Saturday, February 19, 2005

Healthcare and Science in Nazism

"To be sure, other movements, Marxism and Soviet Communism, for instance, have also claimed scientific validity. But only the Nazis have seen themselves as products and practitioners of the science of life and life processes—as biologically ordained guides to their own and the world’s biological destiny. Whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudo science and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves with the science of their time.....

The contribution of the actual scientific tradition to this ethos was exemplified by the quintessentially German figure of Ernst Haeckel, that formidable biologist and convert to Darwinism who combined with ardent advocacy of the Volk and romantic nationalism, racial regeneration, and anti-Semitism. He was to become what Daniel Gasman has called “Germany’s major prophet of political biology.” "
(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and
the Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :441)