"Nazi doctors": how German doctors turned medicine into a science of murder

Before being hanged by the Polish judicial authorities in the same concentration camp and extermination that he had directed until the end of the war, the Obersturmbannführer SS Rudolf Höss he conveyed to his interrogators the "biological" goal of Auschwitz. For this, Höss quoted the direct words of the Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler, his senior officer who, in the summer of 1941, told him: "The Jews are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated." All Jews in our hands will be destroyed without exception, now, during the war. we succeed in destroying the biological substance of the Jews, the Jews will one day destroy the German people. "

This is just one of the stories that make Nazi doctors (El Ateneo), research published by the famous American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in 1986 and now translated into Castilian, in one of the best bibliographical references for those who wish to know the horrors of Nazism. However, Lifton's book exposes not only the "biomedical vision" established in Germany over the years of Adolf Hitlerbut it is useful to understand the reasons why the systematic extermination of an adversary's "biological substance" is always a psychological, scientific and military variable possible at the time of the worst human confrontations.

Not to forget this detail, writes Lifton, creditor of a broad academic career in major US universities and founder of the Center for the Study of Human Violence, it is necessary to recall what the torture chambers displayed by almost all the military dictatorships during the seventies in Latin America show, the "ethnic cleansing" of the Serbs during the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia or the torture sessions in Latin America. the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq at the beginning of the 21st century; Whether at one time or another in the world, "the human genius of adaptation can now ensure that all kinds of men and women adapt to existing genocidal institutions and dominant genocidal mentalities".

Nevertheless, the extent to which the Nazis forged an apparent "normality" around a genocidal ideology marks the imaginable maximum point of convergence between the mbad murder of people and the rational vision of genocide. And that's why medical science under Nazism can shed light on how Hitler imposed his explanation of European history to Mein Kampf (My fight), where he argued that if the Aryan race had been "healthy and dominant" until the Jewish influence "infective", only "eradicating" with surgical precision its presence, the Aryan breed would have become healthy and strong again.

Such was the pseudoscientific "vision" which placed medical science among the main tools of the Third Reich and made civilian doctors the most effective and reserved extermination agents in the world.Endlösung der Judenfrage"or" final solution to the Jewish problem, "as the Nazis called the Holocaust.

One of the first paradoxes of these "psychological conditions leading to harm", as described by Lifton, is developed by euthanasia (or "T4 program") and sterilization. Practices presented even before the German public opinion as a "medical murder", necessary to achieve a higher therapeutic imperative: the absolute control of the biological future of man.

To achieve this, the Nazis have put in place various procedures to improve the "good heritage" and the "racial reserve". And from the forced sterilization of "unworthy lives to live", it quickly became the killing of "disabled" children in hospitals and "disabled" adults in psychiatric institutions. The methods used for this euthanasia were: phenol injections, starvation or carbon monoxide poisoning, which led to the development of the first gas chambers. Since 1933, people suffering from conbad delays, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, Huntington's disease, blindness or hereditary deafness, severe physical malformations and hereditary alcoholism are now candidates. surgical sterilization by vas deferens ligation. men and fallopian tubes in women.

The issues that hitherto preoccupied the Nazi doctors were barely quantitative: was it appropriate to sterilize the weak and the disabled, or their relatives and any other "bearer" of these defects? Sterilization by X-ray irradiation, faster and more dangerous, should wait a few more years, until the experiments in the concentration camps.

This initial combination of visionary idealism and terror with which the Nazis aligned most of the health professionals under their orders could have been achieved without the work of the Reich's Minister of Public Enlightenment and the Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels. Determined to eliminate any "flaccid intellectual" or "disastrous concepts of freedom and equality", pressures and purges in the academic world have clearly shown that only the doctrine of the National Socialist Party should be badumed as the only one " healing movement ". In this way, the Medical Act of 1935 gave professionals the power to formally decide life or death, so that they became "biological agents of the state".

In combination with the fanatic discipline of the SS, which had already begun the Second World War, the next step would be to direct "the scientific extermination" of Jews, gypsies, homobaduals and political dissidents in the extermination camps, where, says a survivor from Auschwitz. "They were all doctors." According to the testimonies collected by Lifton, two weeks were enough: it was time for a doctor to get used to selecting the people who die every day, asphyxiated by the Zyklon B gas, then disappeared in the crematoriums. "And this process can not be explained to anyone, you can only know it by knowing it, the expert can record it, but you can not grasp it," says Dr. Ernst B., one of the anonymous informants who served at Auschwitz, "anus mundi", as the Nazi doctor called him Heinz Linden under the direction of "The Angel of Death", Josef Mengele.

To deal with their own experience of mbad murderers, doctors resorted to alcohol, to the compelling need to integrate their "medical duties" in full war and to the "schizophrenic situation" to use their knowledge to heal to kill, convinced that they did good to the prisoners by selecting them for immediate death. In the midst of this confusion, "small islands of humanity" also sometimes emerged, during which the same SS doctors rescued other (Jewish) gas chambers doctors, or even imperiously favored the arrival of food or food. drugs for a group of prisoners.

"The best way to honor the victims of Nazi doctors is not only to document their actions, but also to deal with the normal conditions of the evil that produced them," writes Robert Jay Lifton. "All of this points to a more general question that has not been sufficiently examined in the context of genocide: the control of authors on the knowledge of what they do or have done." When Hitler asked his infamous rhetorical question, "Who is speaking today about the extermination of the Armenians?", He of course referred to what he thought was the little memory of the world on these issues. "