Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940

Racial Politics and Biomedical Totalitarianism in Interwar Europe

Racial Politics and Biomedical Totalitarianism in Interwar Europe Aristotle A. Kallis There is no more pertinent evidence of the totalitarian nature of the National Socialist regime in Germany than its uncompromising ambition to exercise full authority over every aspect of individual and collective life. Firstly through a series of legislative initiatives (including most notably the 1933 “Sterilization Law” and the 1935 “Citizenship and Marriage Laws”), and from 1939 onwards through the torrent of murderous policies (for example the T-4 “Euthanasia Program” and the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”), the National Socialist state became the primary arbiter of human value, survival and elimination.1 This was a bio-political project of the most extreme kind, a radical counter-utopia. In their fanatical pursuit of the “ideal Vaterland” the Nazis received crucial support from the German biomedical community —support that was verbal and logistic as well as technocratic and political. More than half of German medical practitioners became members of the NSDAP, a quarter joined the SA, and almost one in ten felt that either their professional or scientific interests would be best advanced through the SS.2 The apparent willingness with which the biomedical community bowed to National Socialist demands for cooperation can be described as “anticipatory” co-ordination (Gleichschaltung ). This involved the voluntary and pre-emptive implementation of measures aimed to placate the new Nazi authorities and thus to achieve the best possible arrangement with them. Even this interpretation , however, runs the risk of becoming reductionist, assuming that there was a pre-conceived Nazi norm to which the medical profession subscribed, through intimidation, peer pressure, opportunism, or even enthusiastic endorsement. In truth we are dealing with the conjunction, collusion and synthesis of two separate modern visions with totalitarian scope and implications, each with its own distinctive history, values and teleology. The National Socialist vision of a “racially pure” society remained far more nebulous and uncertain of its prescribed form than its biomedical counterpart. The “structuralist” literature on National Socialist policies against various non-normative groups, both in terms of racial hygiene (the mentally disabled) and racial anthropology (Jews, Sinti, Roma), underlined a culture of experiment of different “solutions ” and radical prescriptions.3 By contrast, specific branches of anthropological, biological and medical research that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed self-sustaining blueprints of both the desirable goal and the feasibility of the required methodology. Even if there were still fundamental disagreements between sub-groups about what were the best (most appropriate, effective and acceptable) means and objectives,4 in its ideal-typical form this new scientific counter-paradigm was holistic and “total”; pointing in the direction of what, for the purposes of this chapter, I term biomedical totalitarianism. The vision of biomedical totalitarianism rested on the idea that biomedical science alone could promote and guarantee the ideal of infinite individual and social perfectibility through eliminating all forms of perceived pathology; and that its practitioners could make the most authoritative and effective decisions about all matters relating to the life and “health” of the individual and society alike. Perhaps more importantly, it entailed a major process of jettisoning deep-seated cultural and moral convictions as well as overcoming the strength of common wisdom about the role and scope of scientific intervention in life. But it also presupposed a new type of relationship between scientific elites and sovereign state power, one providing the legislative, political and bureaucratic framework for the implementation of a far-reaching bio-political vision. Biomedical totalitarianism shared with traditional representations of medicine the belief that the doctor was a potent agent of “healing,” whose main responsibility was to prolong life and battle against the “threat” (real or potential) of “disease.” However, it also depicted the existing paradigm of medical and social “health” as deeply misguided and unsustainable, and articulated radically new definitions of all these notions in a way that suggested a genuine “scientific revolution.”5 A series of new foci (such as the overriding concern with the collective national body, the biological origins of racial membership, the role of heredity in explaining human conditions, the application of natural 390 “Blood and Homeland” laws in society, and new conceptions of social and racial “threats”) marked a dramatic departure from conventional biomedical practices and alluded to an open-ended extension of jurisdiction over the individual and society. The ideal-typical vision of biomedical totalitarianism pointed to a future organic society, where...