Embodied Rhetoric and the Nazi Regime

Photo of women prisoners behind barbed-wire fence at Ravensbrück concentration camp upon their liberation on March 29, 1945.

Embodied, or bodily, rhetoric acknowledges the whole of a person and allows for the whole body of human experiences. 

Isocrates and the Sophists were well aware of this connection between body and rhetoric. They combined physical training with oratory to allow for the shaping of the entire self. The Ancient Greeks understood our bodies play a significant role in how we are perceived and received by an audience. These perceptions by our audience come from identity markers which we assign to ourselves or which may be forced upon us by others. 

"Bodies are fluctuating signifiers whose forms are molded and shaped by a range of cultural forces, including medical technology, personal desires, and public discourses where definitional arguments about bodies find expression...[the] range of bodily expression in public discourse is limited by the cultural context in which it is situated, the body is a rhetorically useful and flexible argumentative locus that reflects the attitudes, values, and biases of a culture" (Achter, 48-9).

The use of bodily rhetoric was vital in Hitler's rise to power and implementation of the Final Solution. 

Polish civilians walk by a section of the wall that separated the Warsaw ghetto from the rest of the city. Warsaw, Poland, 1940–41.

"Images, caricatures, stories, and myths about Jewish corruption strengthened the boundaries between the clean and the polluted. Filth is not a property inherent in the other; it llows for the construciton of a boundary between the pure self and the dirty other...The identification of contaminant with the Jewish body worked because social and cultural authority redefined the body as a public menace" (Glass, 139). 

In order to implement the Final Solution, Hilter needed cooperation from major segments of German professions, such as medical, scientific, and legal. The continuous and relentless use of rhetoric that the Jewish body was "a repository of deadly bacilli" (Glass, 152), led to doctors and public health administrators to accept "Hitler and Himmler's ranting about racial pollution" (Glass, 153). As a result, the Jewish body became viewed as "a body that did not suffer, a body of worthless life" (Glass, 151). In addition, “…while Nazis selected Jews from the general population for “special handling,” Jewish women were further singled out as bearers of the next generation of Jews; thus, they were murdered as Jews and as women” (Ephgrave, 15). 

“Violence of the magnitude of the Holocaust indicates that the Jews had to be both hated and feared as infected, polluted objects” (Glass, 8). Doctors and public health administrators echoing Hilter's rhetoric helped perpetuate this hate and fear making it easier for the Final Solution to be carried out without public objection.

Jewish people were not the only targets of the Nazi regime, however. Anyone who embodied anything other than the Aryan body were to be eliminated.