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  • Medizin und Nationalsozialismus: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung
  • Dieter Kuntz
Robert Jütte, Wolfgang U. Eckart, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, and Winfried Süss, eds. Medizin und Nationalsozialismus: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2011. 323 pp. €24.90 (978-3-8353-0659-2).

More than six decades after the collapse of Hitler’s Germany, the literature examining the Third Reich is now vast and continues to be produced at a brisk [End Page 694] pace. Examinations of the role of physicians and medicine in Nazi Germany have recently mushroomed from the rather sporadic early efforts of the 1960s and the limited number of case studies undertaken during the 1980s that initially analyzed the accountability of the medical profession, to what Robert Jütte, the author of a new survey of this literature, terms the veritable research “boom” that has occurred over the last two decades.

In large measure, Jütte maintains, these halting investigations had much to do with the reluctance within the German medical community to undertake a thorough examination of its own recent past. The Jütte volume was, in fact, prompted and supported by the German Medical Association to promote fuller inquiry into the role of physicians under National Socialism. In an effort to address the heretofore lack of a comprehensive overview of the literature in this field, a team of expert medical scholars and researchers, led by Robert Jütte, and assisted by Wolfgang U. Eckart, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, and Winfried Süss, has compiled a sourcebook, or a “research report”—Medizin und Nationalsozialismus—that offers a historiographical appraisal of works produced within this broad topic to date.

Jütte and his coauthors outline the main themes within the field, identify pioneering efforts and milestones, and note research gaps and areas still in need of further study. The survey includes Austria after 1938 and assesses primarily German-language sources, but it does make an effort to mention relevant publications in the foreign languages in which the authors have competency. The book’s principal themes, divided into six chapters, cover National Socialist health policy and the regime’s underlying ideological concepts, the public health system and medical research in the Third Reich, medical practice and programs before and during World War II, and post-1945 continuities and breaks.

The first chapter gives newcomers to the field an introduction to the most important general overviews of medicine in Nazi Germany and underscores the lack of a truly all-encompassing study of this theme—which remains to be written. Here we also find a listing of the principal documentary sources, exhibition catalogs, and the most helpful bibliographical and biographical publications.

Chapter 2 argues that the actions of physicians and scientists can be understood only within the context of their ideological motivations. This is facilitated through an analysis of Nazi racial and hereditary health policy, focusing on the role played by the scientific community (especially the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology) and its symbiotic relationship to the Nazi regime.

Chapter 3 evaluates works on the structure of the Nazi public health network, noting important new contributions to this field, such as Thomas Beddies’s publication on the Hitler Youth’s Public Health Service. An excellent survey is also offered of the literature analyzing the relationship between Nazi health policy and the health facilities administered by the Protestant and Catholic churches. Studies of nurses under Nazism, it seems, are not lacking, although most of this literature is not available in English. Moreover, the participation of nurses in the “euthanasia” program remains to be researched more fully. Similarly, the role of midwives has only recently been examined, and like other studies of homeopathic medicine and naturopathy—fields that the Nazis promoted—this study is [End Page 695] available only in German. The persecution of Jewish physicians and nurses has generally been well researched, although examinations of medical specialties are still incomplete and regional studies similarly are lacking. A later chapter does give an excellent overview of the little-known fates of Jewish hospitals in Germany, yet also points out the lack of studies on Jewish physicians working in ghettos and camps.

Chapter 4 treats the broad...

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