to come into focus. In order to regain its rightful place, the German government would decide who could and could not procreate, would eliminate the weak and sickly, would remove the lesser races first by forcing them out and then, the “Final Solution”, by killing them all. And all the while Germany was expanding and carrying this vision into new territories as well. Through these measures, the Reich would ultimately be left with a pure, strong, supremely capable Volk destined to rule for a thousand years.
And at the very heart of this view of the future were doctors. It was they who stood on the platform at Auschwitz and said, “Left” or “Right”. One physician, on observing his first “selection” told the chief doctor he “could stand it only half an hour and then had to vomit”.
The chief physician replied, “That will pass. It happens to everyone. Don’t make such a fuss about it.”
And so it was in the most educated, most cultured country in Europe 80 years ago. Never forget.
