Nazi spiritual eugenics (IV): life unworthy of life

The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish…in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess’. HG Wells, Anticipations (1901)

NB: the following contains very distressing information.

The flipside of the ego-inflation dream of the ubermensch is, as we have repeatedly seen, a violent contempt for others you see as inferior untermenschen. And that’s precisely what one sees in the bloody history of Nazi Germany. Absurd schemes for breeding SS supermen were accompanied by horrific programmes to eliminate millions of people, run by these same supposed supermen.

One of the first laws Hitler signed, once the Nazis had dissolved the Reichstag and given themselves absolute power on 23 March 1933, was the ‘Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases’, passed on July 14. It enabled the involuntary sterilization of anyone diagnosed with schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington’s disease, hereditary deafness or blindness, hereditary deformity, mental retardation or severe alcoholism.

The law was inspired by similar laws in US states, but while the US forcibly sterilized around 70,000 people, in Nazi Germany between 200,000 and 350,000 people were sterilized in six years. American eugenicists were impressed. Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, declared: ‘Hitler is beating us at our own game.’

The next step was euthanasia. This was a significant escalation, a fundamental shift against the Christian injunction not to kill. It was a shift back to a pagan past in which infanticide was accepted, or forward to a Nietzschean-evolutionary future where it was perfectly acceptable to kill off the weak.

Nietzsche, the Nazis’ favourite philosopher, repeatedly preached the need to exterminate the weak and infirm. Ernst Haeckel, naturalist, friend of Darwin’s and the leading German popularizer of evolutionary thought, also advocated involuntary euthanasia in his 1904 book The Wonders of Life:

What good does it do humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands of cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots etc who are born every year with a hereditary burden of incurable disease?

August Weismann, another hugely influential German evolutionary theorist, declared in 1889:

As soon as the individual has performed its share in this work of compensation, it ceases to be of any value to the species, it has fulfilled its duty and may die.

But the key German text for the normalization of euthanasia was The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life’ written in 1920 by two German professors, jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. It argued that somehow the killing of mentally retarded people was appropriate considering how many healthy, fit young men had died in World War One (like Hoche’s own son). Killing the unfit would be ‘purely a healing treatment’, the authors argued.

Support for involuntary euthanasia was by no means confined to Germany. In France, Nobel-prize-winning scientist Alexis Carrel called for the gassing of the ‘totally degenerate’ in his 1935 global bestseller, Man the Unknown. In the UK, George Bernard Shaw declared in 1910: ‘eugenic politics would finally land us in extensive use of the lethal chamber’ (the gas chamber, by the way, was invented in 1888 in the UK as a method of killing stray dogs and cats).

In the US, states came close to passing euthanasia laws in the first decade of the 20th century, with state congressmen arguing that the mentally unfit should be killed. American eugenicist Madison Grant declared in his best-selling Passing of the Great Race, that ‘the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit’. In fact, US asylums appeared to have carried out unofficial euthanasia policies, for example by allowing the spread of tuberculosis in asylums. This may be why the average life expectancy for those classified as feeble-minded in the US was 18, in the 1930s, as compared to 66 in the 1990s.

Nonetheless, Adolf Hitler was aware there would likely be public resistance to the state’s mass killing of those deemed unfit, so his order was given privately in 1939, after war was declared. Again, it was thought that the loss of fit young soldiers somehow justified the murder of those deemed unfit.

The killing began with children. From 1939 to 1945, between 5000 and 8000 babies, children and teenagers were sent to ‘special treatment centres’, where they were either given a lethal injection or starved to death. Any child deemed congenitally unfit by three doctors was selected for killing, including any ‘non-Aryans’. Among the murdered was Ernst Lossa, a 14-year-old Gypsy boy, who was deemed ‘ineducable’ and put into a psychiatric facility. There, he realized other inmates were being starved to death, and he stole food to give to them. He was murdered by lethal injection in 1944.

Ernst Lossa

The murder of children was rapidly followed by the Aktion T4 programme for the eradication of adults deemed unfit. The name T4 came from the address in Tiergarten, in Berlin, where the Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care met to organize the mass killing.

Again, any inmates of asylums or hospitals who doctors deemed as congenitally unfit, including non-Aryans, were transferred to ‘special treatment facilities’ where they were injected with a lethal poison, starved, shot, or beaten to death. It was in the Aktion T4 programme that the Nazis developed the use of the gas chamber as an efficient method for rapid mass murder. Its developed was hailed as a ‘great scientific breakthrough’. The SS played a central role in the transfer and murder of patients, though all murders were approved by doctors, to preserve the appearance of a medical procedure.

Historians estimate around 70,000 adults were murdered in the T4 programme. Their families were told they had been transferred for special treatment, but that they’d then worsened and died, then they were sent what they were told were their relatives’ ashes. Public suspicions rapidly grew. Families were told their relatives had died of appendicitis, for example, when their appendix had already been removed. Doctors and priests started to speak out against the secret programme. In 1941, the Bishop of Munster said in a speech:

It is said of these patients: They are like an old machine which no longer runs, like an old horse which is hopelessly paralyzed, like a cow which no longer gives milk. We are not talking here about a machine, a horse, nor a cow…No, we are talking about men and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live?

In response to the largest movement of public resistance to the Nazis in Germany, Hitler ordered T4 to be stopped, but some doctors continued the programme on their own initiative.

These programmes laid the groundwork for the genocide of Jews and other ethnic groups who were deemed untermenschen. As we’ve seen, central to Nazism was the idea that the state existed to purify the German race. Through the Nuremburg race laws of 1935, only Germans deemed ‘Aryan’ were granted citizenship and allowed to marry each other, while Germans deemed ‘Jews’ were denied citizenship and legal rights. This was fundamental to the Nazis’ ideology of spiritual racism.

Yet what exactly was an Aryan? German racial theorists disagreed as to whether Celts were Aryan, or Slavs, or Indians (the term ‘Aryan’ originally came from the European study of Indian culture). The Nazis insisted Jews were a race, or even a different species, but couldn’t agree what a Jew actually was — ultimately they defined it as someone practicing the Jewish religion. How much Jewish ‘blood’ made you a ‘Jew’ — if one parent was Jewish? Or one grandparent? Or one great-grand-parent? The Nazis decided anyone who had three or four grandparents who practiced the Jewish faith was a Jew (in the US, by contrast, any African ancestor anywhere in your family tree defined you as a ‘negro’ — making the entire human race technically negro).

On these rather arbitrary decisions rested the fate of millions of lives. Those deemed non-Aryan, especially those deemed Jewish, were denied all legal rights and protections. They were robbed, bullied, harassed, beaten up with impunity, and segregated into ghettos.

There is much debate on when the Nazi leadership decided on ‘the final solution’ of murdering all Jews. Evidence suggests Hitler initially envisaged expelling German Jews to another country — to Poland, or Palestine, or Madagascar. It seems likely that, given his demonization of Jews, this would still be a temporary reprieve. But it appears the idea of a rapid extermination of Jews and other untermenschen crystallized after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, in 1941.

Hitler never wrote down an order for the final solution, but he made clear to his generals that the invasion of the USSR was a ‘hard racial struggle’ which did not allow any ‘legal constraints’. He also called for the ‘Extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia’, and often spoke of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ threat. The new territories would need to be purged ‘of Jews, Polacks, and rabble’. As was usual in the Nazi regime, Hitler set the direction and his underlings improvised their solutions. Himmler’s SS took the lead. In 1943, he told his officers:

every Party member will tell you ‘perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter’… none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And . . . to have seen this through and — with the exception of human weakness — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

The SS formed death-squads, called Einsatzgruppen, to work behind the invading German army, arresting and murdering resistors, including any Soviet officials, and all Jewish men, women and children. The scale of the murders is incomprehensible. In two days in September 1941, the SS — aided by Ukrainian military — gathered 33,771 Jewish people by a ravine in Kiev called Babi Yar, told them to strip naked and form a queue, and then shot them one by one.

This is Anna Glinberg, when she was three. She was one of the victims of the Babi Yar massacre

The murders was not solely the work of the SS. The German army sometimes took part, as did local militaries in Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, the Baltic states and Ukraine. In the Lithuanian town of Kaunas, for example, from the 25th to the 27th of June, the town’s Jews were forced to gather in a public square, where volunteers beat them to death with iron bars. One man, known as the ‘death dealer ’, beat hundreds of people to death while the gathered crowd cheered, then climbed on their corpses to play the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion.

This is what our species is capable of. And yet murdering untermenschen proved more psychologically taxing than Nietzsche imagined. Rudolf Hoss, the SS commandant of Auschwitz, recalled:

Many members of the Einsatzkommando, unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad. Most of the members of these Kommandos had to rely on alcohol when carrying out their horrible work.

So the SS developed a method of mass murder that was less taxing for its men: gassing in concentration camps. They drew on the technology of the T4 euthanasia programme. SS officers worked side-by-side with doctors, and the mass murder was deemed a necessary medical procedure for the removal of the Jewish virus from the German body-politic. In three months, 1.5 million Jews were gassed in three death camps in Poland. In total, historians estimate that 6 million Jews and 5 million other prisoners-of-war were murdered by the Nazis.

Sachsenhausen concentration camp

One can’t take in murder on this scale. Each one of those numbers was a human being, with feelings, dreams, loved ones, just like you or your our loved ones. Imagine your father or daughter in one of those camps. They were denied any care or dignity, murdered like lice. And this happened in Europe in living memory.

Historians have long debated why and how this could have happened. Clearly, the weakness of the Weimar democracy enabled the Nazis to seize total control and enact their fanatical racist ideology without any checks or balances. But there was initial widespread support for their sterilization scheme, and few Germans complained about the persecution of the Jews.

We’ve seen how the Nietzschean-evolutionary dream of ubermenschen often entailed a homicidal contempt for those deemed untermenschen, and how this way of thinking deeply influenced the Nazi leadership, especially the SS, which took a lead role in the Holocaust. Himmler demanded ‘superhuman acts of inhumanity’ from his men. Striving to become more than human, they became worse than animals.

But why did so many doctors and psychiatrists take part in the mass murder? Robert Lifton interviewed several of them, and he suggests that some shared the Nazis’ ‘biological mysticism’, and their sense of themselves as soldiers or priests serving the German volk and purifying it of the virus of Judaism. For those who didn’t share this faith, the process of murder was helpfully formalized, bureaucratized, collectivized, and shrouded in medical euphemisms.

This is true of the entire eugenics movement. GK Chesterton rightly called eugenicists ‘euphemicists’, because they reframed murder as humane medical procedure, ‘special treatment’ and so on. Lifton also reports that the medical staff lived with themselves through psychological splitting — they did their work in the day-time, then in the evening returned smiling to their families, thinking themselves good citizens.

When the war ended and the killing camps were discovered, the world declared itself shocked. A British parliamentary delegation said the camps marked ‘the lowest point of degradation to which humanity has yet descended’. Yet blaming the Holocaust solely on the Nazis is also a psychological splitting, ignoring the darkness in all of us.

When the Nazis held an international conference on the ‘Jewish problem’ in 1938, delegates from 32 countries travelled to Evian in France. Although every delegate deplored the German treatment of the Jews, not one agreed to take in any Jewish refugees — except for the Dominican Republic. This international failure emboldened Hitler in his murderous plans.

And, as we’ve seen throughout this book, in the decades before the Holocaust, intellectuals, artists and spiritual teachers in many countries argued that some lives were worth more than others, and that some untermenschen needed to be cleared away to enable the evolution of higher beings. Just words…until someone takes you seriously.

The Nazis discredited eugenics forever. But the Nietzschean dream of superbeings did not disappear. It survived, evolved, mutated, and found new places to flourish, including in the Californian counterculture and the Age of Aquarius.