Life unworthy of life

by James M. Glass

In this pathbreaking work of intellectual and cultural history, James M. Glass provides a provocative new answer to the questions that bedevil us to this day: How and why did so many ordinary Germans participate in the Final Solution? And how did they come to regard Jews as less than human and "deserving" of extermination? Glass, a leading scholar of political psychology and political theory, argues that the answers lie in the rise of a particular ethos of public health and sanitation that emerged from the German medical establishment and filtered down to the common people. Building his argument on a trove of documentary evidence, including the records of the German medical community and of other professional groups, he traces the development, in the years following World War I, of theories of "racial hygiene" that singled out the Jews as an infectious disease that had to be eradicated if the Aryan race were to survive - as "life unworthy of life," in the words of Nazi propagandists an