Debate papers Hitler on race and health in Mein Kampf: a stimulus to anti-racism in the health professions

As a British South Asian, I have spent much of my personal and professional life dealing with issues of racism. I have become convinced that it is necessary to understand one’s enemy in order to combat him and was thus driven to read Hitler’s original writings. However, this paper was difficult to write: the content of Mein Kampf is disturbing, particularly to a person who I feel Hitler would have seen as inferior. The presence of the book in my home, and the process of drafting the article actually made me feel unclean. That said, my purpose here is to strengthen the anti-racism voice in medicine and science, and to help counter the rise of overt and covert racism, particularly in Europe, by bringing the writings of Hitler to a wider audience of health professionals. There is a danger that a few readers may be inspired by Hitler’s ideas, rather than shocked into anti-racism mode, but there seems to be no obvious way to counteract this problem except to acknowledge it. No name is more closely associated with racism than that of Adolf Hitler yet, except in a cursory way, his writings are rarely referenced in the health disciplines such as medicine, epidemiology and public health, where the concepts of racism, race and ethnicity are of central importance (Bhopal, 1997, 1998). Arguably, Hitler has had the greatest impact on the concepts of race and ethnicity in history. His ideas, especially the ranking of ‘races’ and of ‘uber’ and ‘unter’ mensch (superior and inferior peoples), may have been derived but were given added strength and force by his writings. These concepts endure and have a life of their own, often being alluded to in discussions about treatment for infertility, and cloning. Many health professionals can draw upon their own experiences of colleagues who have adverse attitudes to those they regard as ‘defective’ or undeserving. Health professionals and researchers may warn of the dangers of racism in medicine by alluding to Hitler (as I have done), but few have read Hitler in his own words. ABSTRACT