Life Unworthy Of Life: Racial Phobia And Mass Murder In Hitler's Germany

by James M. Glass

In this path-breaking work of intellectual and cultural history, James M. Glass provides a provocative new answer to the questions about the Holocaust that bedevil us to this day: How and why did so many ordinary Germans participate in the Final Solution? And how did they come to regard Jews as less than human and “deserving” of extermination?Glass argues that the answers lie in the rise of a particular ethos of public health and sanitation that emerged from the German medical establishment and filtered down to the common people. Building his argument on a trove of documentary evidence, including the records of the German medical community and of other professional groups, he traces the development in the years following World War I of theories of racial hygiene that singled out the Jews as an infectious disease, and that determined them as “life unworthy of life” in the words of Nazi propogandists and German scientists.Looked at from a broader perspective, Glass writes, the actions and beliefs of the German people show what today would be regarded as insane, became, for World War II German society, normal politics. Murdering millions of innocent people was not seen as a vicious criminal conspiracy, but as a therapy essential to the culture’s well-being.

Genres: Holocaust, Nonfiction, History, War

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 1997

Reviews

[Shaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hugh Gregory Gallagher writes, "It has been said that the madness of Adolf Hitler produced Nazi Germany, but it is as true, surely to say that it was the madness of the Germany of the twenties and thirties which found its expression in Hitler."

This was an interesting analysis of the psycho-social factors that allowed Nazi Germany to happen. According to Glass, the idea of racial purification and life unworthy of life, both ideas that were supported by the German medical establishments and universities well before Hitler, were major factors.

Though a little repetitive, I found this to be a thought-provoking read that convincingly argued that rather than being indifferent to the mass murder going on around them, German society as a whole was somewhat enthusiastic about the Final Solution. The Holocaust was not some secret program single-handedly carried out by Hitler and a few of his loyal cronies, but instead a complex and thought-out public health campaign gone terribly wrong that required compliance from all levels of German society.

He describes a social psychosis, where belief reshaped reality in such as way as to dehumanize those the Germans saw as impure and a threat to the overall public health.

Some interesting quotes:

Perhaps this is one of the moral lesson to be derived from an event as unimaginable as the Holocaust: When delusion defines a culture's reality, and the psychotic-normal becomes equated with the real, political life degenerates into an unimaginable terror. It is not that we are all capable of mass slaughtering; the political issue appears in the extent to which we transform humanity into "life unworthy of life," seeing the other not as human, but as polluted flesh ready for disposal.

It is important to remember in this respect that the Final Solution emerged in governmental ministries, research institutes, universities, and medical faculties, because these institutions fundamentally agreed on racist, cultural, psychological, and political assumptions. Eminent researchers and professors prepared intellectual and scientific defenses for the Final Solution long before the first crematoria were built.

A faith in the essential decency of human life and the willingness of institutions to protect that decency lies at the heart of a culture respecting difference. But how strong is that faith? The boundaries between civility and barbarism are protected by human institutions. If social agents find themselves overtaken by belief structures with exclusionary ways of thinking--with, as in the case of Nazi Germany, a medical ethos that defined certain groups as "life unworthy of life"--no natural law or belief in the innate decency of humankind will save scapegoats.

It's so easy to simply reduce the Holocaust to the evil of a few men, but that is really a naive and simplistic explanation that offers us very little in terms of substantial and tangible reasons. Glass, however, takes a more scientific approach in trying to understand and explain the societal and psychological forces involved.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting ideas, badly expressed and badly organized. Also, he misrepresents Hannah Arendt (because she's such a useful straw man if you pretend that she meant the "banality of evil" to apply more broadly than to Eichmann himself) and Sigmund Freud (the uncanny (unheimlich) is not what Glass persists in claiming it is), and although he doesn't misrepresent Julia Kristeva (to the best of my memory), he only sort of throws around the idea of abjection without really digging into how he thinks it applies to Nazi Germany. Also, in a book that's all about purification and taboos and scapegoats, failure to mention Mary Douglas and Purity and Danger: Mary Douglas: Collected Works, Volume 2 is, well, it makes me a little dubious. But mostly, this book is long on polysyllable buzzwords and woefully short on organization. (Also, if you're going to claim Germans had a phobia about touching Jews, it would help if you provided some evidence to back up that claim.) Which is a pity, because the idea that the Holocaust is about the rationalized expression (gussied up with the pseudo-science of eugenics) of a contamination phobia is one that I'd really like to see explored properly.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glass blends psychology, philosophy, historical record, and eyewitness testimony in this indictment of German society during the Nazizeit. The thesis of this book is that the Holocaust happened, not because of a few deranged and sadistic individuals, but because German society as a whole accepted that Jews (and some other groups) were inferior and "life unworthy of life." He details how German society as a whole knew what was happening in the camps, and could not have not known, because it took an unfathomable number of people to carry out the Holocaust, from the railroad operators to the people making the Zyklon B canisters.

I didn't find the psychology or the philosophy nearly as compelling as I think he did, since it makes up a large part of his analysis. At this time I'm not very familiar with Hannah Arendt's work, and can't really speak to whether or not his criticism of her is valid, but I felt like he relied a little too much on Freud for psychology.

That being said, the quotes by Nazi figures, eyewitnesses, historical documents, and his analysis thereof was very interesting. While on one hand, I felt like he was too repetitive with the psychological and philosophical analyses, I thought the repetition of certain points while citing historical evidence was used to great effect. For example, testimony from medical professionals, witnesses, and survivors about the prevalence of fleas was cited over and over (including a few descriptions of the deaths of children who were covered with fleas) to show just how deadly the problem of flea-borne typhus was. While I already knew typhus was a problem in many of the camps, having those specific and evocative stories was important to deepening my knowledge of the problem.

Part of the reason I picked up this book specifically was because I'm researching different groups of Holocaust victims to help be a better teacher about the Holocaust. One group I'm looking at is people with mental and/or physical disabilities, and this book has a lot of information on the T-4 program. I don't think I realized quite the extent of the execution of people with disabilities inside hospitals within cities in Germany-- I think I always assumed they were taken to the concentration camps for this. Glass points out Nazis would have seen after the T-4 program that most Germans wouldn't have protested the killing of people outside their groups (e.g. Jews, Roma, etc.), since they largely weren't even protesting the killing of their family members, and this is an important point.

Overall, I think this book, while repetitive and dry in some of its academic analysis, is a really good source for looking at how the Holocaust happened as a result of the prevailing government and society, and gives some really interesting testimony from the Nazis, those who were complicit in fulfilling the Nazi mission, and those who were victimized by that ethos.