German Doctors example essay topic

Role of Doctors in Nazis Racial Hygiene Germany was out to establish a new utopian world order where everything worked in harmony. They wanted to become a healthy and vibrant organism of healthy Aryans. The German doctors were mobilized to create this new world. The German bureaucrats believed all their social burdens were brought on by the handicapped, incurables and homosexuals as well as the Jews and gypsies. The physicians were to use all their medical knowledge and scientific expertise in the treatment for their new world. The doctors had been led to believe in a brave new world, a biological superstate and committed their heinous crimes in its name.

They were on a slippery slope that began of genetic perfectibility and ended with German superiority. How could this have happened in a society revered for its sophisticated culture and technological advances? The medical professionals of the early 20th century Weimar Republic were the best in the world. The Germans were pioneers in the areas of the medical field making technological strides and radical discoveries that significantly advanced the area of medicine. Aspiring medical scholars from the United States would routinely visit the University of Leipzig or the University of Berlin to study medicine in Germany and then go back to the United States to apply for study at Harvard. The medical pioneers also suffered from the effects of race, eugenics and euthanasia.

Germany's racial theories, often tainted with anti-Semitism, did not take place in a vacuum nor did they arise the moment the National Socialist Party took power. The work of many SS and Nazi doctors found support within the German medical community. This was especially true of those working in the field of eugenics or racial hygiene. At the turn of the century social Darwinism offered the hope of designing a new society where the fittest would survive and the weakest eliminated.

Sound health, productivity and achievement would be the norms of developing this society. The science of eugenics was designed to improve the human race by controlling hereditary factors. Eugenicists firmly believed that through their discipline violence, crime, feeble-mindedness, genetic disease and other genetic illnesses could be removed from society. This could be done by cleansing the population of inferior racial traits by artificial selection, especially through sterilization. In the early part of the 20th century eugenics prospered in approximately 30 countries, notably America, England, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Germany. It was driven by middle class notions that the government could reduce social spending by creating eugenic health policies.

Just after the turn of the century, America became a cauldron of social upheaval. Rapid industrialism, urbanization and immigration helped make it a breeding ground for the eugenics movement. Charles B. Davenport was the founder for the Station for Experimental Evolution on Long Island in 1904. He later relied on funding from Mary Harriman, widow of the railroad magnate, as well as the Carnegie Foundation to create the eugenics record office. He believed that unless conditions changed for themselves or were forced to change, the United States will, because of the great influx of blood from Southeastern Europe, become rapidly darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex immorality. In the United States in the 1920's, at the height of the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, concerns about immigration and hereditary illness were rampant.

Eugenicist lobbied for government policies that would attack these issues especially through quotas and mandatory sterilization. It was this factor in American eugenics that the Germans praised and tried to emulate. At this time, Americans admired the German research in the field of eugenics. It was Davenport, who was now president of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, who strongly supported the German eugenicists after the tensions of World War I. America also gave its support financially to the German movement. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Genetics in Berlin. Its support of the institute continued even after the National Socialist Party took power.

The institutes many projects on race variation by blood groups and twin studies would eventually lead to one of the most serious ethical violations in the history of medicine. In 1934, a Eugenics exhibit, titled "The New Germany", drew thousands of visitors in Pasadena, California. In 1938, Harry H. Laughlin, a strong proponent of eugenics and assistant director of the Cold Spring Harbor labs, promoted Nazi Eugenics in the United States. With zeal he distributed the Nazi propaganda film, "The Genetically Diseased", to countless American schools, churches and clubs. Americans learned form this film that certain elements of the population, including Jews, are nothing more than social examples of moral deviancy and mental retardation. Prior to World War II the German and American connection in Eugenics was firmly established.

In 1933, when the National Socialists Party took power in Germany, the doctors and scientists were ready and willing to offer their assistance in creating the new order. The German eugenicists began to put into practice in the social and political spheres that their American and British colleagues had only theorized. This was especially true concerning racial impurity and sterilization. Germany was soon considered a kind of "bioc racy", a living body that had to be healed. National Socialism, an ever growing bureaucracy, became a type of applied biology with Hitler as the great doctor of the German people. The Fuhrer envisioned that step by step the doctors and nurses, as well as lawyers, teachers and soldiers would all fall into ranks to make the fatherland healthy.

Pure blooded Germans would pass on their genetic legacy to the thousand years Reich. In "Mien Kampf" written by Hitler a decade earlier, he had already publicized his belief of racial superiority. For him the Jews, Slavs, and Africans were inferior races. Science, law, and politics would soon join forces to legislate against the Jews. Established Jewish doctors and other professionals were caught in the trap even before the Nuremberg laws of 1935. For racial and often economic reasons, the Jewish doctors were gradually barred from the medical system.

This made room for the many other German doctors struggling throughout the depression. In March and April of 1933, Jewish and Socialist physicians were purged from state institutions of public health. Young aspiring doctors combined medicine with party politics. Ambitious physicians joined the party and became SS doctors.

They saw early on that there was no other viable opportunity to succeed in the medical profession without participation in the Nazi Party. At the same time, many although not all doctors adhered to ideology mix ed with Aryan philosophy and anti-Semitism. The Aryan spirit began to blossom into plans for the master race. Racial theories soon gave way to practice. One way to create the pure nation was to enforce mandatory sterilization of the undesirables as in the United States. America had already been the first country to allow sterilization as part of a process of purifying society.

Nazi racial hygienists were already most familiar with Harry Laughlin's article on compulsory sterilization legislation in 23 American states. They also read with great respect Eugene Gos ney and Paul Popenoe's "Sterilization for Human Betterment". Germany now engaged itself totally in the sterilization plan on the national level. The engagement of doctors now legitimized the implementation of racial theories.

Together the government and medical professionals would help cure the chronically ill state. In July of 1933, the Nazi government passed a sterilization law that would funnel the undesirables into hospitals to be obligatorily sterilized. It was for the good of the people that those individuals with genetic imbalances, the malformed, and the epileptic be prevented from producing inferior humans. Consciously or not, sterilization of the unfit was the first concrete step on the Nazi road to the final solution. The circle was widening. The 1933 law for the prevention of genetically diseased offspring included the asocial, the alcoholics, the schizophrenic, the genetically blind and any who were a burden to the growing Aryan nation.

Hereditary health courts were established. The doctors were integrated into the bureaucracy of sterilization. With un daunting energy and precision they handled diagnosis, certificates and operations by which hundred of thousands of Germans were sterilized. If sterilization provided an elementary means of controlling the race and heredity, then euthanasia, ironically considered mercy killing, was the logical next step. The hospitalization of the undesirables was a major burden on the medical and social services. The rationale was eliminating these lives that were unworthy of living could help channel funds to other important sectors of society.

The 1939 personal note from Hitler to doctors Karl Brandt and Phillip Buhler started the chain reaction. Gerhard Wagner had already discussed the operation very clearly with Hitler at Nuremberg in 1935. Altogether, six euthanasia centers helped process those Germans deemed by the doctors unworthy of life. Large grey busses transported the unsuspecting to the euthanasia centers.

At the infamous Had amar thousands died at the hands of the medical staff. Mentally retarded children would be allowed to die by starvation. It is tragic that sometimes the children's euthanasia program contained parental consent. A lethal injection would supposedly bring to an end the life of a suffering undesirable and shortly afterwards, the family would receive a letter that the grandfather died from acute appendicitis. This was quite ironic when the appendix had been removed twenty years earlier.

The doctors were pleased with the progress report of the euthanasia project. These doctors, who were authorities in the sterilization and then the euthanasia programs, became leaders in the extermination force. They conducted the primitive gassing of Jews with carbon monoxide fumes as well as helped calculate the amount of gas needed for the extermination chambers. It was not difficult for these doctors to take the next step which was the systematic elimination of Jews and gypsies. Following the Wann see Conference of 1942, the doctors were formally mobilized into the policy of total racial purification or, otherwise known as "the Final Solution". They would participate fully in state sanctioned genocide.

The goal was to heal the nation by eliminating the Jewish disease. At the camps the doctors were on hand to play God. They would determine who would live and who would die. They had the responsibility to select those who had the privilege of working for the Reich and those who would encounter an untimely death. Batches of prisoners were selected to be sent to the pharmaceutical plants to serve as human guinea pigs. Among the camp population of gypsies, homosexuals, and political prisoners, the Jews were always expendable.

Some were chosen to be more useful to the Reich as subjects for human experiments. The scientific data would be sent to doctors in Berlin. The doctors assisted in every aspect of extermination, especially the gassing. Their major task was the disposal of millions of victims. In light of their earlier experience with euthanasia the doctors were recruited to supervise the mass exterminations. They directed the use of Zyclon B pellets which were thrown into the gas chambers by medical orderlies.

When the last human cry settled over the chamber the medical staff then made certain the inmates were dead. The doctors and the bureaucrats them collaborated in the efficient use of the camp ovens. The doctor's trials at Nuremberg clearly raised the issues of ethical behavior on the part of the medical profession. It was a watershed in the history of not only international law as it applied to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was a new notion that there could even be crimes against humanity.

It also was a watershed in the history of medical ethics. Their actions were also clearly a watershed in the history of human experimentation. These were physicians who were involved in atrocities and murders that were all done in the aegis of medical practice and the aegis of human experimentation. The physicians justified what they did by the need to get information when in fact they developed a lot of the experiments themselves. They were in a position to make choices of who would and would not be studied.

They were not in fact victims in the atrocities that took place but were the ones who formulated the experimentation's and carried them out. Some do, however, think the German physicians never actually did relinquish their medical ethics. The physicians thought they were doing the right thing and felt there was a real threat to the German nation. The Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were all threatening the health of the state and as doctors of this same state they had to eliminate that threat. Some would say they did what they had to because of their ethics.

They did these atrocities in the name of protecting the German people and the Nazi state. They saw themselves as doctoring a nation and that is how they were able to justify their involvement in the genocidal crimes.

Bibliography

Gilbert, Martin, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1983.
Proctor, Robert N., Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under The Nazis. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Spiel vogel, Jackson J., Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History. NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2001.
Weinberg, Gerhard L., A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994.