| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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“Euthanasia ” Consciousness
Binding and Hoche turned out to be the prophets of direct medical
killing. While there were subsequent papers and discussions by German
psychiatrists of the Hoche-Binding thesis, it is probably fair to say that,
during the years prior to the Nazi assumption of power, their thesis was by no
means a majority view in German psychiatry and medicine.7 Under the Nazis, there was increasing discussion
of the possibility of mercy killings, of the Hoche concept of the
“mentally dead,” and of the enormous economic drain on German society
caused by the large number of these impaired people. A mathematics text asked
the student to calculate how many government loans to newly married couples
could be granted for the amount of money it cost the state to care for
“the crippled, the criminal, and the insane.”8
Moreover, the extensive public and
medical discussion of the sterilization project tended always to suggest that
more radical measures were necessary. In an August 1933 speech at the opening
ceremony for a state medical academy in Munich, the Bavarian commissioner of
health, Professor Walter Schultze, declared that sterilization was
insufficient: psychopaths, the mentally retarded, and other inferior persons
must be isolated and killed. He noted, “This policy has already been
initiated in our concentration camps.”9
On all sides there took shape the principle that the practice of extermination
was part of the legitimate business of government.
Mental hospitals
became an important center for the developing “euthanasia”
consciousness. From 1934, these hospitals were encouraged to neglect their
patients; each year funds were reduced and state inspections of standards were
either made perfunctory or suspended altogether. Especially important were
courses held in psychiatric institutions for leading government officials and
functionaries — courses featuring grotesque “demonstrations”
orchestrated to display the most repulsive behavior of regressed patients
— of “life unworthy of life.” After 1938, these courses were
systematically extended to include members of the SS, political leaders of the
Party, the police, prison officials, and the press. In the process the medical
profession itself was made ready for the extraordinary tasks it was to be
assigned.10
The Nazis exploited film
for the same purpose, and doctors played a large role here as well. Early
films, such as “The Inheritance” (Das Erbe, 1935), were mainly
didactic and ostensibly scientific in depicting medical and social consequences
of hereditary impairment. A subsequent film, “The Victim of the Past”
(Opfer der Vergangenheit, 1937), covered the same ground and went much
further: it not only contrasted “healthy German citizens” (girls
doing gymnastics, etc.) with regressed occupants of back wards, but spoke of
Jewish mental patients and of the “frightening transgression” of the
law of natural selection, which must be reinstated “by humane
methods.” “The Victim of the Past” was ceremonially intro-
[…duced] |
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