The genetic and racial health or ‘purity’ of the Volk was as integral and inseparable a part of the scheme for eastern conquest as the destruction of Bolshevism, the desire for Lebensraum or the drive for raw materials, a master thread in a closely woven comprehensively Germanic ‘system’. At the psychic level it was probably THE master thread. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who spent almost ten years studying the central role of the German doctors in the Nazi extermination programme, concluded: ‘Rather than medical killing being subsumed to war, the war ‘itself was subsumed to the vast biomedical vision of which “euthanasia” was a part. Or to put the matter another way, the deepest impulses behind the war had to do with the sequence of sterilization, direct medical killing and genocide.’

Peter Padfield, author of Himmler, 1990