| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
| |
[dis…] tributing the Zyklon-B gas used at Auschwitz.
Mrugowsky was put to death at Nuremberg in 1948 for his extensive involvement
in fatal medical experiments. The book he introduced had been written a hundred
years earlier by Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, one of Germany’s great modern
physician-humanists. In his introduction, Mrugowsky focused upon the
doctor’s function as “the priest of the holy flame of life” (in
Hufeland’s words), and on the “art of healing” as the
doctor’s “divine mission.” Partially anticipating his own
future, he spoke of the National Socialist breakdown of the distinction between
research and healing, since the results of the work of the researcher are for
the benefit of the Volk.29
Inevitably, the Nazi medical ideal went back to Hippocrates and related
itself to the Hippocratic oath. The claim was that medicine had been
“despiritualized” mainly by what Gerhard Wagner identified as the
“mechanically oriented spirit” of Jewish teachers. There was thus a
need to “return to the ethics and high moral status of an earlier
generation ... which stood on [the] solid philosophical ground” of the
Hippocratic oath.30 Finally, the
Reichsführer of the SS and overall head of the Nazi police system,
Heinrich Himmler himself embraced Hippocrates as a model for SS physicians. In
a brief introduction to a series of short books for SS doctors under the
overall title “Eternal Doctors,” Himmler spoke of “the great
Greek doctor Hippocrates,” of the “unity of character and
accomplishment” of his life, which “proclaims a morality, the
strengths of which are still undiminished today and shall continue to determine
medical action and thought in the future.” The series was edited by
Grawitz and possessed the ultimate imprimatur in being “authorized”
by none other than Hitler himself.31
In testimony at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, a witness
referred to the Nazi embrace of Hippocratic principles as “an ironical
joke of world history.”32 But this
ultimate absurdity had an internal logic: the sense of recasting the medical
profession — and the entire German nation — in the service of larger
healing.
There was one area in which the Nazis did insist upon a clear
break with medical tradition: They mounted a consistent attack upon what they
viewed as exaggerated Christian compassion for the weak individual instead of
tending to the health of the group, of the Volk. This partly Nietzschean
position, as articulated by Ramm, included a rejection of the Christian
principle of caritas or charity, and of the Church’s “commandment to
attend to the incurably ill person and render him medical aid unto his
death.”33 The same position was
expressed in the Nazi Party medical outlet Ziel und Weg (Aim and Road)
from the time of its founding in 1931. The matter was put strongly by Dr.
Arthur Guett, a high-ranking health official, who declared that “the
ill-conceived ‘love of thy neighbor’ has to disappear .... It is the
supreme duty of the ... state to grant life and livelihood only to the healthy
and hereditarily sound portion of the population in order to secure ... a
hereditarily sound and racially pure folk [Volk] for all eternity.” He
added the visionary-idealistic principle |
|
