The “thrilling” message of National Socialism—that appealed to so many scientists and physicians—was that Germany was an actual body possessing an immune system.
Like any organism with an immune system, Germany would work to ferret out “cells” identified as alien or non-productive—unable or unwilling to contribute.
Jews were identified as particularly virulent cells. The Final Solution represented the functioning or activation of the German immune system—elimination of pathogenic cells from within the German organism. |
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Hitler imagined himself as the “Robert Koch of Germany” whose political mission was to destroy Jewish bacteria in order to cure Germany’s disease. He conceived of the German nation as a living organism:
My Movement encompasses every aspect of the entire Volk. It conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism. There is no such thing as non-responsibility in this organic being, not a single cell which is not responsible, by its very existence, for the welfare and well-being of the whole.
For Hitler, each and every German human being constituted a “cell” within the national body. As a cell within a living organism, each German human being was responsible for contributing to the well-being of the national organism.
In The National Socialist German Workers Party (1935, see Murphy, 1943), Nazi political theorist Gottfried Neese conveyed this same idea:
In contrast to the state, the people form a true organism—a being which leads to its own life and follows its own laws. This living unity of the people has cells in its individual members, and just as in every body there are cells to perform certain tasks, this is likewise the case in the body of the people.
As an organism, the nation was a being that led its own life and followed its own laws. What were the “laws” that governed the German body politic?
In Mein Kampf (1923), Hitler said: “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?” Hitler was referring to the “law of the immune system:" that biological mechanism acting within each organism to reject “foreign” or not-self cells. Jews were identified as foreign cells. The nation, therefore, could act in no other way but to reject or eject these Jewish cells.
In a lecture on June 20, 1939, Professor Eugen Fischer, Rector of the University of Berlin, asserted that when a people wants to preserve its own nature it must “reject alien elements.” When these elements already have insinuated themselves, the people must “suppress and eliminate them.”
The Jew, Fischer declared is “such an alien,” and therefore when he wants to insinuate himself he must be “warded off.” Such actions were merely self-defense. “I reject Jewry,” Fischer concluded, “with every means in my power.”
Philosopher Alfred Rosenberg (1930/2012) set forth an immunological concept as the basis of National Socialism. The “spirit of the race,” Rosenberg declared, realizes its ability to assimilate everything racially and spiritually akin, and at the same time the iron need to “eliminate and suppress everything foreign.” The German race would eliminate what was foreign—not because it was false or bad, but because it “violates the inner construction of our being.”
In The Nazi Doctors (1986), Robert Lifton discusses an influential manual by Rudolf Ramm of the medical faculty at the University of Berlin that proposed that each doctor was no longer to be merely caretaker of the sick but was to become a “physician to the Volk” and “biological soldier.” Nazi doctor Johann S. spoke to Lifton with pride about being “doctor to the Volkskorper (‘national body’ or ‘people’s body’).” Ramm’s manual specified that a doctor was to be an “alert biological soldier” living under “the great idea of the National Socialist biological state structure.”
It claimed that National Socialism is “in accord with the biology of man.” Physicians, Lifton says, could thrill to this message. Dr. S., for instance, described joining the Party immediately after hearing Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess—at a mass meeting in 1934—say that National Socialism is “nothing but applied biology.”
The “thrilling” message of National Socialism—that appealed to so many scientists and physicians who embraced Hitler’s project—was that Germany was an actual body possessing an immune system. Like any living organism with an immune system, Germany would ferret out “cells” identified as alien or non-productive, that is, human beings judged to be unhealthy or asocial, unable or unwilling to contribute to the life of the national organism. Doctors—representing the nation’s immune system—would work to eliminate these cells.
Jews were identified as particularly virulent cells within the German body politic: a bacterium or virus or cancer cell. The Final Solution represented the functioning or activation of the German immune system—working to eliminate or remove pathogenic cells from within the German organism.
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