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From: The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Prior to Auschwitz and the other death camps, the Nazis established a policy of direct medical killing: that is, killing arranged within medical channels, by means of medical decisions, and carried out by doctors and their assistants. The Nazis called this program “euthanasia.” Since, for them, this term camouflaged mass murder, I have throughout this book enclosed it within quotation marks when referring to that program. The Nazis based their justification for direct medical killing on the simple concept of “ife unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes Leben). While the Nazis did not originate this concept, they carried it to its ultimate biological, racial, and “therapeutic” extreme.

Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of “life unworthy of life,” coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the killing of “impaired” children in hospitals; and then the killing of “impaired” adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to “impaired” inmates of concentration and extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps themselves. In part I, I discuss the first four steps, in relation to the Nazis’ overall biomedical vision and as a prelude to Auschwitz and the other death camps.

Also: "Vaccination as biopolitics and social practice from the German Empire to the Federal Republic"

The initial reluctance to vaccinate evidently reflected a programmatic contradiction in Nazi health policy: the contrast between “racial hygiene” ideas that aimed at optimizing hereditary biology on the one hand; and a prevention policy on the other, which envisaged population and defense policy goals. More than ever, vaccination raised the question of how the “national body” should actually be understood and treated. Therefore, in the discussions since 1933, medical considerations have by no means been in the foreground. Rather, it was about the weighting of the needs of the "national comrade" compared to the requirements of the "national body" as well as threatening dangers from which the "national community" had to be protected. Answers to these questions seemed more urgent than ever “in view of the […] low risk of smallpox” 64 and the growing criticism of vaccination, as observed by the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick therefore assumed at the beginning of 1934 that a "revision of the vaccination law [...] would probably bring the conscience clause" 65. 66 This revision also makes sense because it takes “a far-reaching popular feeling into account” 67 so that previous measures against vaccination opponents “should be lifted as soon as possible” 68.

Such considerations formed the starting point of a commission in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which worked on a revision of compulsory vaccination in March 1934. In this meeting, Johannes Breger from the Reich Health Office summed up the fundamental dilemma. If the motto used to be that possible damage to the individual was “the price” “with which the German people pay for their protection against smallpox” 69, then after the “seizure of power” one had to “check whether it corresponded to state ethics to demand such a sacrifice”. An examination is all the more urgent because "a large part of the German population rejects compulsory vaccination", as Ministerial Director Arthur Gütt from the Ministry of the Interior added. His colleague von Kapff took another step further, when he stylized the compulsory vaccination as a touchstone of the National Socialist world view: "Should the compulsory vaccination continue", "the majority of the people will doubt that in medical policy [...] National Socialist principles are decisive". Kapff received support from the President of the Dresden State Health Office, Weber, who saw “limited voluntariness” as a contemporary answer to the vaccination question. After all, “the conditions today are very different than they used to be. Thanks to the education of the National Socialist government, the people's views had changed so that more could be achieved voluntarily than previously with repeated forced vaccinations. Not all members of the commission could agree with this view. From Hamburg, Professor Paschen protested that the state was carelessly giving up its powers. Vaccination should “not be left to the discretion of the individual” but should “be enforced by law”.

The objection of the army medical inspector Anton Waldmann weighed more heavily. A personal decision of the "comrade" when vaccinating would contradict "the leader's principle" and thus increase the risk of epidemics "among the people", which "in the event of a future war forced upon us [...] would prevent the army from freedom of movement". At the end of the meeting, these military-political reasons led to the realization that there were still reservations about the abolition of compulsory vaccination. The commission therefore did not come to a conclusive conclusion, from which an important finding can be gained: in 1933 there was no concept ready for a main instrument of modern population policy. After the "seizure of power", an unusually open discussion was held about the modern precautionary measures70. The fact that the self-responsibility of the “national comrade” was an important argument, and that state coercion was even seen as a contradiction to National Socialist ethics, shows two things: the programmatic contradictions of health policy and the ambiguity about the legitimacy of state coercion vis-à-vis “national comrades”. One could summarize that vaccination mutated into a litmus test for the “consent dictatorship” 71 in the early phase of the “Third Reich”. After all, when it came to vaccinations, it was the “completely normal Germans” who one wanted to win for the “National Community”.

Now back to Lifton:

Academic medicine, as part of the overall university structure, was an important focus for Nazi organizational therapy. The “disease" to be cured was what Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, called “flabby intellectualism,” and what the education and culture minister, Bernhard Rust, called “disastrous concepts of liberty and equality,” or what one educational reformer identified as “any autonomy and freedom of the teacher.” Even before the Nazis, German universities had been bastions of conservative or reactionary political thought which tended to deify the concept of the state. But the Nazis made clear that they wanted something more. As Bavarian professors were told by their new minister of culture: “From now on, it will not be your job to determine whether something is true, but whether it is in the spirit of National Socialist revolution.” Universities were to become (in the words of one historian) “intellectual frontier fortresses” and “bodies of troops”; professors were to develop “trooplike cooperation.”52

Bonus round: "You Know Who Else Opposed Vaccine Mandates? Hitler." — Jacobin Magazine, archived

There’s only one problem: the Nazis didn’t actually issue a vaccine mandate. In fact, Republicans would have found much to like in the Third Reich’s vaccine policy, which was very much in line with their current recommendations: above all, it relaxed requirements for compulsory vaccination that had been in place in Germany for decades at that point, and went with a voluntary approach instead.

Someone is definitely lying. Can you see?