Eradicating typhus: Medical representations and Nazi sanitary discourse in the General Government of Poland (1939-1944)
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63
When German soldiers and civil servants took hold of Poland in 1939, they saw this country through the lens of ideas and stereotypes that were already old: the east was a backward, poor, and dirty territory. From 1942 onwards, after the decision to kill all the Jews of Europe had been made, films and texts produced by the sanitary offices of the Wehrmacht and of the SS taught the German occupation forces how to “treat” the pathologies encountered in the east—above all typhus, which was meant to be genuinely Jewish. This biological conception of the “Jewish danger” presented the “final solution” as an unavoidable medical treatment, as a sanitary eradication.
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