| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
| |
procedures were ligation of the vas deferens in men and of
the ovarian tubes in women. Professor G. A. Wagner, director of the University
of Berlin’s Women’s Clinic, advocated that the law provide an option
for removing the entire uterus in mentally deficient women. His convoluted
argument was based on the principle of “hereditary health”: mentally
deficient women, after being sterilized, were especially likely to attract the
opposite sex (who need not worry about impregnating them) and therefore to
develop gonorrhea, which is most resistant to treatment when it affects the
uterine cervix; the men who would then contract gonorrhea from these women
would, in turn, infect other women with desirable hereditary traits and render
them sterile. Other medical commentators, making a less genetic and more
specifically moralistic argument, favored removal of the uterus in those
candidates for sterilization who showed tendencies to promiscuity.* Still more
foreboding was an official edict permitting sterilization by irradiation (X
rays or radium) in certain specified cases “on the basis of scientific
experiments.”13 These experiments,
ostensibly in the service of improving medical procedures for specific cases,
were a preliminary step toward later X-ray sterilization experiments conducted
extensively, harmfully, and sometimes fatally on Jewish men and women in
Auschwitz and elsewhere.
Directors of institutions of various kinds had
a strong impulse to sterilize in order to eliminate the possible hereditary
influence of a wide variety of conditions - blindness, deafness, congenital
defects, and such “crippled” states as clubfoot, harelip, and cleft
palate.14 The genetically dominated worldview
demanded of physicians led to discussions of the advisability of sterilizing
not only the weak and impaired, but their relatives, anyone who might be a
“carrier” of these defects. Not surprisingly, Fritz Lenz carried the
concept farthest in suggesting the advisability of sterilizing people with only
slight signs of mental disease, though he recognized that a radical application
of this principle would lead to the sterilization of 20 percent of the total
German population — something on the order of twenty million people!15
In that atmosphere, humane efforts were
likely to take the form of pleas for restriction and exemption: for example,
the recommendation by the distinguished anti-Nazi Berlin psychiatrist Karl
Bonhoeffer that people who combined hereditary defects with unusual qualities
or talents should not be sterilized; and the Munich psychiatrist Dr. Oswald
Bumke’s recommendation against sterilizing people who were schizoid rather
than schizophrenic, along with his cautionary statement that schizophrenia
itself could not be eliminated by sterilization because of the complexity of
hereditary influences.16 (The eugenics courts
sometimes did make exceptions for the artistically gifted.)
But the
regime discouraged qualifications and employed a rhetoric of |
__________
* There was, indeed, concern
that degenerate individuals might seek sterilization to pursue "unrestrained
sexual gratification."12 |
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