Medizin und Nationalsozialismus: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung (review)

Robert Jütte organized this volume to orient scholars and students to the explosion of historical scholarship, especially during the past couple of decades, about the role of physicians and medicine in the Third Reich. The literature is so vast that he recruited some of the leading experts on the history of medicine during the Nazi period to write sections related to their own research. The result is a useful compendium providing a reliable overview of the status of historical research on this important topic. The authors also discuss gaps in research that need to be filled, so graduate students looking for dissertation topics in this field will find this work indispensable.

If one wants to understand the Nazi regime, the role of medicine is not tangential. Not only were physicians overrepresented in the Nazi Party in comparison to other professionals, but they played a leading role in spreading Nazi propaganda about eugenics and racism. Some provided expertise to help the Nazi regime formulate policy. Many also participated— sometimes in a leading role—in the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime, including killing the disabled, performing abominable medical experiments, and even racial extermination. Of course, many Jewish physicians faced persecution and death at the hands of the Nazis.

In his contributions, Hans-Walter Schmuhl emphasizes the importance of the history of medicine for any study of the Nazi regime. He interprets Nazism as a biopolitical dictatorship that intended to control birth, death, sexuality, reproduction, and even biological evolution, in order to perfect the German Volkskörper (this could be translated as “body politic,” as long as one understands that for the Nazis, it had racial overtones).

One of the big questions confronting those studying the role of physicians under the Nazi regime is: Why did so many physicians participate in Nazi atrocities? What motivated them? Schmuhl discusses the ideological background that contributed to physicians’ willingness and sometimes even eagerness to participate in the program to kill the disabled. He argues—in line with his earlier works, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987) and Grenzüberschreitungen (Göttingen, Wallstein, 2005)—that social Darwinism, Gobineau’s racism, and eugenics ideology with its stress on biological inequality were some of the key ideological factors preparing physicians not only to participate, but to engineer, some of the Nazi atrocities, especially the program to kill the disabled. However, motivations are complex, and Wolfgang Eckart notes in his essay on criminal human experiments that specific studies on individual perpetrators and their motivations are largely lacking.

Some of the chapters, such as “Eugenics and Racial Anthropology” by Hans-Walter Schmuhl, provide an introductory overview of their topics, so they are fairly accessible to the uninitiated. However, many of the chapters are more historiographical in character—since that is the purpose of the book—and thus require some background knowledge.

This work is comprehensive, with chapters on eugenics and racial anthropology, the medical system, medical research, medical practice, and the attempts to come to grips with Nazi medicine in the post-1945 period. The authors are very thorough in surveying the relevant historiography, both in German and English, though on rare occasions an important English-language title is missing from their bibliography. Discussions range from political and social history to legal and intellectual history. The authors cover just about every topic imaginable. I would have preferred a section devoted to medical ethics under Nazism, but this is an insignificant quibble, especially since the authors cover works on medical ethics in their discussions of other topics, such as the Nazi program to kill the disabled and criminal medical experimentation.

In sum, this work is indispensable for specialists on the Nazi period or the history of medicine who want a sound and judicious primer on the status of scholarship about medicine under the Nazi regime.