Language:
English
Year of publication:
1988
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
3, 1 (1988) 21-36
Keywords:
Jews History 1939-1945
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
World War, 1939-1945 Medical care
;
Human experimentation in medicine
Abstract:
Examines the public health policy of German doctors in the General Government. The Division of Public Health, headed by Jost Walbaum, believed that Jews were natural carriers of spotted fever because of their supposedly unhygienic way of life. Doctors played a decisive role in the adoption of ghettoization, especially in Warsaw. The non-Nazi municipal director of public health, Wilhelm Hagen, shared the prevailing belief, and when spotted fever broke out in the Warsaw ghetto due to overcrowding and food shortages he tried to control it by ruthless methods of quarantine. At a meeting in Bad Krynica in October 1941, 100 public health, military, and SS doctors applauded Walbaum and other speakers who argued that since more food could not be provided, the starvation of the Jews in the ghettos and shooting those found outside were the only way of protecting the German people from infection. The doctors' view of the Jews as carriers of disease, to be eliminated, rather than victims to be helped, justified and legitimized mass murder.
Note:
Appeared in German as "Genozid und Gesundheitswesen; Deutsche Ärzte und polnische Juden 1939-1941" in "Der Wert des Menschen; Medizin in Deutschland, 1918-1945" (1989) 316-328. A revised English version appeared in his "The Path to Genocide" (1992) 145-168.
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