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 Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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 “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE GENETIC CURE 
 
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.  
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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