formation concerning the organization of the Grafeneck program. Every day,
the medical center received about 70 people (from the ages of 6 to 93 years
old) who had been chosen from the incurably mentally ill throughout German
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mental hospitals. Drs. Schumann and Baumhardt, who were responsible for the
Grafeneck center, gave the patients a summary examination and then decided
if they met the requirements specified by the program. In most cases, the pa-
tients were killed within 24 hours of their arrival at Grafeneck. First they were
given a 2-centimeter dose of Morphium-Scopolamine; then they were sent to a
gas chamber. In other institutions (for example in Hadamer), the patients were
killed with a strong dose of Luminal, Veronal, and Morphium. It is calculated
that 6o,ooo people were killed this way.
3.5. Some have referred to the eugenic principles that guided National So-
cialist biopolitics to explain the tenacity with which Hider promoted his eutha-
nasia program in such unfavorable circumstances. From a strictly eugenic point
of view, however, euthanasia was not all necessary; not only did the laws on the
prevention of hereditary diseases and on the protection of the hereditary health
of the German people already provide a sufficient defense against genetic mental
illnesses, but the incurably ill subjected to the program—mainly children and
the elderly—were, in any case, in no condition to reproduce themselves (from
a eugenic point of view, what is important is obviously not the elimination of
the phenotype but only the elimination of the genetic set). Moreover, there is
absolutely no reason to think that the program was linked to economic consid-
erations. On the contrary, the program constituted a significant organizational
burden at a time when the state apparatus was completely occupied with the war
effort. Why then did Hitler want the program to be put into effect at all costs,
when he was fully conscious of its unpopularity?
The only explanation left is that the program, in the guise of a solution to
a humanitarian problem, was an exercise of the sovereign power to decide on
bare life in the horizon of the new biopolitical vocation of the National Socialist
state. The concept of “life unworthy of being lived” is clearly not an ethical one,
which would involve the expectations and legitimate desires of the individual. It
is, rather, a political concept in which what is at issue is the extreme metamor-
phosis of sacred life—which may be killed but not sacrificed—on which sover-
eign power is founded. If euthanasia lends itself to this exchange, it is because in
euthanasia one man finds himself in the position of having to separate zoē and
bios in another man, and to isolate in him something like a bare life that may be killed. From the perspective of modern biopolitics, however, euthanasia is situated at the intersection of the sovereign decision on life that may be killed and
the assumption of the care of the nation’s biological body. Euthanasia signals the
point at which biopolitics necessarily turns into thanatopolitics.
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Here it becomes clear how Binding’s attempt to transform euthanasia into a
juridico-political concept (“life unworthy of being lived”) touched on a crucial
matter. If it is the sovereign who, insofar as he decides on the state of exception,
has the power to decide which life may be killed without the commission of ho-
micide, in the age of biopolitics this power becomes emancipated from the state
of exception and transformed into the power to decide the point at which life
ceases to be politically relevant. When life becomes the supreme political value,
not only is the problem of life’s nonvalue thereby posed, as Schmitt suggests but
further, it is as if the ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in this
decision. In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the
nonvalue of life as such. Life—which, with the declarations of rights, had as such
been invested with the principle of sovereignty—now itself becomes the place
of a sovereign decision. The Führer represents precisely life itself insofar as it is
he who decides on life’s very biopolitical consistency. This is why the Führer’s
word, according to a theory dear to Nazi jurists to which we will return, is im-
mediately law. This is why the problem of euthanasia is an absolutely modern
problem, which Nazism, as the first radically biopolitical state, could not fail to
pose. And this is also why certain apparent confusions and contradictions of the
euthanasia program can be explained only in the biopolitical context in which
they were situated.
The physicians Karl Brand and Viktor Brack, who were sen tenced to death
at Nuremberg for being responsible for the program, declared after their con-
demnation that they did not feel guilty, since the problem of euthanasia would
appear again. The accuracy of their prediction was undeniable. What is more in-
teresting, however, is how it was possible that there were no protests on the part
of medical organizations when the bishops brought the program to the attention
of the public. Not only did the euthanasia program contradict the passage in the
Hippocratic oath that states, “I will not give any man a fatal poison, even if he
asks me for it,” but further, since there was no legal measure assuring the impu-
nity of euthanasia, the physicians who participated in the program could have
found themselves in a delicate legal situation (this last circumstance did give
rise to protests on the part of jurists and lawyers). The fact is that the National
Socialist Reich marks the point at which the integration of medicine and poli-
tics, which is one of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics, began to
assume its final form. This implies that the sovereign decision on bare life comes
to be displaced from strictly political motivations and areas to a more ambiguous
terrain in which the physician and the sovereign seem to exchange roles.
4
‘Politics, or Giving Form
to the Life of a People’
4.1. In 1942, the lnstitut allemand in Paris decided to circulate a publi-
cation designed to inform French friends and allies of the character
and merits of National Socialist politics in matters of health and eugenics. The
book, which is a collection of statements by the most authoritative German spe-
cialists in these areas (such as Eugen Fischer and Ottmar von Verschuer), as well
as other figures responsible for the medical politics of the Reich (such as Libero
Conti and Hans Reiter), bears the significant title State and Health ( État et santé) .
Of all the official or semiofficial publications of the National Socialist regime,
this work perhaps most explicitly thematizes the politicization (or political value)
of biological life and the consequent transformation of the entire political hori-
zon. “In the centuries that came before us,” Reiter writes,
large conflicts between peoples were more or less caused by the necessity of
guaranteeing the possessions of the State (by “possessions,” we mean not only
the country’
s territory but also its material contents). The threat that neighboring
States might expand territorially has thus often been the cause of conflicts in
which individuals, considered so to speak as means to achieve the desired goals,
were ignored.
Only in Germany at the beginning of our century, starting with distinctly
liberal theories, was the value of men finally taken into account and defined, if
in a manner that was of course grounded on the liberal forms and principles that
dominated the economy. . . . While Helferich estimated German national assets
at about three hundred and ten million marks, Zahn thus observed that in ad-
dition to this material wealth, there is also a “living wealth” worth one thousand
and sixty-one million marks. (in Verschuer, État et santé, p. 31)
According to Reiter, the great novelty of National Socialism lies in the fact
that this living wealth now enters the foreground of the Reich’s interests and
calculations, founding a new politics. This politics begins first of all with the
establishment of a “budget to take account of the living value of people” (ibid.,
p. 34), and it proposes to assume the care of the “biological body of the nation”
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HOMO SACER I
(ibid., p. 51): “We ate approaching a logical synthesis of biology and economy.
. . . Politics will more and more have to be capable of achieving this synthesis,
which may only be in its first stages today, but which still allows one to recognize
the interdependence of the forces of biology and economy as an inevitable fact”
(ibid., p. 48).
Hence the radical transformation of the meaning and duties of medicine,
which is increasingly integrated into the functions and the organs of the state:
“Just as the economist and the merchant ate responsible for the economy of ma-
terial values, so the physician is responsible for the economy of human values. . . .
It is absolutely necessary that the physician contribute to a rationalized human
economy, that he recognize that the level of the people’s health is the condition
for economic gain. . . . Fluctuations in the biological substance and in the mate-
rial budget are usually parallel” (ibid., p. 40).
The principles of this new biopolitics ate dictated by eugenics, which is un-
derstood as the science of a people’s genetic heredity. Foucault has documented
the increasing importance that the science of police assumes starting in the eigh-
teenth century, when, with Nicolas De Lemare, Johan Peter Franc, and J. H. G.
von Justi, it takes as its explicit objective the total care of the population ( Dits et écrits, 4: 150–61). From the end of the nineteenth century, Francis Galton’s work functions as the theoretical background for the work of the science of police,
which has by now become biopolitics. It is important to observe that Nazism,
contrary to a common prejudice, did not limit itself to using and twisting scien-
tific concepts for its own ends. The relationship between National Socialist ideol-
ogy and the social and biological sciences of the time—in particular, genetics—is
more intimate and complex and, at the same time, more disturbing. A glance at
the contributions of Verschuer (who, surprising as this may seem, continued to
teach genetics and anthropology at the University of Frankfurt even after the fall
of the Third Reich) and Fischer (the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology in Berlin) shows beyond a doubt that the genetic research of the
time, which had recently discovered the localization of genes in chromosomes
(those genes that “are ordered,” as Fischer writes, “like pearls in a necklace”),
gave National Socialist biopolitics its fundamental conceptual structure. “Race,”
Fischer writes, “is not determined by the assembly of this or that measurable
characteristic, as in the case, for example, of a scale of colors. . . . Race is genetic
heredity and nothing but heredity” (in Verschuer, État et santé, p. 84). It is not surprising, therefore, that the exemplary reference studies for both Verschuer and
Fischer are T. H. Morgan and J. B. S. Haldane’s experiments on drosophila and,
more generally, the very same works of Anglo-Saxon genetics that led, during the
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same years, to the formation of the first map of the X chromosome in man and
the first certain identification of hereditary pathological predispositions.
The new fact, however, is that these concepts are not treated as external (if
binding) criteria of a sovereign decision: they are, rather, as such immediately
political. Thus the concept of race is defined, in accordance with the genetic
theories of the age, as “a group of human beings who manifest a certain combi-
nation of homozygotic genes that are lacking in other groups” (Verschuer, État et
santé, p. 88). Yet both Fischer and Verschuer know that a pure race is, according to this definition, almost impossible to identify (in particular, neither the Jews
nor the Germans constitute a race in the strict sense—and Hitler is just as aware
of this when he writes Mein Kampf as when he decides on the Final Solution).
“Racism” (if one understands race to be a strictly biological concept) is, therefore,
not the most correct term for the biopolitics of the Third Reich. National Social-
ist biopolitics moves, instead, in a horizon in which the “care of life” inherited
from eighteenth-century police science is, in now being founded on properly eu-
genic concerns, absolutized. Distinguishing between politics ( Politik) and police ( Polizei), von Justi assigned the first a merely negative task, the fight against the external and internal enemies of the State, and the second a positive one, the care
and growth of the citizens’ life. National Socialist biopolitics—and along with it,
a good part of modern politics even outside the Third Reich—cannot be grasped
if it is not understood as necessarily implying the disappearance of the difference
between the two terms: the police now becomes politics, and the care of life coincides with the fight against the enemy. “The National Socialist revolution,” one
reads in the introduction to State and Health, “wishes to appeal to forces that want to exclude factors of biological degeneration and to maintain the people’s
hereditary health. It thus aims to fortify the health of the people as a whole and
to eliminate influences that harm the biological growth of the nation. The book
does not discuss problems that concern only one people; it brings out problems
of vital importance for all European civilization.” Only from this perspective is
it possible to grasp the full sense of the extermination of the Jews, in which the
police and politics, eugenic motives and ideological motives, the care of health
and the fight against the enemy become absolutely indistinguishable.
4.2. A few years earlier, Verschuer had published a booklet in which National
Socialist ideology finds what may well be its most rigorous biopolitical formula-
tion: “‘The new State knows no other task than the fulfillment of the conditions
necessary for the preservation of the people.’ These words of the Führer mean
that every political act of the National Socialist state serves the life of the people.
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OMO SACER I
. . . We know today that the life of the people is only secured if the racial traits
and hereditary health of the body of the people [ Volkskörper] are preserved”
( Rassenhygiene, p. 5).
The link between politics and life instituted by these words is not (as is
maintained by a common and completely inadequate inter pretation of racism)
a merely instrumental relationship, as if race were a simple natural given that
had merely to be safeguarded. The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact
that the biological given is as such immediately political, and the political is as such immediately the biological given. “Politics,” Verschuer writes, “that is, giving form to the life of the people [ Politik, das heißt die Gestaltung des Lebens des Volkes]”
( Rassenhygiene, p. 8). The life that, with the declarations of rights, became the ground of sovereignty now becomes the subject-object of state politics (which
therefore appears more and more in the form of “police”). But only a state es-
sentially founded on the very life of the nation could identify its own principal
vocation as the formation and care of the “body of the people.”
Hence the seeming contradiction according to which a natural given tends
to present itself as a political task. “Biological heredity,” Verschuer continues, “is certainly a destiny, and accordingly, we prove ourselves masters of this destiny insofar as we take biological heredity to be the task that has been assigned to us and
which we must fulfill.” The paradox of Nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which
it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not
be expressed better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political
task. The totalitarianism of our century has its ground in this dynamic identity of life and politics, without which it remains incomprehensible. If Nazism still appears to us as an enigma, and if its affinity with Stalinism (on which Hannah Arendt so
much insisted) is still unexplained, this is because we have failed to situate the to-
talitarian phenomenon in its entirety in the horizon of biopolitics. When life and
politics—originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-mans-land
of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—begin to become one, all
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