Abstract
Genocide is neither spontaneous nor episodic. Emerging from biological sciences and from philosophies that encourage and reflect those perspectives, ideas accrete and culminate in racial policies and practices that often become genocidal. These biological and philosophical antecedents began in earnest in the late eighteenth century. By the time of the Nazi rise to power, established thought-patterns about racial hierarchies had come to the fore— as “science”—in Europe and particularly in Britain and the United States. Biological race theory, which is the primary basis of modern genocide, came from within the scientific, medical, and academic communities—not from without as a political imposition by totalitarian governments. In the twentieth century, the members of the “doctorhood” that formulated, legitimized, and justified biological solutions to social and political problems not only thought, expounded, and wrote about their findings but also acted out their beliefs.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Raul Hilberg, author of the seminal three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. rev. edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 70.
See Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown, MA: Blue Crane Books, 1996).
Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” trans. Joan Tate (London: Granta Publications, 1997), pp. ix–x.
Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, trans. Belinda Cooper (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 1.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), pp. 532–3.
Peter Rose, The Subject is Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 18.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 28.
Leon Kamin’s The Science and Politics of I.Q. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
Louis Snyder, The Idea of Racialism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton, NJ: Von Nostrand, 1962), p. 137.
Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
J. L. Talmon, “European History as the Seedbed of the Holocaust,” in Jacob Sonntag, ed., Jewish Perspectives—25 Years of Modern Jewish Writing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), p. 11.
Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 291.
Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others in Germany 1933–45, trans. George Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 46.
A. Mitscherlich and F. Mielke, The Death Doctors, trans. James Cleugh (London: Elek Books, 1962).
Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 15–16.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2005 Colin Tatz
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tatz, C. (2005). The Doctorhood of Genocide. In: Roth, J.K. (eds) Genocide and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-3548-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-55483-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)