Creating the Paradigm of ‘New Nation’

Despite its official Catholic nature, Jozef Tiso’s Slovak State apparatus adopted not only the teachings of the eugenic movement but also the racial-hygiene ideology of National Socialist Germany, which it gradually implemented into its political culture. This study presents how eugenic and racial-hygiene thinking was introduced into the structures of Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana (HSĽS; Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party), the self-governing party of independent Slovakia during the Second World War, against the backdrop of developmental trends in Europe. What is emphasized here is the gradual formation of the racial paradigm in the spirit of a eugenic and racial-hygiene framework, as well as the formation of a ‘pure Aryan Slovak nation’ cult, physically and mentally contrasting with racially-hygienically ‘unclean and degenerate’ Jews and Roma.

Double Dealing Homunculus, Jung, and Fascistic Proclivities

Fascism is a system of government merging the most extreme features of both authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and is classically considered to be at the far-right end of the political continuum, and sees racial hygiene, political violence, battle, and expansionism as means that can attain national rejuvenation. Emergence of Fascism in the last century in Europe, which had been raised up from somewhat democratic settings, has not been overlooked by intellectuals, who are in search of origins and physiognomies of Fascism. While many of researchers appreciate Fascism as a sociological phenomenon that demands psychological autopsy, there are investigators, as well, who are in search of developmental, biological, political, economical or administrative backgrounds of Fascism. In this regard, the connection between Jung and Fascism, also, was an intricate story that has been reflected again in a number of new studies. In the present article, Fascism, as a political dogma in the spectrum of authoritarianism, though not an unfamiliar administrative scheme in the globe and history, has been looked over psychosocially, along with some remarkable standpoints of some of the most known intellectuals, who were studying Fascism, Fascists, and masses in close proximity.

EUGENICS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN LATVIA DURING WORLD WAR II: THE INVESTIGATION FILE OF THE MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY OF THE LATVIAN SSR IN THE CASE OF THEODOR UPNERS

This study, based on the materials of the 1948 investigation of the Ministry of State Security of the Latvian SSR, traces and analyzes the scientific and administrative activities of Theodor Upners (1898-1992) during the Nazi occupation regime in Latvia. From 1942 until the end of the occupation in 1944, Upners was formally the leading eugenics specialist in Latvia. During this time, in 1942 he visited Germany on a scientific trip, gave a course on eugenics at the University of Riga, and in 1943 published the book «The Role of Eugenics in the Life of the Nation and the State». In the 1948 investigation, he was accused of collaborating with the Nazi occupation authorities and glorifying Nazi racial theory. The materials of the investigation indicate that the Upners’ Case was, at least in part, an episode of the repressions towards genetic that began in the Soviet Union. Upners acknowledged his collaboration with the Nazi occupation authorities, but denied – and this is confirmed by his published work – the glorification of racial theory and any calls for racial hygiene. Upners continued to fight to have these charges dropped until his rehabilitation in 1990. In this study, analyzing Upners’ activities during the Nazi occupation in the range between collaboration and resistance, against the background of his story, it is argued that the ideas of Nazi racial hygiene did not find support and adherents among Latvian academic scientists, and the rare public speeches about racial superiority were a tribute to political interests of the occupation regime.

Immunity’s Racial Empire: Virality, Melancholy, Whiteness

Writing in 1991 and 1994, respectively, Donna J. Haraway and Emily Martin argued that in the postwar decades the immune system became a material pedagogy for neoliberal and postmodern thought. In its depiction as a decentralized network of response, the immune system modeled life in late liberalism’s dematerialized time-space compressions. Moreover, if the immune system reified life in this radical expansion, its preternatural competency for discrimination between self and other simultaneously availed a means of retaining racial hygiene in this brave new world of empire. Yet curiously neither Haraway nor Martin acknowledged the extent to which the arrival of HIV in the early 1980s constituted a radical desublimation of what Roberto Esposito identified as the immune system’s salvational image. This essay posits that the arrival of HIV did not simply constitute a neutralization of the immunological fetishism of the postwar period. Rather, the loss of immunity precipitated a biopolitical melancholia. Having lost access to its privileged topos—the immune system itself—immunological governance in turn proximately cathected the object responsible for its trauma, namely, HIV itself. I understand Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Chuck Hogan’s The Blood Artists (1998) to think, in submerged literary form, an incremental embrace of virality as, ironically, the most viable vehicle for conserving the fantasies of both neoliberal competency and racial containment reified initially by immunity itself.

Austrian and Czech neuroscience becomes “coordinated” under National Socialism

The Austrian neuroscience consolidation came swiftly and terribly on “non-Aryans.” Austrian anti-Semitism was arguably even more virulent than in Germany. And laws had already escalated in Nazi Germany to the point that Jewish physicians at most could only treat other Jews as derogatorily called “sick treaters”; these laws were instantly applicable in “annexed” Austria, with no stepwise progressive disfranchisement. Even “Aryan” neurologists who were thought to be unsympathetic to the Nazi movement were dismissed shortly after the “annexation.” The Vienna university neurology clinic was taken over primarily by SS neurologists who had been “illegal” Nazis before the annexation and were extremely dedicated to the Nazi cause. At least one, Walther Birkmayer, spoke of expanding the sterilization law to other hereditary conditions not stipulated already by the law. At least nine racial or political neuroscientist replacements, including directors of institutes, led to racial hygiene consequences, including execution of sterilization and euthanasia programs.

Setting the stage for mass murder and human experimentation

With Hitler’s 1933 power seizure, the fate of roughly 9000 political and racial “enemy” neuroscientists was sealed. In the “Gleichschaltung,” or coordination of German neuroscience, step-wise legal and professional sanctions occurred against “non-Aryan” neuroscientists at every university neurology department in Germany. These were either dismissed within the first months of the Nazi takeover or by the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Sometimes the dismissed neuroscientists were forcibly removed by colleagues and sometimes they were arrested and imprisoned for trumped-up charges. Even private neurologists were forbidden from seeing insurance panel patients. Half of all German doctors joined the Nazi party, eager to take the positions vacated by their Jewish and communist comrades. The German neurology and psychiatry societies were merged to facilitate Gleichschaltung and Nazi influence on the specialties. And flourishing research and clinical programs were halted and then replaced by the racial hygiene agenda of the Nazi state.

Introduction

Despite knowledge since the postwar period and the efforts of neurologist Leo Alexander, the neuroscience community has been slow to recognize its involvement in the racial hygiene policies of the Third Reich. Part of this has been denial, but part of it protective of past perpetrators. However, since the popularization of medicine in the Nazi era in the 1980s, the fall of the Berlin Wall making previously unavailable patient data in the 1990s, and some astute articles in the neurology literature, neuroscience in the Nazi era has emerged as a scientific topic. Pioneering works by Shevell and Peiffer highlighted the unethical involvement of even famed German neuroscientists such as Julius Hallervorden. In the 2000s a growing body of literature has begun to show common threads between the exile of persecuted neuroscientists and the rise of increasingly destructive policies toward neurologic patients, and the exploitation of these patients for scientific research.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough”

Eugenic principles originated in the nineteenth century, along with the related subject of racial hygiene. Eugenics became popular globally, not just in Germany, and was seen as a solution to society’s problems of poverty, crime, and mental illness. Neuroscientists flocked to eugenics, but long before that they helped popularize scientific racism by espousing ideas about smaller skull sizes in so-called “inferior” races. Even famous neuroscientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century became staunch eugenicists, including Forel, Möbius, Anton, Lundborg, Lennox, and Foster Kennedy. Thus, it isn’t surprising that leading up to the Nazi era, neuroscientists were some of the biggest proponents of forced sterilization and even euthanasia programs as negative eugenics measures to rid society of unwanted elements, including neurologic and psychiatric patients who were seen as “burdens.” Notably, not all neuroscientists believed in eugenic measures on these patients, with some calling for “exoneration of the feebleminded.”