The documentary, “In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine” presents the troubling story of how it came to be that German physicians, among the highest regarded in the world, committed such atrocious crimes –“ethical violations” as the actions were frequently called – against innocent victims. The documentary incriminatingly brought to light the decades-long rise of the popularity of eugenics, especially in America around the turn of the century. It also uncovered several things I didn’t know about, including that America actually sterilized handicapped and mentally ill or developmentally disabled people in the early twentieth century.
This is no half-baked, conspiracy-theory documentary. It was made in 1997 by a professor at Boston College, features leading scholars, and is generally highly-regarded.
The film ponders “how could these doctors” have carried out such unethical experiments, treating human beings like mere lab rats, often leaving them disfigured or dead. Near the end, one astute commenter concludes that given the environment in early 20th century Germany (and America) that was saturated in pro-eugenics ideologies and the scientific (though actually pseudo-scientific) emphasis on the superiority of the Arian race, that the doctors under the Nazi regime were actually following through on their ethics, not violating them. He points out that many of them bought into the German rhetoric of superiority and viewed themselves as saving the world through purifying it, which was the highest aim of eugenics as a theory.
Understanding the moral-ideological framework leading up to the war illuminates why it wasn’t so hard for physicians to go along with what seem like ethical-violations to us when their ethics dictated that some people were less valuable than others. Because of the ideas permeating Germany in the early 1900s, the Nazi’s racist rhetoric found sympathetic ears and so picked up steam. Not long after, Hitler’s doctors were killing the infirm and experimenting on helpless Jews in concentration camps to discover the limits of human endurance by pushing their subjects past that limit. They also performed pointless experiments in an effort to prove the superiority of the German race, amid other massacres.
This should jar us out of complacency and force us to reflect. Truly, truly ideas have consequences. Ideas matter. As Americans, we often and easily view ourselves as immune to such suspensions of moral clarity. But in reality, we are especially vulnerable when we think it can’t happen to us.
Abortion and euthanasia in this country are already steps along the path well-trodden by the eugenicists—they ascribe value only to certain types of life and view some humans as less worthy than others. In discussion, it can seem extreme to the point of fanaticism to compare events and ideas to the Holocaust, and sometimes it is. Yet nevertheless, less than one hundred years ago, normal human beings carried out a systematic program of extinction against their weakest neighbors. Indeed, we should never forget; we should always be on guard and always seeking to understand and eliminate the roots of such hatred before the weed of such toxic ideologies blooms again.
What Nazi Medicine makes abundantly clear is that ideas inspire actions. The ideals supporting legalized abortion and euthanasia should terrify us when we compare them to the eugenics movement that laid the groundwork for racist Nazism.
Proponents of abortion and euthanasia tell us that some humans are not true persons and that they can be killed without moral qualm. They tell us that some humans are an inconvenience and that others will be unable to live a “fulfilling life” and so should not live at all. Examined honestly, there is little difference between the rational for aborting a disabled child in the womb and killing a disabled child well into her life, as the Nazis did. Both claim that the child’s life is not worth living, that the child is a burden and that the child will hardly know the difference. Both take innocent life and remove from the world a unique creation of God.
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The idea that “life is not worth living” here stems from a purely secular view in which a fulfilling life consists of specified achievements and pleasures. It is when we view life in such a limited way that some lives lose their value. The pro-abortion hardliner ignores or rejects the idea that living the life that God planned for us–the life that only we can live– is actually worth doing. Viewing each person’s life as a journey to fulfill God’s purpose for him or her, a purpose which could be as simple as inspiring compassion or gratitude in another person, instills a respect for the unrepeatable value of each person.
The abortion/euthanasia agenda is as deadly as the eugenics agenda that came before the Holocaust. It has already begun to show itself, and let us pray that we as a people turn away from such poison before the inherent devaluing of human life flourishes again in its full horror. Or else when we round up disabled five year olds (or eighty year olds) for “euthanasia,” it will be the fulfillment of our ethics that approve of aborting them, not a violation of them, just as the pernicious experiments carried out by doctors in the Third Reich were a fulfillment of their own ethics. Deadly ideas become deadly actions, no matter how lovely the clothing we dress it up in.
Stephanie Pacheco is a writer, blogger, and speaker in Northern Virginia. She earned a M.A. in Theological Studies, summa cum laude, from Christendom College and holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies with a minor in Government and Political Theory. She has presented at a conference of the American Catholic Historical Association and for Christian Women in Action. She lives with her husband and two young children.
