Death of Medicine in Nazi Germany: Dermatology and Dermatopathology under the Swastika (review)

Wolfgang Weyers. Death of Medicine in Nazi Germany: Dermatology and Dermatopathology under the Swastika. Edited by A. Bernard Ackerman. Philadelphia: Ardor Scribendi; Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1998. xxii + 442 pp. Ill. $18.95 (paperbound).

During the composition of this book the author evidently could not make up his mind whether he should write a monograph on the state of dermatology and its practitioners in Nazi Germany, a history of the medical profession in this period, the story of the persecution of Jews, or a general history of the Third Reich, including its antecedents. To resolve this dilemma, he attempted to write all of these in one volume, and the result is altogether disappointing.

First, although this should have been a much-needed specialized treatise on dermatologists during their professionalization from the late nineteenth century to the post-World War II period--against the background of general medical history, the history of the Jews, and pertinent Nazi developments--Weyers gives us a great deal of Nazi history by itself, as if we did not already know that. Whereas photographs are ample in this book, do we really need them for Hitler, Göring, Röhm, and Schacht, in instances not at all related to dermatology? Do we really need explications of Nazi foreign policy, with reference to and pictures of Charles Lindbergh, Neville Chamberlain, and David Lloyd George? Moreover, certain historical facts are simply wrong (e.g., Himmler was not found dead by the Allies upon his attempted capture), and a gratuitous judgment of Hitler as a "pathetic person with no real ego" (p. 281) cannot even be substantiated in medical-historical terms.

Second, the history of the Jews, apart from being superfluous, is often flawed. For example, the proportion of Jewish "industrialists" during the inflation of 1920-23 (p. 30) has never been proved as above average, if that; and before the assassination of Ernst vom Rath (not "von" Rath, p. 229) in November 1938, Jews with Polish citizenship had not been shipped back to Poland, but to no-man's-land between Germany and Poland. In misjudging the purely racist elements of Nazi persecution, Weyers risks the implausible statement that most Jews who survived "were elderly, so their death from natural causes could be anticipated by the Nazis" (p. 254). In keeping with this miscomprehension of Nazi anti-Semitism and its implementation, Weyers writes that the situation for non-German Jews during their persecution "unbelievably was even worse" than for German ones (p. 272)--why unbelievably? And in the description of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, which hastened the Jews' "Final Solution," Reinhard Heydrich's role as Himmler's adjutant is mentioned, but not that of Göring as instigator of the nefarious scheme.

Third, what Weyers writes about the history of physicians and medicine in Nazi Germany is mostly known already as well. Thus why are there fifteen pages of a chapter entitled "The Reorganization of Medicine" (pp. 45-59)--or a further one, "Cooperation with the Nazis," all twenty-six pages of which waste the initiated reader's time? Here, too, Weyers commits mistakes of substance. He states that one professor of medicine was dismissed from Erlangen University because his wife had a Jewish grandparent--hardly typical of Nazi practices (for "quarter Jews" were treated as full Germans even according to the Nuremberg Laws), and begging for a further explanation by the author.

Yet finally, once readers have been able to extrapolate information on dermatologists, they will feel that they have learned something new. Weyers begins with the important observation that from its inception, dermatology was looked upon as a pariah discipline because of its preoccupation with unsightly skin diseases and, worse, venereal disorders. In the nineteenth century and beyond, Jews as pariahs among professionals in their German and Austrian settings became logically complementary candidates for...