Like the euthanasia crimes of [Fascism], the murder of tuberculosis patients in special facilities had a long backstory. As early as the 1920s, lung specialists and other experts responsible for treating tuberculosis paved the way for decisions and actions under [the Third Reich].
Ultimately the decisions of the 1920s culminated in the comprehensive monitoring of tuberculosis patients, their forced transfer to such special facilities and finally their killing through deliberate neglect, including inadequate nutrition. What is more, by constructing the tuberculosis patients as ‘deviant sociopaths’, these experts helped engender social norms that encouraged their exclusion, which prepared the ground for more radical actions under [German Fascism].7
[…]
The First World War was also a positive reference point for some doctors whose thinking was particularly radical. They learnt that the situation of war and crisis favoured those social developments that they advocated. A striking example is provided by Berthold Kihn. In 1932 the psychiatrist and later director of the special facility for ‘deviant’ tuberculosis patients in Stadtroda published a paper in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, a major psychiatric journal.
Shortages during the First World War had also had their good side, Kihn proposed: the Hunger Years ‘truly cleaned out things among inmates of insane asylums’, an allusion to the nearly 70,000 psychiatric patients who starved to death in German health facilities between 1914 and 1918.28 The naval blockade by the Entente Powers had led to major supply bottlenecks in the German Reich, which had most affected the weakest members of society.
Government food officials and facility directors had calculated that supplies for the ‘insane’ should be diverted in times of emergency to social groups regarded as more important. Belinda Davis, among others, has studied the hierarchy in the food supply: the military were at the top, followed by population groups important to the war effort, such as industrial workers; at the very bottom were the ‘useless’ inmates of prisons and other penal institutions.29
Thus, as Davis shows, there was a sharp divide between ‘food for the strong’ and ‘food for the weak’. Here was much more than a philosophy, well before the [Fascist] takeover of power, that was based on a differential valuation of human life. Such considerations, I contend, ultimately led to the actions of a relatively small group of lung doctors and psychiatrists who rapidly rose to leading positions and, like Kihn, after 1933 organized and implemented the forced incarceration of tuberculosis patients.
[…]
We do not know precisely how many tuberculosis patients lost their lives to negligent care and patient murder. The special facilities did not maintain separate statistics for deliberate deaths and, additionally, there are large gaps in the available records. We can, however, estimate those figures. Through the files preserved from Karthaus, for example, we know that of the 391 persons with tuberculosis committed to that special facility between 1939 and 1945, about 20 per cent died.
While that figure includes instances where the patients died of tuberculosis, this number suggested a death rate much higher than the peacetime death rate among psychiatric inmates. According to official medical statistics, prior to the First World War and in the interwar period the annual mortality rate for those admitted for psychiatric reasons was 7 to 8 per cent.99
We therefore have reason to conclude that between 1933 and 1945, a considerable proportion of forcibly interned persons with tuberculosis died as the result of deliberate starvation. If we assume 12 per cent excess mortality, then of the approximately 30,000 patients interned in the special facilities, up to 4,000 would have died as a result of the conditions of their detention rather than from their disease.
(Emphasis added. Note the continuities between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.)
[Footnote]
Their relation to the above is only tangential, but if you are an anticommunist, the following data shall reconfirm your irrefutable conclusion that communism is worse than Fascism. To start, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics:
The TB control program continued throughout World War II. During the blockade of Leningrad, TB facilities provided medical assistance to patients in conditions of severe undernourishment(7–9). In 1943, the Government issued a decree “On Antituberculosis Actions” that led to the creation of new TB hospitals, night sanatoria, kindergartens, and rural boarding schools outside of the industrial centers for children with TB.
Patients working in the defense industry factories were provided with a “curative diet.” In the 1940s, roentgenofluorography was introduced and became the main method of TB screening in adults. Streptomycin was first used in the USSR in 1943; the drug was purchased in the United States to treat Otto Schmidt, a Russian scientist and arctic explorer. Mass production of streptomycin began in 1947 due in part to contributions by Zinaida Ermolyeva, a microbiologist and chemotherapist (10, 11)
The People’s Republic of China:
In addition, by using a new comprehensive evaluation index DISO to compare the performance of three models, it was demonstrated that ARIMAX (1,1,2) × (0,1,1)12 + PM2.5 (lag = 12) model was the optimal one, which was applied to predict the number of pulmonary tuberculosis cases in Urumqi from January 2019 to December 2019. The predicting results were in good agreement with the actual pulmonary tuberculosis cases and shown that pulmonary tuberculosis cases obviously declined, which indicated that the policies of environmental protection and universal health checkups in Urumqi have been very effective in recent years.
The People’s Socialist Rep. of Albania:
A number of endemic diseases were brought under control, including malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis. […] If one looks at the mortality transition from 1950 to 1990, it is clear that the pattern changes as life expectancy improves. Thus, the infectious and parasitic (tuberculosis included) diseases decline and almost disappear in the seventies and eighties.
The Democratic People’s Rep. of Korea:
Tuberculosis deaths were reduced from a reported 19,000 in 1990 to 5,700 in 2010, with the prevalence and incidence of the disease also decreasing between 1990 and 2010.57 The control of tuberculosis can only be successful in any country by way of sustained and systematic organisational efforts that prevent contagion and monitor the disease. North Korea’s success in controlling the spread of tuberculosis in the 2000s indicated two things; that the government had recovered nationwide organisational capacity and that the government prioritised public health programmes.
The Rep. of Cuba:
Before the Revolution, more than one in ten Cubans suffered from tuberculosis, but today TB has been all but eliminated (because the BCG tuberculosis vaccination is only partially effective, Cuba still suffers 35–40 deaths from the disease each year). Cuban vaccine coverage is stronger than most other regions in the world. Today, the USA has an overall childhood vaccination rate of 70 percent, while in Cuba, it is 99 percent (Cuba, 2015, pp. 40, 95–96; Cuba, n.d., p. 8; Erwin & Bialek, 2015, p. 1509; Huish, 2013, p. 36; Mesa‐Lago, 2009, p. 378; Sixto, 2002, p. 333; Thomas, 2016, pp. 192–193; Whiteford & Branch, 2008, pp. 13, 26, 28, 30, 63, 114). [See also Theodore MacDonald’s Hippocrates in Havana: Cuba’s Health Care System, 1995.]
[…]
Before the Revolution, the leading killers in Cuba were generally infectious ones, malaria, tuberculosis, among others. Nowadays, the leading killers in Cuba, accounting for roughly three‐quarters of all deaths, are the same ones found in the developed world, that is, long‐term debilitating diseases, such as heart disease; strokes; cancer; and one remaining infectious killer, influenza (especially among the elderly).
The EZLN:
A greater disparity is apparent between pro‐government communities and Zapatista villages with regard to the treatment of tuberculosis. Currently, 32% of Zapatista inhabitants suffer TB while in larger portions of pro‐government communities, a remarkable 84% continue to experience this respiratory infection.
You can easily tell that all these data are merely government propaganda since they aren’t obnoxiously pessimistic, and adjustments need to be made. So for example, when a report says that only 35–40 Cubans perish from tuberculosis yearly, it’s a lie and the real number is closer to 3,500,000–4,000,000 yearly. It’s kind of like how when women say ‘no’, what they really mean is ‘yes’. That’s just common sense. Check out the Austrian School of Economics for more red pills.
Events that happened today (September 19):
1909: Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche, bourgeois Fascist, was born.
1939: The Battle of Kępa Oksywska concluded, with Polish losses reaching roughly 14% of all the forces engaged.
1940: Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp to gather and smuggle out information for the resistance movement.
1944: The Battle of Hürtgen Forest commenced, and would become the longest individual battle that the U.S. Army has ever fought. (Coincidentally, the Moscow Armistice between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed, which officially ended the Continuation War.)