Is that a Jack boot?
Posted on 12/02/2002 9:59:08 AM PST by Plutarch
Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices, Legacies [Book Review]
edited by Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener (symposium, University of Vermont, April 2000), 160 pp, with illus, $59.95 ISBN 1-57181-386-1, paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-57181-387-X, New York, NY, Berghahn Books, 2002.
Reviewed by Hannah S. Decker, PhD
This is an engrossing book. While the story of Nazi crimes against humanity and the role of physicians in them are broadly known, the essays in Nicosia and Huener's short book bring a specificity and analysis that is profoundly disturbing.
German doctors were unusually supportive of the Hitler regime and Nazi racial ideology. Forty-five percent joined the Nazi party, 33% joined the Nazi Physicians' League, 26% were members of the SA (stormtroopers), and 7% joined the elite and comparatively small Schutzstaffel (SS). Physicians outranked in representation every other professional group except in the SS (there, lawyers had them beat).
German doctors had many avenues for professional betterment under the Nazis. Many German physicians, suffering economically when Hitler came to power, lent their support to get rid of Jewish competitors and then took their jobs. Physicians who supervised the sterilization (often unknown) of 400 000 German adults and deaths of 100 000 "lives not worth living"disabled children and adults in state hospitalshad a better chance of a higher civil service rank and more pay. This was falsely dubbed a euthanasia program. Voluntarily, physicians slowly starved their patients and then overdosed them on medication. This often led to a pneumonia, so the physicians could send home notices of "natural death."
But it was in the human experiments at the death camps that physicians could reap perhaps their greatest rewards. Here was a gold mine of opportunity: innumerable men and women who could be used for "research." On the basis of this "research," physicians published papers in prestigious journals, sent home specimens that could be used by their mentors in Germany, or completed a thesis that would enable them to teach at a university. It was even possible for an SS physician at a camp to get an inmate doctor to write a paper that he then submitted under his own name.
After the Second World War, most doctors quietly returned to their practices and jobs and almost nothing was said about their ethically compromising activities. Important German and Austrian scientific institutesthe Max Planck Institute being a foremost exampletook a long time to acknowledge officially the crimes of Nazi medicine and admit they were still using specimens from death camp inmates.
Yet Nazi Germany was full of paradox. It was under the Nazis that the world's most aggressive crusade against smoking took place. In some measure this was linked to Hitler's personal aversion to smoking, but this was not the main impetus. The antismoking campaign was an important aspect of the racial ideology of Nazism. Tobacco was seen as sapping the strength of the German people, whose bodies had to be pure if they were to establish Aryan supremacy over other countries and people.
Sadly, the German physicians' cooperation with the Hitler regime had some roots in our country. Nazi physicians were educated and supported in their unethical or even criminal activities partly by the eugenics movement that was influential in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, before and at the time Hitler took power. As one contributor writes, "Eugenicists argued that many social problems could be eliminated by discouraging or preventing the reproduction of individuals deemed genetically unfit (negative eugenics), while desirable social traits could be increased by encouraging reproduction among those deemed most genetically fit (positive genetics)." Wealthy families in this country, such as the Harrimans and the Rockefellers, funded eugenic research and educational programs, and prominent scholars lent their endorsement. The results were that 30 state legislatures adopted their arguments and passed sterilization laws. Congress instituted antiimmigration laws to keep out "undesirable" people. The Nazis pointed to these measures to substantiate their own policies for "racial hygiene."
This book is morally challenging to all physicians. How easy it is to shed the Hippocratic Oath for professional and economic gain! We are also left with a difficult question: how do we monitor genetic research today? Valuable genetic research, with its promise of preventing and curing disease, must not be misused by a new eugenics.
Weren't these two women rather "close" to one another?
Is that a Jack boot?
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Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Looks like cigarette smokers were rude and selfish even before WWII. Nothing new.
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