| The Experimental Impulse |
| |
| admitted that Himmler’s words “made a great
impression on me.” Brack in any case extended the shared fantasy to
include assembly-line sterilization “quite imperceptibly” from behind
a counter where the ignorant victim was required to fill in forms for about two
or three minutes: |
| |
The official sitting behind the counter could
operate the installation in such a way as to turn a switch which would activate
the two valves simultaneously (since the irradiation has to operate from both
sides). With a two-valve installation about 150-200 persons could then be
sterilized per day, and therefore, with twenty such installations as many as
3,000-4,000 persons per day … As to the expenses for such a two-valve
system, I can only give a rough estimate of approximately 20,000-30,000 RM
(Reichsmarks).22 |
| The idea was consistent with not only the larger Nazi
biomedical vision but also the specific characteristics of Heinrich
Himmler’s thought. Himmler, Joachim Fest has accurately noted, wished to
see himself as “not a murderer but a patron of science.” He was,
moreover, a patron who took an active part in determining the concepts and
methods of scientific enterprises under his auspices. In the Nazi movement, he
was the pseudo-medical scientist par excellence, the personal and ideological
epitome of the healing-killing reversal.* Trained initially in agriculture, he
combined nature mysticism with a kind of biomechanics and fancied himself
something of a medical visionary. He combined Rosenberg’s racial vision
with Walther Darré’s agricultural mysticism: it is believed to have
been Darré “who urged Himmler to transfer his attention from the
breeding of herbs and the raising of chickens to human beings.”25† And Himmler’s wife Margarete, a
nurse, is said to have interested him in “homeopathy, mesmerism, oat-straw
baths, and herbalism.” As Joachim Fest makes clear, Himmler’s
language was consistently biomedical: “There was talk of ‘fields of
racial experiment,’ ‘nordification,’ ‘aids to
procreation,’ ‘the foundations of our blood,’ ‘fundamental
biological laws,’ ‘the ruination of our blood,’ ‘breeding
of new human type,’ or ‘the botanical garden of Germanic blood’
— truly the visions of a poultry farmer from Waltrudenng!”
26 |
__________
* Himmler’s vision had
varying gradations of absurdity and pseudo science. For instance, he was an
ardent believer (as were Hitler and Göring) in such expressions of
mystical racism as the idea that the lost continent of Atlantis had been the
original homeland of the Aryans, and that Aryans had not evolved from monkeys
or apes like the rest of mankind but had descended to earth from the heavens
where they had been preserved in ice from the beginning of time. Himmler, in
fact, in 1937 established a meteorology division in the Ahnenerbe (see pages
284-87) to “prove” this “cosmic-ice” theory, though
publicly the purpose of the new division was announced as developing new
techniques for long-range weather prediction. Sympathetic to nature healing and
an equally ardent critic of traditionalism and “Christian” prejudices
of establishment doctors, he could view human experimentation in concentration
camps as a form of liberation from these constraints in the name of bold
scientific innovation.24
†Darré, the Reich farmers’ leader and Reich food
minister, was a “blood and soil” ideological theorist who glorified
the German peasant as the driving force of history. |
|
