The title of Robert Lifton’s groundbreaking book is The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1988). Why “Doctors?” Why “medical” killing?

Nazism, it turns out, was a medical ideology: killing to cure. Restoration of Germany’s health required destroying the cause of her disease: the Jew, conceived as a virus, bacteria or parasite. Hitler was influenced by Robert Koch, who discovered the bacterium causing tuberculous in 1882—leading  to the idea that each disease was caused by a specific pathogen. Curing a disease meant identifying and destroying the pathogen responsible for a particular disease.

Koch presented his discovery of the bacterium causing tuberculosis on March 24, 1882, leading to widespread adulation of Koch and development of "bacteriology"—whose basic message was that If one could isolate the pathogen responsible for a given disease and destroy it—the patient would be cured. Bacteriologists became aligned with the state through use of military analogies. Laboratory researchers were compared to soldiers: "Warriors against disease."

In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that Germany was a “single organism,” a “corporate body” and posed the question: “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?”

I hypothesize Hitler was referring to the “law of the immune system”—that biological mechanism causing organisms to eject or reject cells identified as foreign or not self. Hitler’s idea was that that the German body politic—like all organisms—would automatically eliminate alien cells. Jews, pathogenic cells—were considered the source of the “disease within the body of the people” that had to be removed to assure the nation’s survival.

The belief that Germany was suffering from a disease caused by Jewish bacilli gained currency among Nazi leaders. Professor Fischer of the U. of Berlin asserted that when a people seek to preserve its nature, it must “reject alien elements.” Goebbels wrote that exterminating Jews was an unavoidable manifestation of the “life-and-death struggle” between the Aryan race and “poisonous bacillus.”

Heinrich Himmler stated that the struggle between Germany and the “Jewish plague bacillus” was a “law of nature.” In his famous speech of October 4, 1943, Himmler described plans for exterminating the Jews to his SS officers, stating that Germans had the “moral right to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us. We do not want to be infected by this bacillus and to die.”

Why did Himmler call mass-murder a “moral right?” Himmler stressed that destroying human life was an unpleasant task that “ran contrary to the ‘humane’ instincts” of Germans, but that overcoming such scruples was a “measure of one’s character.” This coupling of murder and morality—belief that unpleasant  tasks were “necessary”—was at the core of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust.

The root of everything was Hitler’s belief that Jews were intent upon violently destroying Germany. Since the fundamental task of National Socialism was to “preserve the life of the German people,” therefore exterminating Jews was consistent with morality, indeed necessary. Hitler’s stance crystallized in the following statement: “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.”

The main task of German Doctors was not to cure individuals, but rather to maintain the health of the nation. A manual by Dr. Rudolf Ramm proposed that each doctor was no longer to be merely a caretaker of the sick, but was to become a “physician to the Volk.” Another Doctor spoke with pride about being “doctor to the Volkskorper” (national body), stating that National Socialism was “in accord with the biology of man.” Rudolf Hess stated that National Socialism was “nothing but applied biology.”

Physicians thrilled to this view of National Socialism as “applied biology.” The message that appealed to many scientists and physicians grew out of the idea that Germany was an actual body possessing an immune system. Like any organism, Germany would automatically “ferret out“ alien cells.

German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and were followed immediately by the Einsatzgruppen, “mobile killing squads,” who began systematically murdering Jews in mass shooting operations on Soviet territory. This was the first phase of the Final Solution—before killing operations were transferred to gas chambers. As the killings began, Hitler conveyed his thinking in several extraordinary statements. On July 10, 1941, he declared:

I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and fermenting agent of all social decomposition.

On  February 22, 1942, Hitler stated:

The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.

The Holocaust or Final Solution enacted an immunological fantasy, the purpose of which was to rescue Germany from death, a death Hitler believed would have been inevitable if actions had not been taken to destroy Jewish bacteria. The Nazis created a social movement—and “history”—based on this fantasy.

The coin of the realm in politics is not factuality or truth. Political rhetoric constructs worlds based on shared fantasies. Jews were not dangerous to Germans. Mexicans do not rape Americans. The coin of the realm in politics is the leader’s capacity to express his own fantasies—and to get others to embrace and enact them.

Employing my method, analysis of metaphor, one can perceive how fantasies are externalized into cultural reality. We can learn a great deal about ourselves by looking outward as well as inward, understanding reality as a dependent variable; a world of projections revealing primal fantasies.

Physicists, chemists and biologists study objects in the natural world possessing their own reality. We have not created these objects. However, much of the external world—ideas and objects in society—are created by human beings, often based on fantasies that we project into the world. Observing and theorizing about the world we have created, we are observing and theorizing about ourselves.

Recent medical books show that the immune system is far more complex than initially imagined. Still, its fundamental purpose is clear: to destroy or neutralize pathogenic cells.

Hitler, Himmler and other Nazis  believed that every single Jew had to be destroyed. Not a single one could be left alive The world had to be made “Jew free.”

In The Body is the Hero (2012), Dr. Ronald Glasser explains that the theory of immunology depends on the ability of one cell to recognize a cell unlike itself. Recognition precedes destruction. Once a cell is  identified as foreign or not self, “the attack on this cell begins.” “Our battles against microbes,” Glasser says, ”have never been one of percentages. Every microbe entering our body has to be destroyed, not 98% of them or 99%, but 100%. Not one single enemy can be left alive. If just one survivor continued to replicate, this would eventually mean death, and so all have to be eliminated.”

This passage about pathogenic Jewish cells might have been written by Heinrich Himmler. This kind of thinking about Jews—conceived as bacteria requiring that every single one of them be destroyed lest they survive and multiply—was the basis of the Final Solution.
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Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT OF LECTURE: "GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY."

I present a method for studying the language of political leaders to reveal the unconscious fantasies that generate destructive forms of societal behavior like war and genocide. I focus on Hitler, who conceived Germany as a body politic consisting of the German people as cells of this body. Jews were pathogenic organisms—source of a “disease within the body of the people”. Hitler claimed that Germany possessed an immune system that automatically destroyed alien or not-self cells. Jews were conceived as bacteria, virus and parasites—cells whose continued presence within the German organism would lead to its death.

The Final Solution was as a struggle to destroy Jewish pathogens, thus to save the life of the German nation. I examine the case of Donald Trump, who similarly asserted that the presence of a certain class of people within the body politic would lead to national destruction. Trump identified “Mexican rapists” as the primal danger, requiring construction of a “wall” to prevent these alien cells from entering the body politic.

hy have psychiatrists not developed a concept of collective psychopathology? Over 200 million people died in the 20th century as a result of war and genocide. One would imagine that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts would enter the arena to explore the causes and meanings of collective forms of violence and mass-destruction. There is profound resistance toward exploring pathological behavior that is “normative.” This resistance perhaps stems from our attachment to countries as sacred objects. Political mass-murder is undertaken by nations. We seem unable to face the reality that the most extreme forms of violence are performed in the name of a beloved object. If we wish to “awaken from the nightmare of history”—we need to go where human beings have not gone before by exploring the relationship between violence and love. Why are the most self-destructive forms of human behavior undertaken in the name of mother-countries?