By Donald H. Harrison

Dr. Sheldon Rubenfeld, an endocrinologist who also teaches medical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, says in developing their murderous philosophy of eugenics and racial cleansing, the Nazis in Germany often extrapolated from lessons learned in the United States.

Speaking Sunday, Jan. 22, at a “Limmud” or Day of Learning sponsored by San Diego’s Agency for Jewish Education, Rubenfeld said that notwithstanding the Hippocratic Oath “to do no harm,” German physicians were seduced by the prospect of academic and professional advancement into becoming full participants in the Nazi policies of racial purification.

Rubenfeld said that in the early 20^th century “eugenics” had become a world wide movement with the American efforts in this field headquartered at Cold Springs Harbor, New York.  In 1907, the state of Indiana adopted the nation’s first law permitting sterilization, Rubenfeld told an audience packing a classroom at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center.

Eventually 28 states had such laws, with California becoming the largest practitioner of these medical procedures to prevent people from sexually reproducing.   The legality of such practices was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes opining “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Besides American policies on sterilization, the Nazis admired racist U.S. immigration laws, Rubenfeld said.  Immigration quotas were based on the 1890 census of the United States—a time when few Russians, Poles or Gypsies lived in the country.  The eugenicists in the United States believed such laws would prevent undesirable elements from entering the American blood stream.

In his lecture, Rubenfeld said that 50 percent of German physicians belonged to the Nazi party, and that their belief in “racial hygiene” typically preceded their joining the party.  Many subscribed to campaigns that encouraged birth control for medically unfit people while discouraging medically fit people from using contraception.

Because of his belief in practicing eugenics nationwide, some physicians lauded Adolf Hitler “as the great doctor of the German people,” Rubenfeld said.

As in the United States, influential scientists subscribed to the idea that genetics was a key to human destiny, Rubenfeld said,  It was at this time that the genetic studies that the monk, Gregor Mendel, had made on plant life were “rediscovered” and popularized.

German physicians endorsed the Nazi notion that through eugenics, Germans could eliminate from their nation physical deformities as well as patterns they considered to be mental deformities such as “criminalism, alcoholism, homosexuality,” according to Rubenfeld.

Physicians’  acceptance of Nazi ideology was not only as a result of bad science but also because the Nazis offered them “higher social and political standing than ever before.”

As Jewish doctors were removed from university posts and prohibited from treating Aryans, these vacancies filled by doctors favored by the Nazis.  Under the Nazi sterilization law, doctors were asked to examine children and to sterilize those who were deemed unfit in mind or body.  Doctors were required to register all children with genetic illnesses under their care—or to be fined.

Exclusive of Jews, between 1933 and 1939, 400,000 German citizens were sterilized in response to such ailments as feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia and epilepsy, Rubenfeld said.  In the Nazi ideology, these citizens were not being “punished,” they simply were making their contribution to the betterment of the German volk.

The Nazis also “assigned women to the home,” rewarding those who fit the notion of Aryan racial perfection with a bronze medal if they had four children, a silver medal for six children, and a gold medal for having eight children.  On the other hand, he said, women who didn’t marry by age of 35 “were treated as Jews.”

In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted to prohibit sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, and doctors were required to conduct physical examinations of all marriage applicants.

 In 1939, Hitler implemented a plan for “mercy killings” of those with mental or physical defects.  The program started with newborns, then expanded to include children under the age of three, and then expanded again to the teen years, Rubenfeld said.  He said children who were marked for death had a red plus sign put on their charts, while those who were to be permitted to continue to live had a blue minus on their charts.

The Nazis carried out a tremendous propaganda campaign in favor of euthanasia, pointing out how much money would be saved over a lifetime of a patient who might otherwise have to be institutionalized.  Besides people with genetic defects, Hitler next authorized doctors to engage in “mercy killing” of people who would not recover from their diseases.  Rubenfeld said patients in psychiatric hospitals were particularly at risk, many of whom would be transported to killing centers for lethal injections or for gassing by carbon monoxide.

In such centers, said Rubenfeld, the Nazis learned the murdering techniques that they later would use in the campaign of genocide against the Jews.

Committed to the concept of racial hygiene and purity, doctors became involved in nearly ever aspect of the mass murders in the concentration camps, according to Rubenfeld. 

Besides “selecting” those who could work and those who should be sent immediately to the gas chambers—“selection” being a term taken from Darwin’s “Natural Selection” – physicians were involved in almost every other aspect of the mechanized murder process such as occurred at Auschwitz, Rubenfeld said.

Through windows, physicians observed Jews as they were dying in the gas chambers, then, wearing gas masks, the physicians went into the gas chambers to certify that they were dead, and how long the process took.  They also supervised the removal of gold fillings from the victims’ teeth.

“Thousands of doctors willingly participated in ramp duty (where Jews coming off the trains were “selected”), gas chamber duty, and Red Cross duty” (which involved taking Jews who no longer had the strength to work straight to the gas chambers.”