Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus (review)

Book Review Naomi Baumslag. Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Pp. 216, cloth. $49.50 US. Reviewed by Myrna Goldenberg, independent scholar, Bethesda, MD In Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus, Naomi Baumslag proposes an agenda for research on the connections among medicine, war, and genocide. Building on the groundbreaking work of Robert Jay Lifton, John J. Michalczyk, Howard Fertig, Arthur Caplan, Henry Friedlander, and others, Baumslag sets out to prove that the Nazis rewarded physicians who helped implement the Final Solution, specifically by encouraging the spread of typhus as a means of murdering Jews. By imposing and then neglecting deplorable conditions in the ghettos and camps, Baumslag argues, Nazi doctors ‘‘promoted typhus . . . because ‘natural death’ was cheaper than gassing’’ (57). Baumslag demonstrates that Nazi medicine distinguished itself by its unprecedented and willing complicity in murdering Jews: the German and Austrian ‘‘medical profession as a whole perpetrated and tolerated without protest such widespread atrocities as were performed by German health professionals and researchers during World War II’’ (126). In her analysis of Nazi medicine, Baumslag catalogs bogus and unethical experiments, largely funded by I.G. Farben, to test typhus vaccines, each experiment more sadistic than the last. She also provides insights into other non-typhus-related experiments and vivisections, aptly labeling them ‘‘scientific butchery.’’ Interestingly, as has been repeatedly acknowledged by medical historians and ethicists, Nazi medicine ‘‘produced not a single new cure and not a single important medical discovery’’ (163). Baumslag begins with an extensive history of typhus, tracing it back to fifteenth-century Europe, and follows with a discussion of the history of the struggle to treat and eliminate it. While readers will find that they have learned more than they ever wanted to know about lice and typhus, they will also appreciate the level of detail and the scope of the sources Baumslag uses to explain the significance of the disease in the German war against the Jews. Her experience as a physician and her training in public health are evident in her careful description of typhus and its effects on the individual and the community. In her chapter on the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and its involvement with the Nazi camp system, Baumslag delineates the failure of the ICRC to investigate the conditions of the camps: ‘‘the record of the ICRC during World War II is atrocious and indicative of the inherent weaknesses in the organization’’ (176). She releases her anger at the obvious collusion between the Swiss ICRC directors and German business and military interests, condemning Max Huber and Carl Jacob Burkhardt, the top ICRC officials, for the pro-German decisions that not only led to the unnecessary death by disease of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other prisoners but fed and reinforced the arrogance of the Germans in their determination to ignore the Geneva Convention. Not to be forgotten, Baumslag reminds her readers, is the ICRC’s inadvertent complicity in facilitating the escape of Myrna Goldenberg, review of Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus by Naomi Baumslag. Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, 3 (December 2006): 375–376. ß 2006 Genocide Studies and Prevention. some of the notorious doctors. The passports and travel papers issued to Nazi doctors guaranteed that they would not face capture, trial, and, ultimately, justice. Murderous Medicine also constitutes a compendium of vignettes about the doctors who participated in murdering Jews and other victims of Nazi brutality. These doctors were simultaneously preoccupied with preventing epidemics of typhus among the SS and confining the disease to the Jews—a losing battle, because acknowledging the presence of an epidemic among the Germans would demonstrate the failure to control or contain typhus, and hence a failure of Nazi medicine. Baumslag devotes a substantial section of the book to prisoner doctors, some of whom she considers collaborators (Hungarian doctor Miklos Nyiszli, who was Mengele’s research assistant) while others acted to reduce the misery of fellow prisoners (Berlin physician Dr. Lucie Adelsberger, who ‘‘practiced’’ in Birkenau). Prisoner doctors, of course, faced a spectrum of moral dilemmas—for example, choosing to assist Nazi doctors to save themselves from hunger and...