Sanitary discourse of the Nazis

Is it appropriate to make a comparison, as Herbert Kickl, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) did at a press conference on 30 November[1], between the draconian measures taken against coronavirus and ‘the darkest period of our history in the last century’, i.e. Nazism? Kickl did not develop his analogy but everyone knows what he meant. The measures introduced in Austria, especially the criminalization of the non-vaccinated (fines of over 3,000 euros), are draconian and authoritarian. Specifically, he referred to the ‘strategy of the scapegoat’, as Austrian society has been encouraged to turn against the non-vaccinated as if they were solely responsible for the spread of the virus and therefore merited various forms of punishment.

Kickl spoke more truthfully than he perhaps realised. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they believed they were confronted with a major health challenge. They viewed the Eastern territories as filthy and contaminated areas where the inferior races, Slavs and Jews, festered with microbes unknown to the healthy Germanic race. Wehrmacht soldiers and officers were warned that all sorts of objects of daily life represented a health risk including “door handles”[2] and “the pumps of wells”, things one might touch as a matter of course. A manual issued to the German armed forces, Kampf den Seuchen ! Deutsche Ärzteeinsatz im Osten – Die Aufbauarbeit im Gesundheitswesen des Generalgouvernements (Cracow 1941) explained how the Jewish population was heavily infected with dangerous illnesses and how quarantines had to be imposed on them: “To protect public health it has been necessary to restrict the freedom of circulation of the Jewish population, to subject their use of trains to a special administrative medical authorization, to direct them towards the use of certain parks (because, for example, the transmission of infectious bugs is encouraged by the common use of park benches), to prevent them from using buses and to restrict them to certain compartments in trams.” In France today, these very same measures are in force because the use of certain trains and aircraft is restricted to those able to show their ‘sanitary pass’, i.e. a ‘special administrative medical authorisation’ precisely in the sense proposed by the Nazis.

This is of course the ‘scapegoat strategy’ to which Kickl refers. To be sure, today’s states are not dividing society along racial lines. But the accusation of dangerous infectiousness is the same and, worse, there is the same blending between sanitary discourse and the language of war. Just as the Nazis proclaimed a ‘struggle against epidemics’ (Kampf den Seuchen) so Emmanuel Macron, when he announced the first lockdown in March 2020, gave a now notorious television address during which he kept repeating the phrase ‘Nous sommes en guerre’ (‘We are at war’). The various measures introduced during the following two years, in all sorts of European countries, have not been seen since the Occupation, especially the requirement during lockdowns that special papers be carried (‘attestation’) and of course curfews. Moreover, when Macron announced the introduction of the sanitary pass in August 2020, he adopted an astonishingly martial attitude (‘Vaccinez-vous!’) and delivered his address on the Champ de Mars, the Field of Mars (i.e. the field of the god of war) which is the park between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire (Military School). The same military metaphors were used by the president of Portugal (‘this is a real war’, 18 March 2020); the Spanish Prime Minister (who on 21 March 2020 referred to the virus as ‘an enemy’ and who proposed ‘resistance’, ‘battle’ and ‘fight’ to deal with it); the secretary-general of the United Nations (‘we are at war with a virus – and not winning it’, 26 March 2020); and others.[3]

In the case of the Nazis, of course, the medical discourse blended with their programme of racial genocide. The euphemism for gassing was Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) while expressions like Ausrottung (eradication) were used indiscriminately in the context of both epidemiology and genocide. In 1941, Hitler compared himself to the epidemiologist Robert Koch (1843-1910), the German Pasteur who discovered to causes of tuberculosis, saying that he, Hitler, had discovered that the Jews were like a bacillus. The Nazis even produced a propaganda film about Koch in 1939[4] while Himmler said, ‘Antisemitism is a matter of disinfection.’[5] But the blending was not just metaphorical: the methods used to commit genocide were themselves drawn from the fight against vermin, Zyklon B being the most terrifying example. The gas used in the death camps was itself originally produced as a pesticide and was produced by Degesch, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung (‘German company for the fight against vermin’). Cremation was similarly also initially proposed as a means of exterminating germs.

It is here, at its most extreme level, that we see the deepest similarity between the Nazi experience and our own. To be sure, there is no racial programme today but there is an obsession with science. While Kickl was right to identify the scapegoating as the most dangerous aspect of the Austrian government’s policy – scapegoating is as old as humanity itself [6] - he was also right to attack the totalitarian subjugation of political debate to ‘science’, as if science were the opposite of debate, as if doctors and scientists did not disagree amongst themselves just as much as any other profession, and as if discussion about science were not precisely the way to practise it. It is this scientist obsession, which of course the Nazis shared, which is perhaps the most disturbing: Angela Merkel’s husband, Joachim Sauer, abandoned 16 years of prudent silence last week to denounce – in a foreign newspaper [7] - German opponents of vaccination as similar to American creationists, by which he presumably meant that they refuse to contemplate the discoveries of science when instead this group is precisely interested in what it believes to be a cover-up of the scientific evidence. For good measure, he also called them ‘lazy’, rather as the well-spoken middle-class lady interviewed in the Kärtnerstrasse by Freddie Sayers described them as ‘idiots’.[8]

The scientist tradition is far older in politics than Nazism. It reaches back to the positivists of the early 19th century who wanted ‘science’ and ‘law’ to abolish choice, including popular choice, which they denounced as arbitrary. They dreamed instead of a world run by industrialists because production was more scientific than government. In due course, their theories morphed into Marxism, which also regarded itself as a science: Engels compared Marx to Darwin in his speech over the former’s tomb in 1883 because he had discovered the laws of economic development as Darwin had discovered the laws of evolution. The Nazis, too, thought of themselves as scientists: Rassenkunde and racial hygiene were their obsessions.

Unfortunately, in a much less dramatic and flamboyant way, our own societies have for long fallen into the same scientist trap, especially because they attribute wildly exaggerated importance to the utterances of economists, as if that discipline were an exact science like physics. As states have become increasingly goal-oriented, as if they were vast industrial companies, the sense of freedom has been concomitantly eroded. The EU project, for instance, is explicitly managerialist and protectionist: its goal is to protect Europe against war by subjecting political decisions to the say-so of a neutral administration. The supreme expression of this tendency is Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, originally a management conference whose goal is precisely to blur the difference between states and companies: in the Schwabian world, states are supposed to provide benefits to their citizens, as shareholders who receive dividends, while companies are supposed to practise ‘good governance’.

It is because of this endemic managerialism that Europeans increasingly expect their states to be a protector-Leviathan to which it is natural that all rights should be alienated. The contrasting Hayekian notion that the state is instead an intelligible order which gives meaning and identity to its citizens, and which provides them with a framework in which they can develop and freely pursue their lives, has been eclipsed by this lugubrious managerialism which is in hock, precisely, in the fatal conceit that all outcomes, including natural catastrophes, can somehow be ‘managed’ by state action. Authoritarianism, whether it is of the Hitlerian or Schwabian variety, is the inevitable result. Freedom, meanwhile, is quietly forgotten or, worse, actively despised as dangerous. That is the stage we have reached now.

[1] At 16 :35 in the press conference he held on 30 November 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502DegKwvXc&t=583s [2] In what follows I am greatly indebted to Johann CHAPOUTOT, Eradiquer le typhus: imaginaire medical et discours sanitaire nazi dans le gouvernement general de Pologne (1939-1944), Revue historique, Presses universitaires de France, 2041/1, no. 669, pp. 87-108. For this reference to door handles see Gerd ÜBERSCHAR & Wolfram WETTE, Unternehmen Barbarossa, Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941 (Padernorn: Schöningh, 1984), p. 316. In these extracts of the book available on line there are numerous references to the dangers of epidemics as the result of the German invasion of the USSR, as populations would be deliberately starved to death: https://kamen-jahr.livejournal.com/432170.html. On the same subject see also Paul WENDLING, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2000). [3] Eunice CASTRO SEIXAS, War Metaphors in Political Communication on Covi-19, Frontiers in Sociology 25 January 2021: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.583680 [4] Robert Koch, Bekämpfer des Todes, 1939 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ei7zDvn0ds [5] Speech in Kharkov, 24 April 1943, quoted in CHAPOUTOT, p. 99 [6] René GIRARD, Le bouc émissaire (Paris : Grasset, 1982) [7] Interview in La Repubblica, 22 November 2021. [8] Unherd documentary, 17 November 2021 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9io1MZz_7E, at 02:00