Dan Stone

8th of December 2009 Oxford Brookes University, History of Medicine Seminar Series

It has become common to argue that the Nazi Euthanasia programme was an important way-station on the ‘twisted road’ to Auschwitz, that the elimination of ‘undesirables’ that began with the murder of asylum inmates led directly to the murder of the Jews. Both were part of a Nazi vision for a purified German society. In this paper, I question the limits of this ‘continuity thesis’ by asking several questions: what did the Nazis mean by ‘race’? Can the murder of the Jews be meaningfully conceptualised in medical-eugenic terms? And why have historians sought to emphasise the ‘modern’, ‘scientific’ aspect of National Socialist thinking and genocidal policies over Nazi mystical antisemitism? I argue that the historiographical tradition that sees the Holocaust as part of a broader Nazi medicalising discourse has brought to light the important links between the T4 project and the killing centres of Operation Reinhard, but that when one closely examines the status of ‘race theory’ and ‘race mysticism’ among Nazi Germany’s decision-making elite, one sees that the murder of the Jews was driven less by science than by paranoid conspiracy theory. The aim of the paper is not to exculpate medics and other scientists, who were deeply complicit with the regime’s criminal policies; it is rather to situate correctly the contribution made by science and scientists to the Third Reich’s racial policies.