Heil Health
by
Pierre Lemieux
Excerpt:...The Nazi government was known, and admired, for implementing the most progressive public health policies in their time. State-of-the-art research and regulation were applied to occupational, environmental, and lifestyle diseases. Cancer was declared "the number one enemy of the state." Nazi policy favored natural food and opposed fat, sugar, alcohol, and sedentary lifestyles. The existing temperance movement against alcohol and tobacco became more active under the Nazis, who were involved in what Proctor calls "creating a secure and sanitary utopia."
...Nazi Germany had the world's strongest antismoking campaign and the world's most sophisticated tobacco disease epidemiology" (pp. 9-10). It is well-known that Hitler himself was a rabid antismoker, but the antismoking movement and interventionist public policies of the Nazi area involved much more than Hitler's personal whims. Tobacco was attacked as a "relic of a liberal lifestyle" and as "masturbation of the lungs."...
The Nazi state apparatus had a "Reich Health Führer," with which office the name of Leonardo Conti, a strong antitobacco activist, remains associated. Under Conti, central registries had been established for many diseases and addictions. Nazi Germany was a transparent society, where individuals were prevented from hiding their lives from the state -- as absurdly illustrated by the 1938 ban on attic storage. Thousand of "registered" alcoholics felt victims of the sterilization program under the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. While many of the health fascists were prosecuted and condemned at Nuremberg, Conti escaped by hanging himself in his cell....