Document ZB8KRqvOv27RYbeLp4b8wDQV8

46 CHAPTER 2 and so forth, ad nauseam.34 The Nazis ended up with as many words for murder as Eskimos (purportedly) have for snow. Nazification was also accompanied, though, by sometimessubtle changes in the language of cancer research. With cancer on the rise, it is perhaps not surprising that malignancy came to serve as a powerful metaphor, stigmatizing all that was undesirable in the Nazi scheme of things. Joseph Goebbels routinely castigated the objects of his contempt as "cancers" or "malignancies"--this included not just the Jews and homosexuals but the Foreign Office (Auswartiges Amt) and Stalin's communist empire.35 Germans were not alone, of course, in using this kind of rhetoric: an American eugenics catechism of 1935, for example, compared genetic defec tives to "cancers in the body politic" and the eugenics society itself to a "Society for the Control of Social Cancer.''36 Medical imagery was commonly used to dehumanize raciopolitical undesirables. In a 1936 lecture on radiotherapy in Frank furt, the SS radiologist Prof. Dr. Hans Holfelder showed students in attendance--including the young Richard Doll from England-- a slide in which cancer cells were portrayed as Jews (the same slide depicted the X-rays launched against these tumor-Jews as Nazi storm troopers).37 Jews were often characterized as tumors within the German body, though bacteriologic and pathogenic images (Jew as bacillus, virus), or even older metaphors of plagues, ver min, parasites, "fungoid growths," and so forth, were actually somewhat more common38--possibly because cancer was not yet something over which health authorities were able to exercize a great deal of control. Infectious diseases had largely succumbed to public health reforms and the science-based therapies devised by Koch, Pasteur, and Ehrlich, but cancer was still on the rise--and this may be why pundits looked to an older era of medical horror for their invidious imagery. Doctors were often the ones portraying Jews as cancers or tu mors as Jews. What is also interesting, though, is that Nazi ideals penetrated the technical rhetoric of cancer research. Medical speech was supposed to be Germanized, clarified, and simplified. Foreign terms were to be abandoned in favor of homespun expres sions (not Allele but rather Anlagen-Partner, not Chromosom but GLEICHSCHALTUNG 47 Kemfaden, not Bastard but Mischling, etc.), and unclear bureaucratic language comes under attack (e.g., the legalese of the insurance industry).39 Medical speech also sees an increased use of meta phors of racial struggle, the threat of political chaos, and the need for political unity. Bernhard Fischer-Wasels, the world-renowned father of experimental petrochemical carcinogenesis,40 character ized the nascent tumor as "a new race of cells, distinct from the other cell races of the body"; the task of the cancer therapist was to destroy this pathological race (vollstdndige Zerstorung der pathologischen Zellrasse).41 Cancer cells are elsewhere described as anar chists, spongers (Schmarotzer),42 Bolshevists, breeders of chaos and rebellion, and the like. Hans Auler, a beneficiary of the Gleichschaltung of German cancer research, in 1937 characterized cancer cells as "revolutionary cells," perhaps deliberately poking fun at com munist rhetoric, while Curt Thomalla of the Propaganda Ministry spoke of cancer cells' creating "a state within a state"43--a charge also leveled at Jews and homosexuals. The language of medicine was thus saturated with political ideology--sometimes con sciously and deliberately, sometimes not.44 Linguistic cleansing and reversible images of racial inferiors as cancers (and vice versa) are not the only notable aspects of Nazi cancer language. Another is the widespread talk of "problem solving." Nazi medico-political leaders often spoke about finding "radical," "final," or "permanent" solutions to Germany's prob lems--especially in the early war years, when plans for the radical transformation of German society reached a fever pitch. The Final Solution (Endlosung) to the Jewish Question is the best known and most ghastly, but similar expressions were used for countless other problems. Nazi population policy was directed toward what Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick called "the solution to the woman question" (Losung der Frauenfrage),AS while the campaign to re popularize whole-grain bread was dubbed "the final solution to the bread question" (Endlosung der Brotfrage).46 A medical thesis of 1940 called for a "solution to this difficult problem of smokers" (Losung dieses schweren Raucherproblems),47 and there was talk about finding a solution to the cancer question (Losung der Krebsbekampfungsfrage).46 A spirit of millenarian social engineering infuses the