Saturday, August 26, 2006

From Pasteur to Hitler

Orac has a brilliant analogy to counter creationist innuendo - why not also blame Pasteur? He also brings up Koch. And well, whaddaya know (to quote from Prof. Richard Evans' expert report):
On the evening of 10 July 1941, Hitler declared at his table: ‘I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the fermenting agent of all social decomposition.’
At Hitler’s table talk on 22 February 1942, the following statement was recorded:

It is one of the greatest revolutions there has ever been in the world. The Jew will be identified! The same fight that Pasteur and Koch had to fight must be led by us today. Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one bacillus: the Jew! Japan would also have got them if it had remained open any longer to the Jew. We will get well when we eliminate the Jew.
There's a whole paper online, entitled Genocide as Immunology:
A chapter of Edleff Schwab book Hitler’s Mind (1992) focusing on Hitler’s attraction to immunology is entitled "The Pasteur-Koch complex." Schwab poses the question of what possible connection Hitler could have discovered between the work of two scientists who had devoted their lives to the betterment of the human race and his own obsession with destroying Jewish people? He suggests that something must have "struck a chord when early in his life he heard and Pasteur & Koch;" their major scientific breakthroughs must have "fascinated him as he pondered the meaning of the world." Hitler, Schwab suggests, found in Pasteur's and Koch's contributions a model that became the "nuclear element in his paranoid system and assumed a major role in his entire emotional life."

The renowned chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) had reasoned that sickness in animals and people can be caused by bacteria. Support for this notion was provided soon after by the German researcher Robert Koch (1843-1910). The concept of social disease, Schwab theorizes, fused in Hitler's mind with the teachings of these two bacteriologists, Pasteur and Koch. Hitler took it upon himself to become a self-appointed crusader to salvage the health of the nation.
Like Pasteur and Koch, Hitler saw himself as a benefactor of humankind. Just as a physician kills bacteria and viruses by applying medication to restore health, Hitler felt that by killing people he could save human civilization. In planning the Final Solution, Schwab suggests, Hitler thought he was applying the procedures of modern medical technology on a massive scale as a health-restoring program to assure human existence in the future. Thus did ideas about the body, disease and the immune system become the basis of Hitler’s paranoid belief system.
Oh my! Darwin quietly rests in a shadow.

I guess, we should burn all the immunology textbooks.

PS: I know, I know, Prof. Evans endorsed Weikart's book. I've been told he will weigh in on the issue in the coming weeks. And don't expect his response to be sympathetic to creationists.

8 comments:

  1. My copy of Picker's Tischgespraeche says it is an 'ungekuerzte Ausgabe', and is the 3. Auflage September 1999.

    It starts at 21.07.1941

    Is there another edition with stuff from 10.7.1941?

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  2. Steven, here's Evans' footnote:

    621’Ich fühle mich wie Robert Koch in der Politik. Der fand den Bazillus und wies
    damit der ärztlichen Wissenschaft neue Wege. Ich entdeckte den Juden als den Bazillus
    und das Ferment aller gesellschaftl. Dekomposition’; Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Archive
    Irving; reprinted in P. Longerich (ed.), Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden
    (Munich, Zurich, 1989), p. 76. Robert Koch discovered vibrio cholerae, the bacillus
    that caused cholera, in 1884.

    (Methinks this might refer to these original papers mentioned by Irving.)

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  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  4. Irving praises Genoud in the page linked to.

    Didn't Genoud try to hoax Irving with a forgery of Hitler's Last Testament?

    See Fake


    Picker's book has more claim to authenticity than work edited by Bormann and then Genoud, and then translated from the French by Stevens and Cameron.

    Irving claims 'They were expertly, and literately, translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens....'

    They were translated from the French, not the German.

    And not always accurately translated either.

    Take Steven's and Cameron's translation, which has Hitler saying 'I admit that one cannot impose one's will by force...'

    This is literal nonsense.

    The French of Genoud reads 'J'admets qu' on ne puisse s'imposer que par la force...'

    The 'ne.. que' does not meant 'not', but 'only'. It is a French idiom.

    And the only real explanation of the translation is that Stevens and Cameron thought the 'ne' of the French meant 'not'.

    There are other signs that the version of Table Talk that Irving thought most authentic was a translation of the French of an admitted hoazer.

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  5. Steven, please see http://ffrf.org/fttoday/2002/nov02/carrier.php for the argument that the papers are genuine.

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  6. Yes, Carrier says 'Picker's edition carries the strongest claim to authenticity.', which is what I said.

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  7. We're talking about Heim-Genoud papers:

    "Clever minds might consider the possibility that the Bormann Vermerke was actually fabricated by Genoud, by simply copying and expanding on Picker's German. But we can actually rule that out from an examination of Picker's first and second editions. Genoud correctly translates several words and sentences in 1952 that were accidentally omitted from Picker's 1951 release, but restored by Mediger in 1963. Thus, Genoud must have had access to a genuine manuscript, and that must be the one Jochmann finally released in 1980. This, in fact, corroborates the authenticity of both German originals, at least where they agree."

    I.e. there is no reason not to trust the original Heim papers, and Evans' quote probably comes from them.

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  8. 109 times throughout history the Jew has had to be kicked out of territory after territory, yet it is never the Jews fault according to the Jew.

    The truth is, that no matter the time in history, location on Earth or people involved the Jew has been a sickness to all.

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