genocide

genocide The term ‘genocide’ was introduced in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, who had escaped from German-occupied Poland to the US. As a child in the new Polish state Lemkin sensed the vulnerability of Jews, as an ethnic minority, to coercive states; his expertise in international law prompted him to develop the term to describe the systematic annihilation of an ethnic group, religion, or culture. To Lemkin's dismay, the Nuremberg Medical Trial did not recognize genocide as a crime, although medical experiments were defined as a crime against humanity. Lemkin drafted the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 9 December 1948. It was only in 1988 that the US ratified the Convention.

Although medicine at its best is antithetical to genocide, at its worst it has facilitated genocidal atrocities. The biomedical sciences (broadly conceived) have supplied rationales for defining degenerate races. Anthropologists collecting specimens accelerated the demise of the Tasmanians, who at the turn of the century were regarded as one of the most primitive races. Physiological sciences assisted in racial classification, for example with the use of blood groups, which were linked to racial types. This reached a culmination with the Nazi measures of racial screening and genocide in the occupied East. Josef Mengele had doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and other racial experts attempted to identify residual Germanic elements among the Slavs. Not only Jews, but also gypsies were defined by the Nazis as meriting total eradiction, and numerous other ‘races’, such as the Slavs, were subjected to atrocities. Medical expertise was essential to maintain the fitness of higher races by eliminating the mentally ill and the severely disabled, and preventing reproduction of carriers of inherited diseases.

Medical expertise has provided techniques of extermination. The development of the Zyklon gas chamber was transferred from sanitary practices of delousing. Instead of killing the insect vectors of diseases, the Nazis tried to kill the human hosts of the pathogens. Each of the Nazi crematoria at Auschwitz could kill and dispose of a thousand bodies each day. This represented a highly medicalized form of genocide, using techniques and ideas of hygiene.

Genocidal measures provided an opportunity for advancing medical knowledge by the performance of human experiments, and the collection of specimens of the killed. Again, this is well illustrated by Nazi medicine. Anatomical collections included the skeletons, brains, organs, and tissue samples of persons deemed racially inferior. These collections often remained in German medical institutes until the 1990s. The anatomical atlas of Pernkopf, long a standard work, contained material from children killed in a Viennese hospital, and he also used corpses of executed persons for teaching purposes. German concentration camp experiments were conducted to determine the point that death sets in under extreme conditions of cold or immersion in seawater. Other experimental victims were used to test new vaccines and drugs after deliberate infection.

Despite Lemkin's efforts to prevent repetition of Nazi atrocities, the crime of genocide can all too easily occur. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia had a number of disturbing features, not least the prominence of physicians among the Bosnian Serb leadership. Large-scale massacres do not necessarily require medical expertise: the Turkish killing of the Armenians during World War I or the tragic massacres in Rwanda in 1995 show that all that might be necessary for such measures is to set in motion death marches — when persons would die from exhaustion — or to wield a simple machete. Genocide seems likely to remain one of the most horrific forms of pathological human behaviour.

P. J. Weindling

Bibliography

Kuper, L. (1977). The pity of it all. Gerald Duckworth, London.
Horowitz, I. (1976). Genocide: state power and mass murder. Transaction Books, New Brunswick.
Weindling, P. J. (1989). Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism. Cambridge University Press.

See also eugenics; killing; racism; war.