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  • Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent
  • Michael H. Kater
Paul Julian Weindling . Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xii + 482 pp. Ill. $80.00 (1-4039-3911-X).

Paul Weindling has published the first comprehensive, critical, book on the problems posed by medical crimes in the Third Reich. But he focuses even more on the ignorance of the Allies, in particular the Americans, in trying to come to grips with these crimes after May 1945. His overall verdict is that the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial was a failure, for reasons he is able to enunciate after analyzing a mass of data, trenchantly and convincingly.

One of Weindling's more serious charges is that in 1945–46 the legal and medical specialists of the U.S. Forces lacked a systematic blacklist of German scientific criminals and had no clue about some of the lethal practices in Nazi Germany, such as "euthanasia" as perpetrated in German psychiatric wards. Hence, not only "euthanasia" but also forced sterilization were excluded from the criminal-prosecution list. Weindling argues that because eugenicists existed also in the United States, several German eugenicists, such as Otmar von Verschuer, the teacher of Josef Mengele, were not tried. Indeed, most aspects of medical life in Nazi Germany—the public health-care system, health insurance, the Reich Physician Leadership hierarchy, the persecution of Jewish doctors—never came up before the Nuremberg court.

Instead, as Weindling charges, the Americans took great care to learn about matters that could directly benefit them. From the beginning in 1945 their thinking was influenced first by the ongoing war against Japan, and then by the Cold War. In light of these two main developments, many German doctors were spared either detailed scrutiny or the full force of the law. Even before the war was over, the Americans (and, initially, their allies) expected to discover fundamental innovations by Nazi medicine in pharmacy or clinical practice, in chemical or biological weaponry. War crimes early on were defined as those committed against Allied service personnel and, secondarily, against civilian hostages—hence little attention was paid to the potential character of German medicine in 1945 as a pseudo-science. Because victims of the Holocaust were of no immediate concern to the Americans, dubious German medical scientists were immediately employed in U.S. institutions.

Weindling goes on to show that the fact that German doctors were tried and condemned at all, and that eventually a few were hanged (although all those who were imprisoned were freed after only short stays behind bars), was due to a few idealists who had both the knowledge and the integrity to move things forward. According to Weindling, the German doctors were slippery culprits with clever lawyers. The defendants, not without some justification, stressed the fragmentation of the Nazi political structure, which made it possible to exempt senior figures like Hubertus Strughold and Paul Rostock from responsibility. (Out of ignorance, the Americans believed in a Nazi monolith that made differentiated judgments difficult.)

Altogether, Weindling's book sensibly complements the classic study on the Doctors' Trial by Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke, published shortly after [End Page 786] the event.1 Yet, as valuable as it is, the book does have a few weaknesses. The most annoying is Weindling's lack of a profound overall knowledge of the Third Reich. He should have been able to criticize the defendants' argument that experimentation on concentration camp inmates condemned to death was legitimate: historians of the SS know that no one in the camp system was ever "condemned," to death or otherwise, for they existed beyond the Nazi (regular) legal system and languished in the camps at Himmler's pleasure. It constitutes yet another fault of the Americans that for their trial purposes they never bothered to find this out. Weindling writes that Albert Speer befriended Karl Brandt after the latter's release from SS captivity in May 1945—but in reality the two men, both typical of the young and capable technocrats of the Nazi Order, had been close friends and collaborators for years. Weindling also gets a number...

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