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“Hitler as a Political Physician”
by Richard A. Koenigsberg
“Every distress,” Hitler explained, has “some cause or another.” It was not enough for politicians to “doctor around on the circumference of the distress,” and try from time to time to “lance the cancerous ulcer.”

Rather, it was necessary to penetrate to the “seat of the inflammation—the cause.” It was unimportant whether the irritating cause was discovered “today or tomorrow.” The essential thing to understand was that unless the cause was addressed, “no cure is possible.”
Immediately after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, Hitler decided to go into politics. The nation was suffering. Hitler wished to work to restore the German Reich.

In one of the earliest speeches of which we have a record (delivered in Salzburg on August 7, 1920), Hitler asserted that the first demand he raised was that “our people be set free,” her chains be burst asunder, and that Germany rise again to be “captain of her soul and master of her destiny.”

What distinguished his program from those put forth by (the Austrians he was addressing) was “our attitude toward the Jewish problem.” For us, Hitler said, it was a question of whether Germany could recover its health.

“Don’t be misled,” Hitler explained, into thinking “you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus.” Don’t think you can fight the racial tuberculosis without taking care to “rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis.”

Jewish contamination—the poisoning of the nation—would not subside until “the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.”

At the very beginning, Hitler defined his mission: to relieve the suffering of Germany by eliminating or removing the cause of her disease, the Jew. At the core of Hitler’s identity as a politician was his sense of himself as a Doctor who would act to cure Germany’s disease.

In Mein Kampf (1923), Hitler criticized conventional politicians. Their activity was condemned to sterility because they saw at most the forms of Germany disease, but “blindly ignored the virus.” The only way to cure diseases was to “disclose their causes.”

Every distress, Hitler explained, has “some cause or another.” It was not enough, therefore, for the Government to issue emergency regulations—to “doctor around on the circumference of the distress” and try “from time to time to lance the cancerous ulcer.”

Rather, it was necessary to penetrate to the “seat of the inflammation—to the cause.” It was unimportant whether the irritating cause was discovered “today or tomorrow.” The essential thing to understand was that unless the cause was addressed, “no cure is possible.”

Hitler’s aspiration as a political leader was to cure the disease from which he believed Germany was suffering. His mission—as a political physician—was to identify the cause of the nation’s disease, and to attack this cause at its roots.