The New ‘Good German’ and Totalitarian Technocracy

The 20th century watched in horror as the rising of dictatorial regimes quickly took the form of totalitarian technocracies. Technocracy is the science of social engineering, a regime of broad control over the population that grows in the shadow of power and under the guise of scientific knowledge and ‘consent’. The democratic process becomes increasingly irrelevant as decision-making ends up in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and favoured advisers, with public debate stifled by a homogeneous discourse, avidly propagated by the media, that favours the ruling elite’s diktats being imposed by so-called “experts” who claim the salvitic status of ultimate defenders of human life and guardians of a “science”.[1]

Since the spread of the Wuhan virus at the dawn of 2020, it is possible to observe some visible signs that something remarkably strange is happening across the world in general, and the West in particular. Today, those who manage to resist the sweeping mesmerism of the media are able to observe disturbing signs that point to the rapid consolidation of a technocratic agenda on a global scale, one whose strength seems to far surpass the political, legal, and theological structures that had so far sustained the edifice of Western civilisation and cost centuries of conflicts to be consolidated.

Nazism and communism, each with its own totalitarian peculiarities, are classic examples of atrocities perpetrated in the 20th century by technocratic power taken to its utmost consequences. It is instructive to highlight here the example of Nazism as its ignoble history is particularly pedagogical when it comes to how technocratic power can be advanced and consolidated. Phillip Collins, in his instructive Darwinism and the Rise of Gnosticism, classifies Nazi Germany as a “prime example of a Gnostic scientific dictatorship edified by Darwinism.”[2] Inspired by evolutionary biology, the ‘science of Darwinism’ to which Collins refers, and which had been strictly adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s, became a socio-political phenomenon which underpinned the genocidal measures that would later horrify the world.

In fact, the race-based totalitarianism manifested in National Socialism was experienced through unspeakable health policies based on some peculiar forms of pseudo-scientific and technocratic bias. On behalf of Darwinian science, the idea that miscegenation could produce various forms of human degeneration was taken as an absolute scientific truth. Hence, eugenic policies were faithfully enforced by SS (Schutzstaffel) agents both in Germany and also in the occupied territories, encouraging, for example, those who were designated “healthy” and “racially pure” individuals to breed even outside the bonds of marriage.

In 1920, Karl Binding, a leading law professor, published together with one of Germany’s leading psychiatrists, Alfred Hoche, a popular book, Allowing the Destruction of Worthless Life (Die freigabe vernichtung lebensunwerten lebens). In this book the authors manifest a concern about a large number of “useless people” who had become a “burden” to the State. The elimination of the severely mentally ill, so they argued, “is not a crime, nor an immoral act, nor emotionally cruelty, but a permissible and beneficial act”.[3] To this end, a documentary film displaying images of chronically disabled children was released in all cinemas across Germany, in 1937,[4] stating: “By humanely terminating their wretched and helpless lives, we shall be observing our Creator’s law of natural selection and order”.[5]

In more recent years, historians have claimed that the Nazi regime pioneered experimental medical research, and that some areas of medicine actually ‘flourished’ under Nazism – for example, “the regime war’s against cancer which saw pioneering epidemiological research of the highest quality”.[6] Thus Nazi Germany led the world in the area of epidemiology and Nazi ideologues contrasted their notion of health as a communal duty with the conviction that individuals could not do as they wished with their own bodies. Overall, the Nazi war on infectious diseases revealed that allegedly “good” science could easily be “pursued in the name of anti-democratic ideals. Public health initiatives were pursued not just in spite of fascism, but also in consequence of fascism”.[7]

According to John Cornwell, author of  Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact, the Nazi political programme was seen in terms of cures and antidotes. In this context, Jews were considered to be undermining the health of the German population. Thus Hitler lamented, in 1925, that the State still did not have the means to “master the disease” which was penetrating the “bloodstream of our people unhindered”. Such ideas saw the entire German population as a patient of the State, Jews as a sickness, and the political leader as the beneficent physician.[8] The images of Jews as the carriers of a potentially deadly disease was the bio-political content merged with Nazi medical science. Hence the race laws of 1935 were entirely underpinned by images of immunity against a deadly virus and the need for general immunisation of the entire population.

From the outset the Nazi leadership had decided on prevention against infectious diseases as a key public policy, indicating a conviction that the causes of epidemics were preventable if they included health immunisation campaigns and safety measures in the workplace. “Under the Nazis these initiatives were taken to remarkable new lengths”.[9] By 1940, for example, Hitler was already seen as the great ‘healer’. Jews were not only a threat to the health of the community, “they were responsible, it was claimed, for actual current epidemics … requiring immediate isolation and quarantine – degenerate euphemism for the ghettos and the camps. In the pathological paradox that frequently attends science as salvation, the purveyors of death thus become those who respect and preserve human life.”[10]  As Cornwell points out,

After Hitler came to power campaigns were launched in the press on radio advocating for regular examinations. Poster campaigns advised men to have their colons checked for cancer as frequently as they serviced their motor cars, and for smokers to desist. Mass X-rays were carried out in schools, the army, in factories, and offices. Since the Nazi war on cancer was conducted on the level of prevention rather than cure, the determination to succeed switched from biomedical research to public health campaigns, the gathering and analysis of statistics, or epidemiology, and surveillance for early detection.[11]

Curiously enough, only a relative handful of German medical practitioners dared oppose these “epidemiological” measures. On the basis of questionnaires, in 1933 the government aimed to bar all doctors who did not agree with its government policies. They were obliged to apply for exemption and, by early 1939, “some 2,600 medical doctors had been dismissed, their places taken by Aryans”.[12] Members of the medical profession, as a group, outnumbered all other professionals in Nazi Party membership. Lawyers formed the next-largest support group of the Nazi membership. Such membership of the Nazi Party within the Reich Physicians’ Chamber peaked at 44.8 per cent. Physicians licensed between 1925 and 1932 showed the largest proportion of party membership, at 53.1 per cent of the profession.[13]

Under the influence of National Socialist thinking within the profession, “medical doctors began to expound the importance of the health of the entire nation as opposed to the health of the individual”.[14] Medical-research scientists did not repudiate the use of human beings for medical experiments. On the contrary, with both criminal law and civil liability laws conveniently suspended, these medical researchers (who had a mind to venture into some unethical and dangerous scientific experiments) knew they could do so with absolute impunity. Some of these medical scientists would subject concentration camp inmates to horrendous forms of ‘medical’ research, without consent and with no regard for suffering and risk of life. The groups of medical perpetrators included some 350 qualified doctors (including university professors and lecturers) who were involved in all forms of concentration camp experiments. The point is that evil can be sometimes perpetrated under the guise of ‘doing good’. Most of these medical doctors apparently thought their actions were morally justified, since they were contributing to the “health” of the German people. According to Weikart, “The acceptance by scientists and physicians of many elements making up Hitler’s worldview helps explain the ready acquiescence and even eager participation of many highly educated Germans in Nazi atrocities”.[15]

In October 1938, Hitler signed a notorious law ordering all midwives to report on any child born with suspect congenital defects to the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. Three different doctors were then called to examine the child and decide if he or she should live or die. Those selected to die were removed from their parents and murdered at one of the thirty medical facilities spread accross the nation. Although individual doctors could refuse to participate in the killing of disabled children, “there was never a shortage of medical professionals willing to take part in the murders”.^[16] Astonishingly, the vast majority of German medical professionals actively supported Hitler’s desire to sterilise those who were deemed ‘undesirable’ by merely rationalising that this should be done for “the betterment of the German race”.[17]

In 1942, the German leader revealed a desire to “make every German realize that it is a disgrace to be a lawyer”.^[18] Hitler believed that the only legitimate course of action for the State is that which advanced “the health” of the German population. Hitler hated lawyers and once stated, in his own words, that “the health of the German nation is more important than the letter of the law”.^[19] He believed lawyers were “deficient by nature or deformed by experience”.^[20] And as Hitler also stated: “Politics today is completely blind without a biological foundation and biological objectives”.^[21] Thus legislation was enacted which targeted the mentally disabled to be collected and transported to sterilisation centres where the so called ‘social parasites’ would be sterilised by such methods as injection of poison and electric shocks to the genitals.^[22] Also, another law was enacted to create “health tribunals” comprised of one trained layer and two health advisers, who then were in charge of deciding if a person should be subjected to some form of “medical” treatment which included sterilisation and, after 1935, castration.

Under the tutelage of public health officers and organisations, and with the objective of saving the Nordic race (supposedly threatened by the growing number of miscegenated individuals), the Lebensborn Program was created to generate ‘pure Aryans’ matrices for the generation of ‘sanitized’ offsprings. About 8,000 babies in Germany and 12,000 in Norway would be born as a result of the Lebensborn eugenics policy, in addition to the nearly 200,000 Polish children who were kidnapped by the program in that Slavic country. Hitler’s ultimate goal was to ‘immunise’ the entire German population by generating a million ‘pure children.’ While state-controlled obstetric centers would take care of the “racial purity” of the infant, the sinister agenda of the Nazi technocracy progressed relentlessly in the name of protecting the “health” of the German people, and with the complicity of much of the academia and medical profession.

In 1933, legislation against the genetically sick or handicapped offspring was enacted. Thus, the compulsory sterilisation of about 400,000 Germans suffering from some type of physical or mental illness was legally endorsed. Six years later, the racial hygienics program began to promote a variety of euthanasia measures. The initial target were children perceived to suffer from any form of mental disability. In two years, the program was already reaching children up to 12 years old. At any time, the parents of mentally impaired children, or those with some form of perceived psychopathology, received the visit of “health officers” empowered by orders to take them to “treatment centers” from which those poor children would never return alive.

In those dark mental institutions, as of 1941, the Nazi technocrats installed the T4 eugenics program which ultimately became responsible for the extermination of at least 90,000 “patients”; 72,000 of them died in hospital gas chambers in a model that would be later repeated in the extermination camps. It is worth considering that in many such concentration camps, brutal and inhuman medical experiments were the final fate of thousands of people. It is estimated that at least 300 of these prisoners died in medical experiments aimed at investigating hypothermia, 200 in experiments involving low-pressure chambers, and another 500 inoculated with the malaria protozoan. This morbid scenario also enjoyed the support of the medical profession, leading Robert Kennedy Jr., in his preface to Dr Joseph Mercola’s recent book on COVID-19, to draw the harshest criticisms of the technocratic spirit of those days, which was sordidly endorsed and legitimised by those who had the moral obligation to protect human life as per their professional oath. As Kennedy points out,

The medical profession has not proven itself an energetic defender of democratic institutions or civil rights. Virtually every doctor in Germany took lead roles in the Third Reich’s Project to eliminate mental defectives, homosexuals, handicapped citizens, and Jews. So many hundreds of German physicians participated in Hitler’s worst atrocities – including managing mass murder and unspeakable experiments at the death camps – that the Allies had to stage separate ‘Medical Trials’ at Nuremberg. Not a single prominent doctor or medical association raised their voice in opposition to these projects. ^[23]

Kennedy’s point is supported by the historical data. In addition to actively engaging and legitimising the Third Reich’s health programs by means of coercive experiments of sterilisation and euthanasia, the complicity of medical doctors with the marginalisation (and subsequent extermination) of their own Jewish peers (which made up a significant percentage of professionals in the biological area) vividly testifies to the cruelty of prominent members of the German Medical Society.

After an extensive political and media campaign aimed at instilling, on a large scale and relentlessly, fear and anxiety amongst the population, a sophisticated media campaign with utilitarian and scientific overtones prepared the spirit of the average citizen to consent to the point of complicity with the atrocities that would be perpetrated on a massive scale on “undesirables”. Thus a kind of “new normal” can be gradually developed to potentially justify any atrocity that might be supposed on the basis of public safety and health of the people.

Accordingly, under the Nazi technocratic apparatus in full operation, every form of political dissent had to be meticulously silenced. Books or tracts opposed to the dominant narrative of the government were burned on huge pyres amid scenic parades, while the media (newspapers, magazines, cinema and radio) were committed to consolidating the prevailing governmental discourse, according to the censorship engendered by its notorious propaganda minister, Herr Doktor Joseph Goebbels.

As for the nation’s educational system, teachers of Jewish lineage were purged, with the remainder of the teaching profession almost entirely supporting the Nazi regime. Indeed, more than 97 per cent of all German teachers joined the National Socialist Teachers’ Union [24], which adopted mandatory textbooks that perverted the children’s minds with issues such as:

“If the construction of an asylum costs 6 million marks, how many houses of 15,000 marks can be built with that value?” [25],

and this

“The Jews are outsiders in Germany. In 1933, there were 66 million inhabitants in the country. Of this total, 499,862 are Jews. What is the percentage of outsiders in German society?”

Several other control measures became part of a broader social engineering program that promoted a state of increasing segregation of the Jewish population. In August 1938, a law requited that, by January of the following year, all identification of Jews whose first names did not show Jewish origin be altered to add the designation “Israel” for men, or “Sarah” for women. German Jews were forced to carry these infamous transit passports that limited their access to various types of services and establishments, both public and private. On October 5, 1938, a month before the violent Kristallnacht, the Reich Interior Minister declared these documents invalid until they were updated, so that they bore a bold and damning “J” printed on the cover of the document.

To further instill irrational fear amongst the population, a recurrent theme in Nazi propaganda was the idea that Jews –in addition to being an “impure race”– were unclean creatures who spread infection and contagion diseases, including the dreaded typhus. Health officers then produced posters with a quarantine notice at the entrance to the ghettos, warning the curious about the possible dangers of venturing into those spaces of segregation. Since the sanitary conditions imposed on those confined areas were entirely degrading, this naturally created a propitious environment for the rapid spread of previously announced diseases, thus turning the deceptive warning of Nazi authorities into self-fulfilling prophecy. The lie proved itself to be effective in keeping non-Jews away from the ghettos, preventing the curious from finding for themselves what the regime was doing to that oppressed minority.

Far from being limited to the ideological recruitment of medical doctors and other health agents, as well as the ideological indoctrination through the educational system and the control of information, the Nazi technocratic establishment could always rely on the fundamental support of engineers and technicians working for the big corporations. Due to their hegemony in the field of information management, in today’s language are often described as “Big Data” and “Big Tech”. In 1930s Germany, nobody could ever have predicted the development of powerful companies with large-scale information-collection and data-classification systems. It would have been  considered the stuff of science fiction to imagine that such technical resources would end up in the hands of a few oligarchs who aspire to acquire and exert absolute power and control over an entire society and its individuals.

The technocratic project of the Nazi regime contemplated the necessity to identify and annihilate almost 600,000 German Jews. However, it is important to consider that for Hitler and his supporters a “Jew” was not the mere practitioner of the Jewish faith. Whether secularized, sceptical, patriotic, war hero, or someone who had been fully assimilated into the German mainstream culture, the Jew had to be seen, above all, as the bearer of a toxic and threatening element: the Jewish blood. The Jew was, therefore, an infectious-contagious agent that, if left free to mingle with other citizens, would contaminate the German race. As such, the “danger” of Jewish “contagion” was not restricted to the synagogues and Jewish communities, but also “infected” individuals in German churches, clubs, courts of law, businesses, universities, hospitals, the armed forces, and state agencies. Tracking and identifying the spreaders of this “infectious disease” by probing the records of their ancestors was a Herculean task at a time when computers were only a distant dream. However, the Third Reich was able to efficiently identify, track and classify Jews of all social classes, whether from Germany or the occupied territories.

As the precursors of the digital universe we know today, the punch-card technology developed by IBM provided the Nazis with the means of data compilation required for the regime’s future steps in the process of identification, tracking, confiscation, incarceration, deportation and, finally, the extermination of the unwanted. IBM – like other active and influential companies to this day – has never denied accusations of active involvement with the Third Reich, as fully attested by Edwin Black in his 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust, the fruit of research supported by documents collected in several countries. According to Black, the German demographic census and identification of the Jewish population was carried out under the auspices of IBM in New York, being later taken over by subsidiaries in Germany, Poland, Holland, France, and Switzerland.

Even worse than this is the fact that, eleven years later, in 2012, Black gained access to correspondence that not only confirmed the involvement of Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s president, with Hitler’s project, but also revealed the close coordination between IBM management and the Nazi leadership. [26] When it came to data management in concentration camps, the company maintained groups of trained engineers and technicians in these locations to process Hollerith cards with identification codes and prisoner-tracking. Homosexuals, criminals, Gypsies, Jews, and other categories of convicts were classified according to specific code numbers. This data-management process served to record the prisoner’s cause of death, while other designated numbers identified whether the wretched had died of natural causes, execution and suicide or the “special treatment” of the  gas chambers.

In addition to control of information and complicity of the medical and scientific communities, as well as the technical support of the greatest Big Tech of the time, the Nazi regime was also supported by the most powerful Big Pharma company of the time, pharmaceutical conglomerate IG Farben. Formed in 1925 after the merger of several chemical and pharmaceutical enterprises, the IG Farben group boasted an installation in Monowitz, the forced labor camp within the Auschwitz complex. There, the pharmaceutical company used slave labor to produce its products, using IBM’s data tabulation system to identify, select and reallocate workers endowed with special skills. In addition to developing the lethal gas Zyklon-B which was used to eliminate millions of Jews in extermination camps, and other devastating gases for military use (which were never used in World War II for fear the Allies would respond in kind), the conglomerate’s chemists and pharmacologists tested a drug called Pervitin (a methamphetamine supplied in pellets and crystals, also known as D-IX) on prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The aim was to maximize the alertness of Wehrmacht soldiers, especially those fighting on the Russian front, where resistance to the rigors of extreme cold was the imperative. Reports from surviving soldiers claim that Pervitin allowed them to remain awake and in combat action for up to 50 hours! [27]It is estimated that around 200 million doses of Pervitin were produced between 1939 and 1945.

By the end of 1946, Nazism and many of its genocidal leaders were finally and formally condemned in a makeshift international court conducted in the only public building still standing in bomb-ravaged Nuremberg, the Bavarian city where the Nazis had performed semi-religious parades and ceremonies that included proclamations of the Reich’s racial segregation laws that ultimately legitimised the  aforementioned notorious scientific experiments. The enthusiastic participation of medical practitioners and scientists in the totalitarian experience of Nazism gave rise, in Nuremberg, to a special judgment concerning the abominations perpetrated by these “executioners in white coats”. On December 9, 1946, twenty doctors came before the court to be tried for their war crimes. Seven of them would go to the gallows while a further seven were condemned to long-term imprisonment.

The most relevant aspect of this episode is to consider that the doctors’ trials  gave rise to the Nuremberg Code, a document endorsing ten principles that were incorporated into the doctor-patient relationship after the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. The document deals with the essentiality of informed consent and the right of freedom of choice for any medical practice with human beings, thus condemning any form of coercion or restriction by force that may be exerted on the patient. Furthermore, that code emphasises the importance of clarifying all the risks involved, including the inconveniences or unwanted effects potentially involved in the course of the pharmaceutical or medical treatment. By stressing the health agent’s full personal responsibility for the ministered treatment, the document concludes by citing the need to interrupt any medication, at any stage, in the face of reasonable evidence of any possible immediate damage or long-term effects resulting from the medical or pharmaceutical experiment.

Unfortunately, as we are witnessing at the moment, Ronald Reagan’s  well-known statement that freedom is only ever a single generation from extinction seems to perfectly explain what is currently happening to the medical guidelines enshrined at Nuremberg. In fact, in these times of the coronavirus, which Patrick Wood, an authoritative writer on technocracy, describes as “the great panic of 2020”, the distant scientific totalitarianism of the past appears to be re-emerging from the mists that have tenuously hidden it in time. This terrible example of history invites us to an inescapable question: How much free and far are we from unleashing a new and devastating totalitarian technocracy, in the mould of the Scientism exalted by the unwary and unquestioning Germans of the 1920s and 1930s?

Naturally, in this new technocratic age some fear of repeating the racial element can be reasonably discarded. The question, however, alludes to the sanitary (or epidemiological) aspect of totalitarian social control. Ronnie Cummins, in his chapter entitled How the Pandemic Plans Unfolded (which opens the book by Dr. Joseph Mercola) is clear in stating that

beyond its effects on health and the health care industry, COVID-19 has empowered the global elite more than ever before to manufacture lies and half-truths. Uber-powerful Silicon Valley Big Tech corporations (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon), Big Pharma, the World Health Organization (WHO), and philanthropic giant Bill Gates have indentured politicians and scientists from across the politican spectrum.

Cummins sadly concludes that, “the result is fearmongering, political polarization, and social engineering –all wrapped in a disguise of protection.” Indeed, with the advent of the Wuhan virus –under suspicion of being the result of “gain of function” experiments – it is noted that Western societies as a whole are now seeing some type of action plan aimed at their obliteration, a goal entirely achievable via the combination of the following factors:

♦ the censoring of problematic individuals by social networks, the banning of Donald Trump by Twitter and Facebook being but the most conspicuous example

♦  the consequential erosion of our basic freedoms. Did you ever think in your wildest dreams you would need permission of the State to leave the country, the situation in today’s Australia?

♦ the homogeneous narrative disseminated by the mainstream media. Look here to the pillorying of Craig Kelly, Senator Malcolm Roberts and others who dispute the creed of the global warmists

♦ the imposition of endless lockdowns, implemented on the most dubious and yet undisclosed medical advice, that has culminated in the restriction of movement, association and business

♦ the public anathematisation of dissenting voices. Consider here the Australia doctors, professors and chemists who see merit in the use of ivermectin against the coronavirus but are never, will never, be given a public airing except as the focus of ridicule

♦ the open and relentless persecution of physicians not aligned with the narrative of the status quo. Shockingly, Australian doctors have been warned they must not discuss other COVID treaments with their patients; that only getting vaccinated will do.

♦ the mandatory use of face masks, even when their use in specific situations — on an empty beach or alone atop a tractor in a vast paddock — makes no sense whatsoever other than signifying the wearer’s acceptance of State edict.

♦ the massive and indiscriminate distribution of still-experimental vaccines that, in the name of medical emergency, have been given a rails run from Big Pharma labs to your arm.

♦ all of the above reinforced by a relentless media campaign of fear.

In regard to the last point, did any voice in the mainstream media object as Victoria Police bashed and gassed old ladies, smashed heads into pavement, arrested people in their homes for Facebook posts and pursued protesters down Elizabeth Street in a tank-like armoured car equipped with a roof turret for peppering ‘hooligan elements’, as the Soviets would have described them, with plastic bullets and stun grenades? No, not a peep of concern.

“Seriously, one more comment about human rights … it’s about human life “,[28] complained  Daniel Andrews, the Victorian Premier, about journalists who even dare to question the impact on human rights of lockdown measures. Likewise, Hitler’s vision of the health of the people made him equally contemptuous of anyone defending human rights. He frequently dismissed with disdain the entire concept of human rights, since he thought this could destroy the biological vitality of the German race. Thus, for Hitler and like-minded dictators, “health” not only trumps human rights but shows that the right thing is doing what might be advantageous in the sense of preserving the public health.[29]

Ultimately, the major objective seems to be a diabolical preparation of the ordinary citizen – the echoes of what happened with the Germans of the past can only be ignored by an effort of will – for a docile surrender of all their most fundamental rights and freedoms, always in the name of an overly protective and purportedly benevolent State. There is no denying that, in the once “free world” in which we lived people began to breathe an intoxicated atmosphere of social engineering that is akin to those once experienced by other unfortunate nations of the past. The not-so-distant past of National Socialism has left for posterity the now apparently forgotten warning that, in the name of science and the “health” of the people, technocrats can happily implement the most unthinkable and meticulous perversities.

Unfortunately, once again in history a significant portion of the medical profession and other scientists in the biological field do not stand as defenders of fundamental human rights. Noteworthy are some obvious exceptions,  as shown in the courage of some French doctors and nurses who, in their protest against the present sanitary tyranny, publicly burned their diplomas before the cameras, and in a small group of American health professionals who decided to simply abandon the profession for the same reason. With the exception of these and some other commendable cases of resistance –including courageous  Brazilian doctors and researchers – a substantial part of the profession has aligned itself with hegemonic political discourses that attempt to curtail and suppress the needed scientific debates prompted by the pandemic.

Under Hitler, the dissident scientist risked imprisonment and death. Today’s dissenters do not risk  death, but certainly the loss of the professional accreditation and, although we have not yet seen a case, even imprisonment. Will medical scientists, heavily dependent on government payments to pursue their vocations, behave like the fellow travellers of National Socialism – taking benefits from government while claiming that, as individuals, they are not in any way responsible for the dictated policies they nevertheless implement?

The good medical practitioner will reject the use of individuals as instruments, as a means to an end.[30] There is an urgent need today for medical scientists and pharmacologists not only skilled practitioners in their disciplines but who also possess a high sense of moral responsibility to question, probe, pose and criticise the trends of government-dominated science. The best defence against the prostitution and abuse of science is for scientists to unite in unofficial constituencies, both small and large, to create independent communities of individuals who are human beings first and scientists second. These constituencies will provide the pluralist checks and balances that alert the public to the irresponsible exploitation of medical science which poses threats not just to personal freedom and the rule of law but to the health of the average citizen. 

As you read this article, you may be surprised to see that so many similarities between then and now are unfolding before our eyes. Yes, Nazi Germany might indeed have some lessons to teach us. The grave danger is that the State and its apparatchiks have embraced the wrong ones.

Augusto Zimmermann LLB, LLM, PhD, CIArb, DipEd, is Professor and Head of Law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education in Perth, WA. From 2012 to 2017, he served as a Law Reform Commissioner in Western Australia. Professor Zimmermann is also President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association (WALTA) and a  former tenured legal academic and Research Dean at Murdoch University, School of Law, in Perth, WA.

Aramis C. DeBarros is a graphic artist and official translator with over 20 years of experience in the production of Christian literature for missionary purposes. He is also a Fellow at Burke Instituto Conservador, a conservative institute based in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil.

[1] Ryan McMaken, ‘America is a Technocracy, Not a Democracy’, Mises Institute, May 1, 2020, at https://mises.org/wire/america-technocracy-not-democracy

[2] Phillip Collins, ‘Darwinism & the Rise of Gnosticism’, NewsWithViews.com, June 2, 2005, at https://newswithviews.com/guest_opinion/guest59.htm

[3] Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Leipzig, 1920), 56f. Quoted in Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler: Leading Millions into the Abyss (Croydon/UK: Ebury Press, 2013), 180.

[4] Opfer der Vergangenheit (‘Victims of the Past’)

[5] Welsh, Propaganda, 123 Quoted in Rees, above n.3, 181.

[6] John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 11.

[7] Ibid., 173.

[8] Ibid., 24.

[9] Ibid., 168.

[10] Ibid., 25.

[11] Ibid., 168.

[12] Ibid., 155.

[13] Ibid., 152.

[14] Ibid., 154.

[15] Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethics: The Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (New York/NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 203.

[16] Rees, above n.1, 185.

[17] Ibid., 178.

[18] Kenneth C. H. Willig, ‘The Bar in the Third Reich’ (1976) 20 American Journal of Legal History 13, 14.

[19] Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (New York, Longman, 1981), 293.

[20] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York/NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 290.

[21] Quoted in Richard Overy, Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 244–45.

[22] Kenneth Ludmerer, a medical historian at Washington University, notes that the idea of eugenics is as old as Plato’s Republic. However, he adds, Darwinism was the main reason for the rise in interest in the idea in the 19th century: “Modern eugenics thought arose only in the nineteenth century. The emergence of interest in eugenics during that century had multiple roots. The most important was the theory of evolution, for Francis Galton’s ideas on eugenics — and it was he who created the term ‘eugenics’ — were a direct logical outgrowth of the scientific doctrine elaborated by his cousin, Charles Darwin” –  K Ludmerer, ‘Eugenics’ in M Lappe (ed), Encyclopedia of Bioethics (New York/NY: Free Press-MacMillan, 1978), 457.

[23] Robert F. Kennedy Jr, ‘Preface’, in Dr Joseph Mercola et al, The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021).

[24] Erwin W. Lutzer, When a Nation Forgets God – 7 Lessons We Must Learn From Nazi Germany (Chicago/IL: Moody Publishers, 2010), 101.

[25] Ibid., 104.

[26] Edwin Black, IBM’s Role in the Holocaust – What the New Documents Reveal (Huffpost, updated March 17, 2015)

[27] Kaushik Patowary, Pervitin: The Wonder Drug that Fueled Nazi Germany (amusingplanet.com, May 25, 2020)

[28] Janine Graham, ‘The Informer: ‘Seriously, One More Comment About Human Rights…’, Says Daniel Andrews’, The Canberra Times, 27 July 2020, at https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6851881/seriously-one-more-comment-about-human-rights/

[29] Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethics: The Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6.

[30] Cornwell, above n.6, 462.