Unclean

On Empire and Nazi Medicine

• The popular media, for example, commonly portray the Nazi regime as fanatic, half-crazed criminals conducting their evil plans with as much reason or sense as 1930s television gangsters. This is a false impression for a number of reasons, but primarily because it underestimates the degree to which large numbers of intellectuals, often leaders in their fields, were willing and eager to serve the Nazi regime.

• What I want to argue in addition to this…is that biomedical scientists played an active, even leading role in the initiation, administration, and execution of Nazi racial programs. In this sense the case can be made that science (especially biomedical science) under the Nazis cannot simply be seen in terms of a fundamentally “passive” or “apolitical” scientific community responding to purely external political forces; on the contrary, there is strong evidence that scientists actively designed and administered central aspects of National Socialist racial policy. – Robert Proctor

A reader (thank you Capt. Roy Harkness) brought my attention to a passage written by Don Wilson (thank you Don).

It’s excellent and worth circulating. I’m going to use it as the anchor for this stack.

I’ve had Nazi medicine on my mind recently, as I was talking to some good friends recently about how Nazi propaganda¹ associated Jews with Typhus² and in so doing made them “unclean”.

An important aspect of Nazi antisemitism is “disease.”

I wrote this recently.

Capturing Society - Lies are Unbekoming (substack.com)

A handful of Germans, in the 1930s figured out that you could control the world’s most scientifically advanced society at the time, through medicine. Through that realization they created the world’s first Medical Totalitarian State built around the idea of protecting and purifying the “Nation”, or as the Germans would say, the “Volk”. What we call today, the “Public”.

The German use of Big Medicine to create a Totalitarian State, worked.

Empire paid attention and decided that would be the chosen model to create a Global Medical Totalitarian framework. Public Health is our Empire’s chosen model.

I don’t think you can understand what they did and are doing to the world without understanding German Totalitarian Medicine from the 1930s and 40s. More on that later.

First, here is Don Wilson with a sprinkling of recent important videos I’ve come across.

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By Don Wilson

A lot of people are getting upset having their conduct during covid compared to Germans supporting the rise of Nazism.

Let's recapitulate.

A fifth of the population was legally classified as unclean. They were barred from most public spaces, including theatres, restaurants, movies, pubs, clubs, swimming pools, sporting events, concerts, conventions, etc.

To access public facilities, people had to carry a digital mark with them so authorities could confirm they weren't unclean.

The unclean were fired and barred from most jobs: education, healthcare, courts - all public sector work, most major union jobs and a wide smattering of major private employers. When they were fired, the unclean were denied employment insurance, the reasoning being that they had been fired for cause on account of being unclean.

The unclean were banned from travel on trains, planes, and chartered boats. They had no legal means of leaving the country. Even if they wanted to, they could not escape the country that obviously hated them so.

It became illegal to socialize with the unclean.  They weren't allowed to attend weddings or funerals or visit sick relatives or friends in hospital.

Special laws were made for the unclean subjecting them to house arrest if they were around a person who had recently had a positive PCR test. The unclean had to continue to cover their faces in public when universal masking was dropped.

It became socially acceptable to wish death upon the unclean in social media and in major news organizations. Public health figures and other politicians gave press conferences to shame and insult the unclean. The public developed shared pejorative names for them and relished in insulting the unclean.

News media regularly ran polls asking if the unclean should be arrested or fined. Public figures openly and proudly spoke about withholding medically necessary healthcare from the unclean - letting them die. The unclean were removed from organ transplant lists, condemned to almost certain death.

No end date for these measures was ever suggested, no timeline given. To the contrary, this was called the "new normal".

Criticizing any of these developments made you a social pariah, and likely cost you most of your friendships and family relations, if not your job.

The lesson of the Holocaust - and of covid - isn't that Germans or Albertans or people of the 21st Century are uniquely gullible or evil. It's that for most people, "morality" is not a matter of principle, but rather of adopting what they perceive to be the dominant group ideology - even if that ideology is marked by wanton irrationality or brutal inhumanity.

Indeed, as in certain cults or gangs, the brutality or irrationality of the acts or beliefs required to signal group inclusion further entrench people into the ideology, rather than repel them, a kind of perverse sunk cost fallacy writ large.

So, yes, if you're a typical person - Albertan, Canadian or otherwise - it is overwhelmingly likely that you would have been a Nazi if you were born in Nazi Germany. If you cheered along lockdowns and mandates, that likelihood approaches certainty.

Repent.

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To better understand today’s Political Medicine, you need to understand Nazi Medicine.

For that let’s go to a subject matter expert Robert Proctor and his masterpiece:

Racial Hygiene – Medicine under the Nazis

Introduction

We have long heard that science helps us to expand our horizons, to cure disease, and to make our lives easier. Especially since World War II, we have seen the increasing use of science to augment industrial production, military strength, and medical excellence. Science in the modern world serves to stimulate production and provides a well- spring for new technologies and inventions.

Most people are also aware, however, that enlightenment and production are not the only functions of science. Particularly in recent years, people have come to recognize that science-based technologies also serve to maintain social order and to facilitate the policing of society. In the 1950s and 1960s, the development of the sciences of counterinsurgency and of riot and crowd control demonstrated that science and science-based technologies could be used for the maintenance or disruption of social order.

Since the 1960s, recognition of the fact that science may be used or abused has given rise to concerns that science be socially responsible. This in turn has coincided with a growing awareness that the kind of science people create has something to do with the social context within which science is formed. In this sense, we may speak of a new appreciation of the politics of science—politics that affects not only how science is used or abused but also what aspects of nature are investigated in the first place. Historians now generally recognize that the logic, the methods, and the social structure of science have varied over time and place, and that the growth of knowledge can no longer be understood simply in terms of the mastery of nature by tools or the application of genius or curiosity to nature. We recognize, in short, that there are circumstances in broader society that structure the interests and priorities of science.

There is also increasing recognition that this dependence of the interests or priorities of science on broader social goals has fostered a rethinking of traditional ideals of academic freedom. J. D. Bernal once observed that science, however free, must be funded. And when we study the effects of neutron flux on semiconductors or the expression of oncogenes in viruses, this may have as much to do with the priorities of a nation’s military or medical budget as with any “inherent” interest of some particular part of nature. Nature, after all, is infinitely large and infinitely rich, and scientists must narrow their focus. Scientists may divide among themselves their piece of the pie, but only after others have decided how big that piece will be.

If the structure and priorities of science are part of the broader structure of society, then enlightenment, production, and even social control are not the only functions of science. A fourth function, one that is important in the history of science under the Nazis, is closely tied to social control: this is the function of apology. It has long been recognized that if people can be convinced that the social order is a natural order, and that the misery (or abundance) they find around them derives from the will of God or Nature or both, then attention can be diverted from those parts of the social order that are the true source of that misery (or abundance).

The idea that the social order is natural or inevitable, fixed by the will of God or the laws of nature (or, more recently, by the structure of one’s genes) is not a new one. According to Roman legend, Menenius Agrippa in the sixth century B.C. was sent to a plebeian camp to quell a rebellion. Agrippa told the plebeians a fable in which the various parts of the body rebel against the stomach. He convinced the unruly mob that the several classes of society are dependent on one another, like the parts of the body, and that it makes no more sense for one part of society to rebel against another than for the stomach to rebel against the heart. Legend has it that Agrippa was thereby able to persuade the crowd that the rebellion should stop and the troublemakers should return quietly to the city.

There are many other examples where lessons concerning human rank and privilege are said to be learned from nature. In the Middle Ages, literary “bestiaries” instructed men and women in vice and virtue through examples of the courageous lion, the crafty fox, and the industrious bee. Metaphors of the city and the body—the “body politic”—justified the ways of the polis in terms of the ways of the natural body. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biology continues to serve as a social weapon, providing a set of tools and arguments that allow either the direct control of populations (through sterilization or biological warfare, for example) or their indirect control by reinforcing particular visions of the proper social order (sociobiology, theories of brain lateralization, and so on).

The various functions of science—enlightenment, production, control, and apology—are interconnected. Knowledge of nature, for example, requires a certain degree of control over nature; hence the progress of science depends on the development of tools and instruments. Development of the tools and instruments of science depends on the progress of industrial or craft production. Continuous and profitable production in turn requires a certain level of social stability; the sciences of social and personal control (economic and behavioral sciences, management and police science, counterinsurgency technologies, and the like) help maintain that stability. Control in turn, at least when people are the object, is most effective when invisible; hence the importance of ideologies in obscuring the nature of that control. Hence also the importance of apologetics designed to demonstrate the naturalness or inevitability of some status o: fluxus quo, that what is, or will be, ought to be.

The following pages explore the place of science, especially biomedical science, under the Nazis, with particular reference to the functions of apology and social control. This departs somewhat from other ways science under the Nazis has been studied. Until recently, most historical and sociological studies have concentrated on the Nazi destruction of science, the expulsion of Jews from the universities, and the corruption of intellectual and liberal values. Each of these is an important aspect of the fate of science under the Nazis. My focus here, however, is not primarily on how the Nazis corrupted or abused science, but rather on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy.

This approach can perhaps be distinguished most clearly when compared with that of Alan Beyerchen’s pioneering book, Scientists under Hitler, which has played an important role in reopening discussion of Nazi science, especially in the field of what was known as deutsche Physik. Beyerchen’s book represents one of the more thoroughgoing attempts to wrestle with the problem of science under the Nazis, and his work has inspired others in both Germany and the United States to pursue this further. Beyerchen, however, sees the power relations between science and National Socialism working almost entirely one way: he is primarily interested in how German physicists responded to National Socialism, and to what extent the Nazi regime pressured scientists into cooperation with the regime. He does not see the scientific community in the years 1933—1945 as responsible in any deep sense for the political events or crimes in this period; rather, he sees the politicization of science as something that emerged after World War II, especially as scientists began to reflect on their role in the construction and use of the atomic bomb. Scientists up to this time, according to Beyerchen, were not generally aware of the potential uses or abuses of their skills; they eschewed political power and political responsibility and retreated to the privacy of their laboratories and seminars. Science in this view was largely independent of politics. To be fair, Beyerchen does point out that under the Nazis “a small band of politically active scientists” did try “to inject racial considerations into the content and conduct of physics as a discipline.” He considers this primarily an injection of politics into science, however, rather than a movement growing from within science itself.

It is important to distinguish the political nature of science from the political consciousness of scientists; it is also important to distinguish among the various sciences in this regard. It is true that the political consciousness of physicists increased in the years following the development of the atomic bomb. But the question of how and in what sense science is political is not simply a question of political consciousness. The development of a discipline may be shaped by political forces, even if its leading agents are unaware of this influence.

This becomes clear when we turn to the case of the German biomedical community. Here, the model of an essentially passive and apolitical scientific community responding to purely external political forces underestimates (a) the extent to which political initiatives arose from within the scientific community itself, and (b) the extent to which medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist racial policy. I do not want to suggest that there was no political coercion of medical science in this period. What we shall see, however, is that the coercion often took the form of one part of the scientific community coercing another, rather than a nonscientific political force imposing its will on an apolitical scientific community. If this is true, then the most common way we have been led to see the experience of science under the Nazis is flawed in at least two senses. First, people have generally assumed that science suffered under the Nazis. In much of the early literature on science under the Nazis, scholars tended to accept at face value the testimony of émigrés that the Nazis were either hostile to science or supported what today would be called pseudoscience. Joseph Needham, for example, in The Nazi Attack on International Science, argued that “German science has been largely destroyed,” and illustrated this with the claim that the Biochemische Zeitschrift had become “thin” under Nazi rule. It is true that as many as 18 percent of German academics were dismissed from their posts and that the number of students studying at German universities dropped by about one-half from 1933 to 1938. Yet one should not conclude from this that German medical science was entirely or even in large part destroyed under the Nazis. In 1937 more than 25,000 books were published in Germany; nearly a thousand of these were medical books. The overwhelming majority of German medical journals continued publishing uninterruptedly during the first five years of Nazi rule; and more than a dozen new medical journals began publication in this period (see Appendix A). Medical journals published in Germany between 1933 and 1938 fill more than 100 meters of shelf space—more than any other country in the world in this period.

The tacit assumption of Needham’s book, and of much other early literature, is that science thrives only under democracy and that democracy in turn benefits from values implicit in the free pursuit of science. A closer look at the history of science under the Nazis indicates that this is not always the case. While certain sciences, such as physics and mathematics, suffered, other sciences, such as psychology, anthropology, human genetics, and various forms of racial science and racial hygiene, actually flourished. A second and related misconception concerns a more general view of the nature of the Nazi regime itself. The popular media, for example, commonly portray the Nazi regime as fanatic, half-crazed criminals conducting their evil plans with as much reason or sense as 1930s television gangsters. This is a false impression for a number of reasons, but primarily because it underestimates the degree to which large numbers of intellectuals, often leaders in their fields, were willing and eager to serve the Nazi regime.

Nazi racial science is probably most often associated with the medical experiments performed on so-called lower races. Testimony presented at the Nuremberg and Buchenwald trials documented the involvement of German physicians in a series of brutal and often “terminal” experiments, where prisoners in concentration camps were forced to submit to bone grafts or limb transplants, or were exposed over long periods to severe cold or low pressure, or were forced to drink seawater. These experiments were justified by Nazi doctors on the grounds that the knowledge collected could be used to help save pilots forced to bail out at high altitudes or to crash-land in the icy waters of the North Sea. Evidence presented in the trials revealed the involvement of doctors in a massive program for the extermination of “lives not worth living,” including, first, infants with heritable defects, and later, handicapped children and patients of psychiatric institutions, and finally, entire populations of “unwanted races.”

The Nazi medical experiments and even the program for the destruction of “lives not worth living” represent only the tip of a much larger iceberg. In fact, the ideological structure we associate with National Socialism was deeply embedded in the philosophy and institutional structure of German biomedical science long before the beginning of the euthanasia program in 1939—and to a certain extent, even before 1933. The published record of the German medical profession makes it clear that many intellectuals cooperated fully in Nazi racial programs, and that many of the social and intellectual foundations for these programs were laid long before the rise of Hitler to power. What I want to argue in addition to this, however (and here I shall be drawing upon a growing body of recent German scholarship on this question) is that biomedical scientists played an active, even leading role in the initiation, administration, and execution of Nazi racial programs. In this sense the case can be made that science (especially biomedical science) under the Nazis cannot simply be seen in terms of a fundamentally “passive” or “apolitical” scientific community responding to purely external political forces; on the contrary, there is strong evidence that scientists actively designed and administered central aspects of National Socialist racial policy.

The structure of this book is as follows. The first chapter traces the rise of what was known as racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene) from the social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century to its synthesis with National Socialism at the end of the Weimar period. In the second chapter I explore the conception of race espoused by Fritz Lenz, Germany’s most eminent racial hygienist and coauthor of the most important genetics textbook of the interwar years. In the third chapter I document the dual phenomenon of (a) the early and active support of the German medical profession for National Socialism and (b) the eagerness of Nazi philosophers to base their “revolution” on what they considered sound biology and medicine. Nazism, according to many in this period, was simply applied biology. Here I also trace the Gleichschaltung (unification and subordination to Nazi ideals) of the German medical profession and the place of racial hygiene within the German biomedical research establishment.

Chapters 1—3 are intended to lay the groundwork for understanding the extent to which the German medical profession found Nazi ideology attractive; Chapters 4—8 detail the participation of the medical profession in Nazi racial practice. Chapter 4 explores the origins and administration of the 1933 Sterilization Law—a law that resulted in the sterilization of more than 1 percent of the entire adult population of Germany. The Sterilization Law (modeled on similar laws in the United States) represents the first major triumph of Nazi racial hygiene. Chapter 5 presents a discussion of Nazi attempts to provide what some called “a solution to the woman question”; here the focus is on the Nazi conception of women as bearers and rearers of children. This chapter also explores the curious confrontation of this ideology with the practical exigencies that emerged with preparations for war.

Chapter 6 discusses attempts to solve “the Jewish question” in Nazi racial science and racial policy. My focus here is on what can be called the medicalization of anti-Semitism: the attempt on the part of doctors to conceive the so-called Jewish problem as a medical problem, one that required a “medical solution.” The medicalization of anti-Semitism represents only part of a larger attempt by the German medical profession to medicalize or biologize various forms of social, sexual, political, or racial deviance; Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, Marxists, and other groups were typecast as “health hazards” to the German population. When the Nazis herded Jews into the ghettos of the occupied East, public health provided the ideological rationale: concentration was justified as “quarantine.” Chapter 7 continues this discussion, exploring the participation of physicians in the Nazi program to destroy “lives not worth living.” Here we examine how the Nazi extermination of handicapped children and psychiatric patients in gas chambers outfitted in German hospitals provided a model for the subsequent destruction of Germany’s racial and ethnic minorities. We also look at some of the links between the euthanasia operation and plans for a “final solution” to the Jewish question; the chapter concludes with a brief look at some of the medical experiments conducted by physicians in Germany’s concentration camps.

The final three chapters discuss certain broader aspects of German racial science and medicine. Chapter 8 explores the “organic” vision of Nazi racial medicine. Many people may be surprised to learn that the Nazis worried about the long-term effects of environmental pollutants and established policies to guard against the toxic effects of substances such as alcohol, tobacco, heavy metals, and asbestos. The Nazis stressed the importance of a diet rich in fruit and fiber and encouraged the consumption of whole-grain bread. Nazi medical philosophers encouraged a return to the practices of the traditional German midwife; these and other practices were defended on the grounds they would improve the quality of “the German germ plasm.”

Chapter 9 investigates one of the “paths not taken” by German medical science, examining the structure of medical resistance to the Nazis, with special focus on the activities of the Association of Socialist Physicians (Verein Sozialistischer Arzte). Here, we see an example of how German medicine might have evolved had the Nazis not come to power. Chapter 10 then considers some of the broader moral and political questions raised by the example of doctors under National Socialism. And in the Epilogue, we look at some of the legacies of racial science in postwar Germany.

I should also introduce a caveat on the method followed in this study. My focus is on the role of physicians in the construction of Nazi racial science and policy. By physicians, I mean those with medical degrees. Many of those we shall be looking at were biologists or anthropologists. The divisions between medicine and biology or anthropology were not always clear in the early part of this century. For most of those pursuing basic biological or racial research, the medical degree was the appropriate path of study. Thus August Weismann, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Weinberg,. Wilhelm Schallmayer, Fritz Lenz, Eugen Fischer, and Alfred Ploetz all had medical degrees; Weismann, Weinberg, Lenz, and Ploetz all practiced medicine at one time or another. Biology was simply not a separate profession, as we think of it today. “Racial hygiene” was both a priority of scientific research and a form of medical practice.

I have assumed throughout this study that “science is what scientists do.” Not because there is no difference between genuine and spurious science (there is, or at least can be), or because it is necessary to maintain a cool and detached attitude toward such things in order to understand them (it isn’t, and one shouldn’t). I believe instead that it serves little purpose to continually ask, “But was it science?” We should not allow our judgment of the ethical character of Nazi medical practice to hinge entirely on whether we consider it to have been based on “genuine science.” One cannot (or at least should not) radically divide the practice of science from its product; science is, among other things, a social activity, and the politics of those who practice it is part of that science. Furthermore, we miss something if we assume at the outset a fundamental hostility between science and a form of political practice such as National Socialism. This was not how scientists themselves viewed the matter; understanding how this could have come to be is one of the goals of this study.

The purpose of this study is programmatic as well as expository. The broader thesis guiding this book is that movements that shape the policies of nations can also shape the structure and priorities of science. The history of medicine under National Socialism presents a clear and indeed dramatic case; but it may not be as extraordinary as people sometimes think. Politics enters science in ways we are only beginning to understand. If we are to appreciate how this works, then we need to examine more closely the political history and philosophy of science. The following pages explore one example of how politics can shape the practice of science. One should keep in mind, however, that science shaped by politics is not something foreign to science as it is practiced today.

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1. The Nazis created propaganda that associated Jews with typhus. During World War II, the Nazi regime used typhus outbreaks, especially in ghettos and concentration camps, as a part of their anti-Semitic propaganda. They portrayed Jews as carriers of typhus to fuel their racist policies. This false association was used to justify the segregation, terrible living conditions, and killing of Jewish people under the guise of preventing the spread of disease.

A notable instance of this propaganda was a poster created in 1941 for public display in German-occupied Poland, which roughly translated to "Jews are lice; they cause typhus." This poster aimed to closely link Jews and typhus in the minds of non-Jewish Poles, featuring a typhus-ridden louse drawn over the face of a Jewish man depicted as a skull. This form of propaganda was part of the Nazi strategy to justify the segregation and extermination of Jews by portraying them as carriers of disease and a danger to society.

The role of German doctors and public health officials in advancing these antisemitic ideas was significant. They supported the Nazi regime's claims by publishing essays that falsely blamed Jews for spreading typhus, reinforcing the regime's narrative. The respected status of these medical professionals lent credibility to these unfounded claims, which were used to rationalize the creation of ghettos and the further isolation of Jews from Polish society.

2. Typhus is a group of infectious diseases caused by Rickettsia bacteria, which are often transmitted through insect vectors such as fleas, lice, or mites. There are several types of typhus, each associated with different vectors and geographical regions. The three main forms of typhus are:

1. Epidemic Typhus: Caused by Rickettsia prowazekii, it's often spread by body lice. This form of typhus is typically found in areas with poor hygiene and crowded living conditions, often exacerbated during wars or natural disasters. Symptoms include high fever, headache, rash, and delirium. Without treatment, epidemic typhus can be severe and sometimes fatal.

2. Endemic (Murine) Typhus: Caused by Rickettsia typhi or Rickettsia felis, it's transmitted by fleas from rodents to humans. This form is milder than epidemic typhus and is found worldwide. Symptoms include fever, headache, and rash.

3. Scrub Typhus: Caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi, it's transmitted by chigger mites in areas with dense vegetation and is most common in the Asia-Pacific region. Symptoms include fever, headache, body aches, and sometimes a scab at the site of the mite bite.

Symptoms of typhus can vary but often include sudden fever, chills, headache, and a rash. The diagnosis is typically made based on the symptoms and confirmed through specific tests, such as serological testing.