| “This World Is Not This World”
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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. |
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