Germany, Hitler urged in his Gemlich letter, needed to become a dictatorship to rid the country of the Jewish “racial tuberculosis.” Several years later, in Mein Kampf, he compared Jews to “bacteria” and suggested Nazism as an antibiotic. The supposedly medical language was part of his code for mass murder. Once again, Hitler was not being original. Talaat Pasha had spoken in the same way during the Ottoman genocides, when mass killings were referred to as sanitation.