Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide ©
"This World Is Not This World"
new strain from a well-tried species that has been exhausted by too much cross-breeding, first goes over the field to cull the unwanted plants."16
The Nazi project, then, was not so much Darwinian or social Darwinist as a vision of absolute control over the evolutionary process, over the biological human future. Making widespread use of the Darwinian term "selection," the Nazis sought to take over the functions of nature (natural selection) and God (the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away) in orchestrating their own "selections," their own version of human evolution. In these visions the Nazis embraced not only versions of medieval mystical anti-Semitism but also a newer (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) claim to "scientific racism." Dangerous Jewish characteristics could be linked with alleged data of scientific disciplines, so that a "mainstream of racism" formed from "the fusion of anthropology, eugenics, and social thought." 17 The resulting "racial and social biology" could make vicious forms of anti-Semitism seem intellectually respectable to learned men and women.
One can speak of the Nazi state as a "biocracy." The model here is a theocracy, a system of rule by priests of a sacred order under the claim of divine prerogative. In the case of the Nazi biocracy, the divine prerogative was that of cure through purification and revitalization of the Aryan race: "From a dead mechanism which only lays claim to existence for its own sake, there must be formed a living organism with the exclusive aim of serving a higher idea." just as in a theocracy, the state itself is no more than a vehicle for the divine purpose, so in the Nazi biocracy was the state no more than a means to achieve "a mission of the German people on earth"; that of "assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements in this [Aryan] people ... [and] ... raising them to a dominant position."18 The Nazi biocracy differed from a classical theocracy in that the biological priests did not actually rule. The clear rulers were Adolf Hitler and his circle, not biological theorists and certainly not the doctors. (The difference, however, is far from absolute: even in a theocracy, highly politicized rulers may make varying claims to priestly authority.) In any case, Nazi ruling authority was maintained in the name of the higher biological principle.
Among the biological authorities called forth to articulate and implement "scientific racism" — including physical anthropologists, geneticists, and racial theorists of every variety — doctors inevitably found a unique place. It is they who work at the border of life and death, who are most associated with the awesome, death-defying, and sometimes death-dealing aura of the primitive shaman and medicine man. As bearers of this shamanistic legacy and contemporary practitioners of mysterious healing arts, it is they who are likely to be called upon to become biological activists.
I have mentioned my primary interest in Nazi doctors' participation in medicalized or biologized killing. We shall view their human experiments as related to the killing process and to the overall Nazi biomedical vision.
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Psychology of Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
Back Page 17 Forward
Copyright © 2005 Robert J. Lifton. All rights reserved.
Technical/administrative contact: webmaster@holocaust-history.org