Nazi Medicine.
- Apr 6
- 2 min read
People write to me very frequently, asking, “How could the Holocaust have happened?” The answer is extremely complex and involved reshaping long-held social and moral beliefs. I was asked to repost this three-part series on the practice of medicine in the Third Reich, which provides a great deal of insight.
Part One –
No government can simply say, “We are going to kill everyone that is Jewish, that is Roma or Sinti, that is mentally or physically handicapped, that has a hereditary illness, or that is homosexual,” and expect their citizens to go along. It is essential to change the public conception about killing and whether it serves a useful purpose for the society as a whole. In order to do this, individuals already held in high esteem within the society are necessary tools, and in the case of Nazi Germany, the most useful tools were physicians.
By the early 1930s, nazification of the medical profession held the highest priority for the German government. Universities were told, “From now on it will not be your job to determine whether something is true, but whether it is in the spirit of the national socialist revolution.“ (Nazi Doctors, 37) The medical manual of the University of Berlin stated the doctors were not just carers of the sick, but “biological soldiers”, “physicians to the Volk” (the national body). And of critical importance – the health of the Volk came before that of the individual. Stop and think about that for a moment – in every situation, the health of the society was more important than that of the individual. What did that mean?
So began the radical transformation of the practice of medicine in Germany, once centered around healing the sick and now, instead, centered around sacrificing the sick to the greater good. The next step, of course, was to define what makes one “sick” and to limit the effect of such individuals on the Volk.
And so we begin to see that the Holocaust was not an event; it was a deliberate, systematic, step by step process to create the perfect Third Reich…
