The Nazi War on Cancer (review)

Robert N. Proctor. The Nazi War on Cancer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. x + 380 pp. Ill. $29.95; £17.95.

Robert Proctor's new book is important for two reasons, a specific and a general one. Specifically, Proctor details the Nazi dictatorship's fight against a medically well defined nefarious disease, cancer. In general terms, he makes a significant statement about the interrelationship between politics and science when he writes that good science does not necessarily travel with good politics, and vice versa. I have recently studied the same phenomenon regarding politics and the arts, especially music.

Assiduously researched and well written, Proctor's book tells a fascinating tale: that the Nazis' attempt to defeat cancer was the most decisive and vigorous one then known to man; that German cancer research was the most advanced in the world by the time Hitler assumed power in 1933; and that the anticancer measures of the Nazi regime probably caused the disease to decline among the post-1945 German population. There is an enlightening section on industrial dyes and cancer, and Proctor relates that in Nazi Germany lead-lined toothpaste tubes were banned fifty years before a similar move in the United States. He points to obvious reasons why anticancer research would appeal especially to Nazi-attuned scientists, because "the mutation theory was attractive to eugenicists worrying about the corruption of the human genetic stock" (p. 61). Well informed as he is, Proctor always provides pre-1933 background, and his illustrations are exemplary.

I would debate some of the details regarding the broader canvas of the Third Reich, but none of these are serious enough to detract from the great value of this book. For example, Proctor overestimates the importance of Reich Health Leader Dr. Leonardo Conti, who was not, as he writes, the most powerful man in German medicine, and was even farther from being one of the most potent figures in all of Nazi Germany. On the contrary, Conti, for most of his career in the Third Reich after 1939, was locked in internecine and debilitating battles with other Reich and Party grandees, such as German Labor Front leader Dr. Robert Ley and, toward his last years, Reich Health Plenipotentiary Professor Karl Brandt, one of Hitler's own physicians. Workers were not, as Proctor suggests, regarded as valuable only while being productive; this underestimates the "socialism" in Nazism, and in particular ignores Ley's health and pension schemes for workers, which he wished to push through in conjunction with, but often in tactical opposition to, the increasingly fragile Conti. Himmler did not engage in the mass killing of Jews during the last weeks of the Third Reich--far from it: he sought a shabby peace with the world Jewish leadership through the good offices of Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, and for that reason stopped the killing machine for political reasons before he was actually forced to for technical ones. Proctor also writes that Nazi leaders, assumed to be paragons, paid a great deal of attention to what they ate and drank--but is this really so, in light of what we know about Göring's gourmand manners, Goebbels's noted lack of sensitivity toward food when dining, Himmler's obvious indifference to it, and the multifariously documented heavy drinking of Ley, Education Minister Bernhard Rust, Munich Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, and Supreme Stormtrooper Leader Viktor Lutze?

This brings me to my last point, which is not a criticism but constitutes the fruit of years of musing about the structure of the Third Reich. Proctor would appear to be an adherent of what Third Reich historians call the "intentionalist" school, which presupposes a monolithic sociopolitical structure under Hitler. This structure--so it makes eminent sense--would have been conducive to a vigorous and successful confrontation with cancer. In Proctor's view, German science underwent a streamlined development from the peak years in the 1920s into the 1930s and 1940s...