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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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29 |
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| Sterilization and the Nazi Biomedical
Vision |
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in extreme form, the attraction of the Nazi biomedical
vision for a certain kind of biologically and genetically oriented scientist.
Opposition to Sterilization
There did not seem to be much opposition to sterilization. The
Catholic Church disapproved of it, but avoided confronting the issue and did
little more than press for the exemption of Catholic judges and doctors from
enforcing the law. One judge on a Hereditary Health Appeals Court raised the
interesting, question of the “burden of unusual responsibility”
placed on doctors required to perform operations that “serve no
therapeutic purpose.” But Gerhard Wagner — then the leading Nazi
medical authority and a zealous advocate of sterilization — denied any
such moral conflict in doctors; and a Party newspaper ran a column with the
significant heading “Life or Death,” which made the simple point that
the life of the nation took precedence over “dogma and conflicts of
conscience,” and also that opposition to the government’s program
would be met with strong retaliation.23
The great majority of the doctors I interviewed told me that they
approved of the sterilization laws at the time. They believed the laws to be
consistent with prevailing medical and genetic knowledge concerning the
prevention of hereditary defects, though a few of these doctors had some
hesitation about the laws’ compulsory features. The doctors all stressed
their absolute distinction between those sterilization policies and later
“euthanasia.”
Decisions about sterilization were affected by
bureaucratic struggles both between doctors and lawyers and between extremely
ardent and less ardent advocates of the procedure. One doctor I interviewed,
Johann S., who had been a leading organizer and high-level participant in Nazi
medical programs including sterilization, thought that “the law was
totally messed up by the legal people.” He and his medical colleagues
believed strongly that “it would have been more appropriate to leave this
decision [about whom and when to sterilize] to a doctors’ team.”
While psychiatrists later emphasized their restraint, Dr. S. related incidents
in which they had to be restrained from sterilizing people with relatively
benign psychological difficulties such as treatable depressions. He told how
even Gerhard Wagner (whom he tended to glorify) had restrained a
physician-health officer with the admonition, “This is not a rabbit
hunt.” While Dr. S. recognized that excessive zeal was widespread, he
tended to excuse it as a product of the idealism of that time: “The great
enthusiasm that carried through the developments between 1933 and 1939 cannot
be denied. Everybody wanted to contribute. One of the first National Socialist
laws to be enacted was the law on [hereditary] health. Thus the [state] health
officers demonstrated their ambition to have as many people as possible
sterilized.” |
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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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