Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (review)

Michael Burleigh’s span is a wide one, but with his early training in late medieval German history and his expertise on Nazi Germany, he can afford to forge connections where other scholars would be much at risk. This is precisely what he has done in this collection of his own essays—starting with German nationalist historians’ treatment (such as Albert Brackmann’s) of Eastern colonization by Teutonic Knights, and finishing with recent interpretations of the Holocaust. In between there are essays on the atrocious side of the German-Soviet war (a long piece that threatens to throw the others off balance), the German churches and euthanasia, Nazi Germany as a racial polity, and the Final Solution as a tool of Nazi geopolitical planning.

Two comments are in order here. First, anthologies that throw seemingly unrelated papers by a single author together for the sake of making a new book may be suspect, and the intention is sometimes all too obvious, especially in the case of less-than-convincingly-mature scholars. But in this particular case, Burleigh knows what he is doing, because he is very sure what he is talking about. He has already given us authoritative treatises on the Nazi scholarly preoccupation with Ostforschung, that curious branch of German science and scholarship claiming to provide justification for aggressive imperialism in the European East. ¹ Some years ago, when I reviewed his book on this topic, which contained the names of some of my own German teachers at the University of Heidelberg (as does the present volume), I thought it a truly pioneering work. Burleigh has also written convincingly on processes that redefined life in Nazi Germany in purely racial terms, so that today we would call them “racist.” ² And not least, he is an expert on euthanasia under the Nazis, as his penultimate book shows. ³ Hence he is in a logical position to tie important phenomena together and to make the reader see the much larger canvas—from the Teutonic Knights to Hitler, if you will—thus placing the Holocaust in a wider historical context than any myopic Goldhagen could ever have done.

Burleigh’s book on euthanasia brings me to my second point. The history of Germany, culminating, at its worst, in the Holocaust, from much earlier stages on may be seen as a history of nationalist, social hygienics—a giant cleansing process that has a large and significant medical side to it. It is this aspect that makes an anthology like Burleigh’s eminently reviewable in the leading international journal of the history of medicine. German physicians took the concept of blood literally in a physiological sense, when Hitler told them that “good race” was equal to “good blood,” and vice versa. Some Nazi physicians really did believe that the blood running through a Jew’s veins could be clinically demonstrated to be different from that in an “Aryan”’s veins. This criminal hogwash was the result, through a process of intellectual-historical perversion, of the racial-cleansing attitude that Germans adopted at the time when they were attempting to extinguish or enslave the Slavs (“slaves”) of the European East. Hence established professors like Brackmann were intellectual handmaidens, and the Final Solution was the logical finale of that process—and Burleigh is right to treat both (and related phenomena) in context. I say this, notwithstanding the fact that once again Cambridge University Press (or the author himself) could have taken greater care in proofreading the pages and getting rid of annoying spelling and printing mistakes, especially in the original German.