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Nazi doctors did more than conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses. Lifton (The Broken Connection; The Life of the Self shows that this medically supervised killing was done in the name of "healing," as part of a racist program to cleanse the Aryan body politic. After the German eugenics campaign of the 1920s for forced sterilization of the "unfit,"it was but one step to "euthanasia," which in the Nazi context meant systematic murder of Jews. Building on interviews with former Nazi physicians and their prisoners, Lifton presents a disturbing portrait of careerists who killed to overcome feelings of powerlessness. He includes a chapter on Josef Mengele and one on Eduard Wirths, the "kind," "decent" doctor (as some inmates described him) who set up the Auschwitz death machinery. Lifton also psychoanalyzes the German people, scarred by the devastation of World War I and mystically seeking regeneration. This profound study ranks with the most insightful books on the Holocaust.
Born in Warsaw in 1927, Dov Freiberg spent his early childhood years in Warsaw and Lodz in the enveloping embrace of his family. One of the few survivors of the Sobibor death campand a veteran of the famous illegal immigrant vessel Exodus, he has lived in Israel since 1948, fought in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He dedicated his life to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and testified in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, as in several other high-profile Nazi war crimes trials. He lectures regularly for students, soldiers and educational institutions. To Survive Sobibor (1988) is Dov Freiberg's first book to be translated into English. His other books are : A Journey To The Past With Dekel Shibolim (1993), A Man as Any Other(1996) and Two Worlds (2001).
Asperger was the director of the University Children's Clinic in Vienna, spending most of his professional life in Vienna and publishing largely in German.[1] As a child, Asperger appeared to have exhibited some features of the very condition named after him, such as social remoteness and talent in language;[2] photographs taken during his seminal work show that he had a frank and earnest face with an intense gaze.[3] In 1944, Asperger described in the paper "'Autistic psychopathy' in childhood"[4] four children in his practice[5] who had difficulty in integrating themselves socially. Although their intelligence appeared normal, the children lacked nonverbal communication skills, failed to demonstrate empathy with their peers, and were physically clumsy. Their speaking was either disjointed or overly formal, and their all-absorbing interest in a single topic dominated their conversations. Asperger called the condition "autistic psychopathy" and described it as primarily marked by social isolation.[6] Asperger called his young patients "little professors",[4] and believed the individuals he described would be capable of exceptional achievement and original thought later in life.[5] In a society governed by the Nazi eugenics policy of sterilizing and killing social deviants and the mentally handicapped, Asperger's paper passionately defended the value of autistic individuals, writing "We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers."[4]
The Nazi Fuehrer Adolf Hitler stated repeatedly Nazism was a secular ideology founded on science. There was some diversity of views among the Nazi leadership as to the future of religion in Germany. Anti-Church radicals included Hitler's militant atheist Deputy Martin Bormann and Minister for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, the neo-pagan official Nazi Philosopher Alfred Rosenberg and security chief Heinrich Himmler. Some Nazis, such as Hans Kerrl, who served as Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs, believed Christianity could be Nazified into "Positive Christianity", by renouncing its Jewish origins, and Apostle's Creed, and holding Hitler as a new "Messiah". Hitler himself believed that in the long run, National Socialism and religion would not be able to co-exist, but was prepared temporarily to restrain some of his more radical instincts out of political considerations.
darkbake
reply to post by jimmyx
Well I agree with that part - I don't want religious people controlling my life with restrictive beliefs, either - but I'm skeptical about how sustainable atheism is as a cultural power vacuum before it is replaced by either Nationalism or Islam.
Although, I suppose in the U.S. we do have a system set up with a lot of checks and balances - even culturally, with 50 different states, established churches like the Mormons and all of that.
edit on 21amSat, 21 Dec 2013 06:22:23 -0600kbamkAmerica/Chicago by darkbake because: (no reason given)
The Nazi Party was founded as the pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party in January 1919. By the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler had become its leader and assumed control of the organisation, now renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in a bid to broaden its appeal. The National Socialist Program, adopted in 1920, called for a united Greater Germany[1] that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent,[2] while also supporting land reform and the nationalisation of some industries.
Large segments of the Nazi Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and economic revolution upon the party gaining power in 1933.[18] Many of the million members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were committed to the party's official socialist program.[18] The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, pushed for a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would entrench the party's official socialist program. Further, Röhm desired that the SA absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks under his leadership.
The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels, hated capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core, and he stressed the need for the party to emphasise both a proletarian and national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism.
A majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics.[4] Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements.[5] Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but syncretic.
a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
darkbake
I was talking to one of my friends about the liberal atheist (extremists) and about how they don't believe that people should have beliefs.