Did German Anthropology Cause the Holocaust?

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany (photo by Geoffrey Clarfield)

As a Canadian Jewish anthropologist and film producer, born and raised in Toronto, every November I honor Neuberger Holocaust Education Week.

In addition to following films, lectures and seminars that take place in and around Toronto, I set myself a reading task. This year, while producing a film in Canada, Europe and Israel with Canadian film director, Igal Hecht, both of us read and reread the Lancet Commission on the Holocaust in Medicine, a project that was envisioned and co-chaired by Israeli doctor and medical academic, Professor Shmuel Reis.

The study is professionally researched. It has an up-to-date bibliography of over 800 items, and it is extremely hard going. It is not for the faint-hearted. And this past November we had the privilege of discussing this report with Dr. Reis at a quiet café in Tel Aviv. This is what we learnt.

In this groundbreaking report Reis and his worldwide network of topflight, participating physicians and medical historians describe in detail the institutional, practical, tragic results of an early 20^th century mental shift among German intellectuals, ideologues and medical professionals towards Social Darwinism and Eugenics and that when later fused with historical antisemitism, led to the Holocaust.

By the early 20^th century Social Darwinism was one of the most widespread ideologies among educated men and women in Western Europe and North America. Simply put, it abused the writings of Charles Darwin to invent a hierarchy of races with white Europeans at the top, and Black Africans and darker races at the bottom.

Even though the Jews of 19^th century Europe “looked white,” they were put in a class of their own, a degenerate race, who if allowed to continue to intermarry among “White Europeans” would cause the “downfall of civilization.”

If you think that Canada was immune to this pseudo intellectual “enthusiasm” then do yourself a great favor. Read the almost unknown masterpiece by Canadian writer Angus Mclaren - Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945.

Mclaren describes in some detail how Canadian intellectual, academic, medical and political elites embraced both Social Darwinism and Eugenics until many years after the defeat of the Nazis. In the 1920s, when the Germans were “perfecting” their system of Social Darwinism/Eugenics, the Canadian elite sent health professionals to Germany to “learn how things are done there.”

Mclaren’s tome is a depressing book. It is not taught in our high schools, universities or colleges, nor does it inform the “institutional culture” of media organizations like the CBC.

During a visit to a bookstore in Toronto I happened upon a thick study on the history of my alma mater, the University of Toronto. I checked the index for Eugenics and there was nothing there. For those who still believe that politician Tommy Douglas is close to a saint, as he was the godfather of Canada’s socialized medicine, note that he too believed in Eugenics!

Eugenics was the “practical,” “activist” side of Social Darwinism in so far as intellectuals and physicians began to believe in “racial hygiene,” meaning that those fellow citizens who it was believed were genetically defective, needed to be sterilized or, in the more extreme Nazi version killed, all in the name of Medicine and Public Health. And so was born, “Nazi Medicine” the greatest moral inversion of the healing art in the history of humanity.

Its precursor was “Nazi Anthropology” a pseudo-scientific theory of racial hierarchy and which was taught at institutes and universities even before the rise of Nazism. Joseph Mengele was a fan.

Over coffee Reis told us, “Most reasonably well-educated people know about Nazi Medicine and the Holocaust through true stories about Dr. Jospeh Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted horrific scientific experiments on mostly Jewish concentration camp prisoners and slave laborers. These stories have been around since the Nuremberg trials and are often mentioned in any study, book or documentary on the Holocaust. What is not commonly known is that Mengele was not the exception. He was the rule and the entire German Medical establishment was on his side.

The Nazis did not have to force the German medical establishment to support the Holocaust. They came along willingly. Over 50% joined the Nazi party, and 98% of these medical professionals after having participated or stood by when medicine was weaponized by the Nazis, returned to their humdrum jobs in German hospitals and clinics after the war, as if nothing untoward had happened.”

Reis reminded us of another aspect of the report when he explained that the first medically organized practice of eugenically supported mass murder of German citizens began before the Final Solution.

The Aktion T-4 project was designed to gas psychiatric patients, congenitally ill children and those “whose lives are not worthy of living” in the early days of the war. This T-4 “Euthanasia” (actually patient killing) program focused primarily on German and Austrian (mostly non-Jewish) citizens who were living in psychiatric and medical institutions. It is estimated that 250-300,000 people were killed in this way.

Why? Because these people were considered inferior and defective and were thought of as not worth being supported to live, by the Reich. It was only after the authorities, with the full support of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical professionals had killed thousands of fellow Germans that this technique was applied to the destruction of the Jewish people in the Concentration Camps.”

None of this started at the beginning of the war in 1939. The path had been prepared by legislation such as the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases which included alcoholism as well as fake “diagnoses” like “feeble mindedness.” It is estimated that 400,000 Germans were sterilized because of this law.

I once forced myself to watch some Nazi propaganda films. One is about a couple who go to court to contest the state’s desire to euthanize their sick child. The mother makes a touching plea to the court, but the Nazi judge ‘gently’ explains that the goal of the state and its legal institutions is to prevent a “lifetime of incurable suffering.” This film was screened widely in German theaters.

When we asked Dr. Reis what some of the key takeaways from the report are, he told us that there are five:

• That the willing participation of the German medical profession in supporting and implementing the Holocaust and the Final Solution was the rule and not the exception. It remains the greatest case study of moral inversion in the history of medicine.

• Thousands of German medical professionals returned to their clinics and hospitals after the war without censure or punishment, as if nothing untoward had happened.

• Medically enforced murder began among non-Jewish Germans administered by their own medical “experts.” Then it was applied to the Jews in the Final Solution.

• The history of Nazi Medicine is not widely known or taught in today’s medical schools.

• It must be incorporated into the curriculum of all and every medical and health professions school in the world as it is the supreme example of moral inversion. That has not happened yet.

I have read Dr. Reis’s Resume (it is thirty-five pages long). He has been a major force for the good in Israeli medicine and Global Health. He has published widely, mentored students, lectured extensively in Israel and abroad. All along he has kept up private practice as he believes in the value of family and community-based medicine.

What Igal and I did not know is that Shmuel was born in Germany after the war. His parents survived the concentration camps and were victims of the Holocaust on a grand scale.

It is therefore only just that a surviving son of victims of Nazi Social Darwinism and Medical Eugenics should successfully put together this massive project, a groundbreaking, innovative report now used by all medical schools in Israel, and a growing number abroad.

When we asked Shmuel if the curriculum that has been developed from this report has also been adopted by European Medical schools he told us, “Not quite yet. But given that Social Darwinism was the quiet partner in the colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa, I am not surprised that African health professionals are taking an on-line course we developed for the African context by the thousands.”

One can only hope that every medical school in United States and Canada will soon show the moral resilience that the Kenyans have shown. There is still much work to be done here.

As we got up to say goodbye, I thought to myself that years ago, as a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Toronto I was vaguely aware of the Nazi Anthropological movement but my professors at the time saw it merely as an aberration of the field.

If that is still indeed the case, then one can also hope that when the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is forced to rescind its academic boycott of Israeli academics like Shmuel, they will be open to a better understanding of the history and catastrophic consequences of one dark stream in their own intellectual history-German Anthropology and its relation to Eugenics and the Holocaust. North American anthropologists need to read the Lancet Report.

May that day come soon.