Auschwitz, die NS-Medizin und ihre Opfer (review)

This new book about criminal Nazi medicine has much to recommend it. Klee is a journalist; his often catch-phrase style appeals to German lay readers, who arguably still have to learn more about the subject, although it may annoy the scholar. Interesting even to the initiated, the case histories contained in this book concern victims, perpetrators, and medical activities; the publication of the diary of Buchenwald physician Erwin Ding-Schuler (1941-44) is a first. Moreover, the complete listing of German physicians who attended the notorious Kältetagung in Nuremberg in October 1942 (which was once published by the Nazis) is extremely useful. Klee rightly emphasizes the role of not only the SS, but also the Wehrmacht in these medical crimes. Of particular value is his treatment of the post-1945 history of victims and perpetrators, although that chronicle is incidental rather than systematic. As his main sources he uses documents of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and, rarely spotted before, of the 1960s Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, as well as several concentration-camp-specific records.

However, the suggestion of the publisher, the prestigious S. Fischer Verlag, that all of Klee’s primary sources are first-used evidence, is largely overstated—especially in the case of the Nuremberg documents. When it comes to the critical literature, Klee’s record is downright disappointing. In accordance with his publisher’s contention that he is the first to tackle these important issues, he is at pains to ignore many of the previous publications on the subject. Missing, for instance, are Robert Jay Lifton’s book on Auschwitz physicians (The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide [1986]), Paul Weindling’s (Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 [1989]) and Robert Proctor’s (Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis [1988]) on the ideological and scientific backdrop to Nazi medical crimes, Alice Platen-Hallermund’s very early volume on Nazi euthanasia (Die Tötung Geisteskranker in Deutschland [1948]), Günther Schwarberg’s on the Jewish children’s murder in Neuengamme (Der SS-Arzt und die Kinder: Bericht über den Mord vom Bullenhuser Damm [1979]), Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt’s on the architecture of Auschwitz (conducive as it was to medical killing) (Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present [1996]), and my own monographs on Third Reich physicians and the SS Ahnenerbe (Doctors under Hitler [1989]; Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS, 1935–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches [1974, 1997]), to which Klee devotes an entire chapter as if it were new ground.

Two other, major, faults render this book of only limited value to the scholar. First, Klee’s matter-of-fact reporting of events occurs against a blank historic and scientific background (in line with the absence of Weindling’s and Proctor’s books) and explains nothing about the specificity of Nazi medicine. Thus the important question of whether the heinous deeds of SS physicians were merely the result of human sadism or the consequence of a long-term perversion of the German medical culture is left untouched. Related to this is, second, the problem of an interconnection between concentration-camp experiments and German mainstream medicine at that time. That there was such a connection is hinted at by Klee when he writes (as is already well known) that physicians like Neuengamme’s Heissmeyer wished to earn the Habilitation, or right to lecture at a university, ideally as a professor. Yet nothing is fleshed out.

Altogether, then, analysis and reflection are missing from this work. As a running account, it will be useful in imparting many of the gruesome details to the educated layman, inasmuch as they are not already widely known. But it clearly fails to interact with the ongoing international discussion by scholars, about the nature of and reasons for what this popular author calls “Nazi medicine and its victims.”