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  • John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust
  • James F. Tent, Ph.D.
Paul J. Weindling, John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust. Rochester, New York, University of Rochester Press, 2010. $95.00.

The subtitle of this book is slightly misleading, in that John Thompson’s medical career embraced many roles: as a physiologist, aviation medicine researcher, Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) officer, physician tending victims at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, postwar [End Page 413] investigator of German scientific developments, investigator of German medical war crimes, self-made medical ethicist, philosopher, UNESCO official engaged in German reeducation, youth counselor, and finally as a psychiatrist at the Einstein College of Medicine in New York. These many roles hint at a restless personality. He was constantly taking on new challenges, jobs, or assignments. Although married once, he never formed successful relationships to women. He befriended homosexuals but was not one himself. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he strove for moral and ethical renewal in society. In short, he was an aesthete but also a charismatic. He adopted a Jesuitical approach of dealing directly with senior officials, be they heads of state, ministry officials, diplomats, generals, philosophers, or academics in his quest for moral regeneration after World War II.

His background was unusual. The son of a wealthy American family (his mother was Scottish, his father an engineer from Oregon), Thompson was born in Mexico in 1906. He was educated at Palo Alto High School, then at Stanford University where he fell under the sway of David Starr Jordan, a eugenicist, who favored “Anglo-Saxon racial superiority” (23). Upon graduation, Thompson chose physiology and completed basic medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, then taught anatomy at Swarthmore College until 1933. He qualified in medicine and surgery at Edinburgh in 1935 under outstanding physiologists and psychiatrists, working in wards at prominent British hospitals until his Edinburgh mentors sent him to Harvard in 1937 where he worked in its Fatigue Laboratory conducting physiological studies on patients undergoing physical and mental stress. He employed oxygen to relieve various forms of stress. In the late 1930s, German Jewish refugees at Harvard convinced Thompson to discard the eugenics notions of David Starr Jordan. With the advent of World War II, physiologist Thompson’s stress studies garnered attention when he claimed that he could measure fear in pilots by observing hand movements and measuring blood hemoglobin levels. In 1940, Thompson moved to the University of Toronto, investigating decompression effects in aviators descending from high altitudes, and was then commissioned in the RCAF in 1942. His RCAF service led him to Great Britain in 1944 as an aviation medicine specialist and subsequently in late April 1945 to a nightmarish situation in Germany.

Bergen-Belsen was hardly even the worst of Nazi concentration camps. Still, it was by any normal standard a living hell. Thompson was based in nearby Celle with Canadian and British scientists monitoring German scientific developments. Belsen changed that. Along with all other nearby medical personnel, Thompson labored in sick wards, treating desperately ill victims of Nazi barbarity. Despite their best efforts, Allied medical [End Page 414] teams witnessed the deaths of thousands of patients. Even as they lay dying, many victims gave testimony to ghastly medical experiments under German medical scientists. This traumatic experience transformed Thompson into a medical ethicist. Almost singlehandedly, Thompson initiated a new Nuremberg Trial targeted specifically at German doctors accused of “Medical War Crimes.” Author Weindling traces in minute detail how an aroused Thompson overcame resistance in high Allied military and diplomatic circles (a few sought only practical results from those experiments without considering ethics). Thompson would have none of that. He and his adherents informed the public about monstrous experiments undertaken not only by the SS but also by civilian doctors. Those trials duly took place in 1947, thereby establishing an incontestable record of what had transpired in German camps, hospitals, and sanatoria: euthanasia on a massive scale, compression chambers in which victims suffered the agonies of rapid decompression, immersion in icy water to test hypothermia, forced drinking of sea water, injection of victims with deadly bacteria and viruses, and much more. One “borderline...

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