Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945 (review)

This is an absolutely marvelous book. Even if you have no wish to slog through the depressing résumé of the ghastly consequences produced by applied 'racial science' in Nazi Germany, it is nice to know that someone has done this for us and we can always go and look up the specifics if the need arises. Benno Müller-Hill, who started as a bench scientist, is now Professor of Genetics at the University of Köln (universally spelled "Cologne" in this translation). He has produced a remarkable chronicle of the perverse misuse of anthropology, psychiatry, and genetics in Nazi Germany from the time of Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 to the end of World War II in 1945.

This book was originally published as Tödliche Wissenschaft in Hamburg in 1984. Four years later it was translated into English by George Fraser and published by Oxford University Press, receiving well-merited praise by the distinguished and eminently qualified historian Robert N. Proctor, author of Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Proctor 1988a, 1988b). This version has been reproduced by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, with the English orthography retained throughout, and includes an afterword by the codiscoveror of the DNA double helix, James D. Watson, who has known the author from the time they were both at Harvard in the late 1960s.

Other scholars have looked at things from more long-term historical or international perspectives (Weinreich 1946; Weindling 1985, 1989; Kühl 1994; Goldhagen 1996), but no one has nailed down the specifics with such relentless attention to detail. In addition to researching formally published works, he has consulted private correspondence, conference session notes, and court records stored in a formidable set of repositories on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He has also interviewed a sampling of the surviving colleagues and relatives of the psychiatrists and anthropologists who abetted the Nazi efforts at genocide.

It is not a long book, but it is very densely written. The names and organizations accumulate in mind-boggling proliferation. Both the author and the translator have provided useful guides to help the reader. Right at the beginning, the translator has provided a section designated "Notes on Terminology," which explains what things like SS and RuSHA (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt) actually meant. I knew about the notorious cartel IG-Farben, but I did not know that it stood for Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (Union of Interests of the Dye Industry—a chemical manufacturing consortium), and that Auschwitz was initially set up as a camp to provide it with slave laborers. And I did not know that IG-Farben metamorphosed into BASF.

After the extensive selection on "Notes and References," the author has provided a 14-page "Name Index" listing in fine print the roster of over 300 of the most important people referred to in the text with their qualifications, employment places, and dates, and the page numbers where they are mentioned in the account. As with the section on "Terminology," this index is extremely helpful to the reader who has often forgotten the name or the term by the time it pops up again a chapter later. The only minor complaint one might have about the list of names is that it simply uses an initial to stand for the given name. The infamous Auschwitz camp physician is referred to only as "Dr. Mengele" in the text and Mengele, J., in the Name Index. One has to look elsewhere to find out that he was Dr. Josef Mengele.

The core of the volume is a 70-page section comprised of four chapters on the development and application of Nazi policies for the treatment of the mentally ill and of 'aliens' such as gypsies and Jews. This...