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March 8, 2002
Lives that were deemed unworthy
Lecture, exhibit at Holocaust Education Centre examine Nazi murder
of disabled.
PAT JOHNSON REPORTER
German doctors during the Third Reich were not merely pawns for
the Nazis' evil medical experiments, but active pioneers on the
leading edge of macabre science. That was the message brought to
Vancouver by one of the world's leading experts in Nazi medical
history.
Dr. Robert Proctor, distinguished professor of history at Pennsylvania
State University, was here marking the opening of a new exhibit
at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The exhibit, Life Unworthy
of Life: Nazi Euthanasia Crimes at Hadamar, looks at the involvement
of the medical profession in carrying out the murders of thousands
of German citizens and others who were deemed to be mentally or
physically deficient.
Proctor noted that the same medical staff who oversaw the euthanasia
machinery at the beginning of the Nazi era subsequently followed
the machinery when it was transferred from service against the disabled
and put into action as part of the Final Solution, when the gassings
were turned toward Jews and other targets of the Nazis.
The euthanasia campaign was part of a larger scheme, dubbed "racial
hygiene," which called for the elimination of less-than-perfect
human specimens. The idea was not created by the Nazis, but was
effectively absorbed by the National Socialists by the time they
came to office in 1933. It was a perverse part of a larger "health"
scheme, which was based on the Nazi philosophy of an "organic"
state. The philosophy portrayed Germany and the German race as a
single organism, headed by the "doctor" Adolf Hitler,
and based on the idea that any part of the "body" that
was unhealthy would have to be excised.
The original concept of racial hygiene included Jews among the superior
races, but that was unsubtly reversed when the Nazis usurped the
policy.
Proctor pointed out that there has been an emotional debate over
the past 50 years over what to do with the ill-gotten knowledge
obtained from the Nazi era. That debate continues unabated, but
Proctor added that there are some data that were discarded because
of their taint with the Nazi monstrosities that we would have done
well to utilize. For example, by the 1940s, the Nazis had discovered
that asbestos was a cause of a particular strain of cancer, yet
North Americans continued to use it in domestic and industrial settings
into the 1970s. There were also aspects of the Nazi obsession with
health that were surprisingly progressive, such as an emphasis on
vegetarianism, use of soy beans and preventive care, such as regular
colorectal exams and advertisements explaining to women how to perform
a breast self-examination.
On the other side of this equation, there was a propaganda campaign
- illustrated in its grotesque bluntness in the exhibit at the Holocaust
centre - which put a very specific monetary cost on the care of
disabled people. Posters with severely disfigured people were accompanied
by stark actuarial accounts of how much the patient's care would
cost the reich over a lifetime. The victims, the exhibit notes,
were not only congenitally or irreversibly disabled people, but
also the elderly, deaf and blind people, ill soldiers and people
unable to work for whatever reason.
Proctor pointed out that the medical professionals who fulfilled
these services to the Nazis were not coerced and, indeed, enthusiastically
took the opportunity to "cleanse" the nation and to use
victims to further science. An organization of Nazi doctors was
formed and, before Hitler took power in 1933, had already been joined
by six per cent of the entire medical profession. By the height
of the Nazi era, half the country's doctors belonged to the organization.
By law, doctors were required to report patients who might be eligible
for the euthanasia or sterilization campaigns. The Nazi medical
organization's journal had a column devoted to anonymous letters
asking whether a physician should report a patient with, say, a
club foot, to the authorities. If euthanasia was not deemed necessary,
forced sterilization was often selected instead.
After the war, Proctor said, the sterilization perpetrators were
not classified as war criminals, because most Western countries
were practising sterilization in some form or other. Proctor was
an expert witness in the case of developmentally disabled Albertans
who, during the same era, were forcibly sterilized at rates in excess,
based on population, of those perpetrated by the Nazis.
The exhibit in the Holocaust centre examines the beginnings and
various permutations in the development of the euthanasia campaign
and discusses the limited justice meted out to perpetrators after
the war.
Proctor's lecture marked not only the opening of the new exhibit,
but the first in a series of four lectures on various aspects of
eugenics, medical ethics and genetic technology. The exhibit continues
until June 7.
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