[PDF]"Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices, Legacies" (2002) ⚕️

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DICINE AND


MEDICAL ETHICS
in NAZI GERMANY



EDITED BY

FRANCIS R. NICOSIA
and JONATHAN HUENER


























































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OLIVER*WENDELL*HOLMES


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JAMES C. GRAHAM FUND














Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany




Medicine and Medical Ethics
in Nazi Germany

- OvSSD -

Origins, Practices, Legacies


Edited by

Francis R. Nicosia

and

Jonathan Huener



Berghahn Books

NEW YORK • OXFORD

JAN 2 1 2003



WO-Z)



Published in 2002 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2002 The Center for Holocaust Studies at
the University of Vermont

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Medicine and medical ethics in Nazi Germany : origins, practices, legacies
edited by Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57181-386-1 (alk. paper) ISBN 1-57181-387-X
(alk. paper: pbk.)

1. Medicine—Germany—History—1933—1945. 2. Medical
ethics—Germany—History—1933-1945. 3. World War, 1939-
1945—Atrocities. 4. National socialism—Moral and ethical aspects.
I. Nicosia, Francis R., 1944— II. Huener, Jonathan.

R510 .M385 2001
6l0'.943’09043-dc21

2001037996


British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.


Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.


Contents


Preface v i

Introduction: Nazi Medicine in Historiographical Context 1

Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener

1. The Ideology of Elimination: American and German

Eugenics, 1900-1945 13

Garland E. Allen

2. The Nazi Campaign against Tobacco: Science in a

Totalitarian State 40

Robert N. Proctor

3. Physicians as Killers in Nazi Germany: Hadamar,

Treblinka, and Auschwitz 59

Henry Friedlander

4. Criminal Physicians in the Third Reich: Toward a

Group Portrait 77

Michael H. Kater

5. Pathology of Memory: German Medical Science and

the Crimes of the Third Reich 93

William E. Seidelman

6. The Legacy of Nazi Medicine in Context 112

Michael Burleigh

Appendix 128

Contributors 140

Selected Bibliography 142

Index 151


V


Preface


THE FIRST FIVE ESSAYS in this volume are based on the lectures given
by five internationally renowned scholars at the Miller Symposium
on the theme of “German Medicine and Ethics under National
Socialism,” held at the University of Vermont in April 2000. In the
fall of 1998, several members of the advisory board of the Center for
Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, most prominently
Professor Emeritus Arthur Kunin, M.D., initiated plans for a sympo¬
sium centered on issues and controversies related to the practice of
medicine, the medical profession, and medical ethics in the years of
the Third Reich.

Established with the goal of honoring the scholarly and pedagogical
contributions of Professor Raul Hilberg, who served on the faculty of
the University of Vermont for more than three decades, the Center for
Holocaust Studies remains committed to furthering the cause of Holo¬
caust education and serving as a forum for the presentation and dis¬
cussion of new perspectives on the history of Nazi Germany and its
crimes. As is so often the case, our exploration of controversial and
insufficiendy charted territory in the history of National Socialism and
its crimes begins, and returns to, the orientation and compass that Pro¬
fessor Hilbergs pioneering work in the field provides.

The Miller Symposium was one such effort and, with the support
and cooperation of the University of Vermont College of Medicine, was
designed to address several of the most critical issues in the study of
Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Among these issues are the place of
the Holocaust in the larger context of eugenic and racial research; the
motivations and roles of some of the most important perpetrators of
Nazi crimes, namely, the German scientific and medical establishment;
the forms of racial and medical research undertaken with the support
of and in the name of the Nazi state; the multiplicity of victims of Nazi
persecution and murder; and the impact and legacy of the eugenics


- VI -


Preface


movement and Nazi medicine on physicians and the practice of medi¬
cine since World War II.

Confronting these issues from a variety of disciplinary and method¬
ological perspectives, the individual essays contained herein are based
on the authors’ original scholarship. They introduce the reader to the
foundations of Nazi medicine in racial and eugenic research in Ger¬
many and elsewhere, and ground German medical practice and
research in the regimes racial ideology. Moreover, they describe some
of the murderous forms that medical practice took, accounting all the
while for the motivations and complicity of the medical establishment
in the crimes of National Socialism. Finally, these essays confront the
complex and troubling legacy of medicine in the Third Reich, as they
direct our attention to current debates over the nature and course of
research in genetics and biotechnology. In its entirety, this volume is
intended to offer the reader a brief, yet focused introduction to this
controversial subject area, and is suitable for undergraduate and gradu¬
ate students; for students in the fields of history, medicine, philosophy,
ethics, and the sciences; and for the general reader interested in the his¬
tory of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

Neither the symposium itself nor this volume would have been pos¬
sible without Leonard and Carolyn Miller, whose generous support and
engagement have helped to sustain and expand the programming of the
Center for Holocaust Studies in recent years. It is therefore only fitting
that this symposium bears their name. Recognition and thanks are also
due to the College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, the Uni¬
versity of Vermont Department of History Nelson Grant for Faculty
Development, Kathy Johnson of the Center for Holocaust Studies,
Wolfgang Mieder, and the symposiums organizing committee, which
included Nancy Gallagher, Martin Koplewitz, Roy Korson, Arthur
Kunin, David Scrase, and the editors of this volume. Finally, the editors
especially wish to thank Michael Burleigh of Cardiff University for his
concluding essay. His path-breaking scholarly works on this topic are
well known, and his observations here, the reader will undoubtedly
agree, are both provocative and synthetic. They serve to guide and chal¬
lenge us as we consider the historiographical relevance and moral impli¬
cations of the issues raised in this volume.


— vu -



Introduction

Nazi Medicine in Historiographical Context


- eso -

Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener


IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the
category of perpetrators of Nazi crimes against Jews and other victims
has evolved and expanded considerably during the decades since the end
of World War II. Gerald Reitlingers The Final Solution: The Attempt to
Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939—1945, 1 published in 1953 and
based largely on the documents used by Allied prosecutors against
major Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946, naturally
identified Hider and top officials of the Nazi Party and the state during
the Third Reich as the perpetrators of Nazi crimes. Raul Hilbergs
groundbreaking work The Destruction of the European Jews , 2 published
in 1961, was the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust based on
the massive documentation available to Western scholars beginning in
the 1950s. Its focus on the administrative and bureaucratic process of
genocide came at a time when the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem
and the subsequent publication of Hannah Arendts Eichmann in
Jerusalem’ focused attention on this quintessential SS bureaucrat.

These events expanded the definition of perpetrators to include those
in the Nazi state apparatus who, like Eichmann, operated just below the
top military, civilian, and SS officials named and prosecuted just after
the war. This redefinition was followed by trials before a West German
court in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965 of SS personnel who had worked
at Auschwitz during World War II. For almost twenty years thereafter,
perpetrators of Nazi crimes were typically considered to be Hitler, his
top military and civilian lieutenants, and some of their subordinates in


- 1 -



Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener


the party, state, and police bureaucracy, all motivated more or less by
Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism on the one hand, career opportunities
presented by the regime and its policies on the other, or some combi¬
nation of both.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the concept of Nazi perpetra¬
tors has expanded considerably. Historians have endeavored increas¬
ingly to write history “from the bottom up, within a context of
sociological, economic, and psychological analysis of “ordinary Ger¬
mans,” their opinions and attitudes under Nazi rule, and their role in
the persecution and extermination of Jews and other victims. Interest
has turned to the extent to which ordinary and not so ordinary citi¬
zens—people who were not Nazi ideologues or true believers, or indi¬
viduals with positions of authority in the bureaucracy, the party, or the
military—were complicit in Nazi crimes. The effort over the past
twenty years has produced a wealth of scholarship that has greatly
expanded our understanding of the human catastrophe that was the
Third Reich.

Addressing trends and opinions in the German population at large,
Marlis Steinert’s Hitler’s War and the Germans: Public Mood and Atti¬
tude during the Second World War, published in 1977, was followed in
the 1980s by Ian Kershaw’s Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the
Third Reich: Bavaria and Sarah Gordon’s Hitler, Germans and the “Jew¬
ish Question, ’’which considered the popular reactions of ordinary Ger¬
mans to anti-Semitism and Nazi policies toward the Jews. 4 Detlev
Peukert’s Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in
Everyday Life characterized everyday life in Nazi Germany as running
the gamut from consent to accommodation to nonconformity. 5 In the
1990s, consideration of “ordinary Germans” was focused more on their
attitudes and role in the “final solution” with the publication of several
works important both for their scholarly contributions and their con¬
troversial nature. David Bankier’s The Germans and the Final Solution:
Public Opinion under Nazism concluded that indifference rather than a
lust for murder characterized the German public attitude toward the
Jews and the Jewish policy of the Nazi regime. 6 This focus on the atti¬
tudes and actions of ordinary people climaxed with the publication of
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101
and the Final Solution in Poland 7 in 1992, followed four years later by
the appearance of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Execution¬
ers: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust* Omer Bartov’s Hitler’s Army:
Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich appeared in 1991, and the


-2-


Introduction


controversial touring exhibition of the Hamburg Institute for Social
Research on the German army’s role in the Nazi genocide was pub¬
lished in book form in English translation in 1999. 9 Brownings micro¬
history of one reserve police battalion and both the Bartov book and
the Hamburg exhibit on the German army demonstrate the capacity of
“ordinary men”—in the Order Police and in the regular army, respec¬
tively—to commit mass murder. Goldhagen goes so far as to claim that
this capacity was typical of virtually all Germans because it was inher¬
ent in a broadly accepted, annihilationist German anti-Semitism.

Somewhere between Hitler and high-ranking officials of the Nazi
state and party on the one hand, and ordinary German citizens inside
and outside the police and the military on the other, we confront the
thousands of perpetrators in the professions: industrialists and busi¬
nessmen, scholars and teachers, lawyers and judges, artists, and scien¬
tists and physicians. Of course, these people were not “ordinary” in the
same sense that most police and soldiers may have been; the profes¬
sionals were, after all, the best-educated members of German society.
Many occupied positions of enormous prestige and influence in the life
of the nation, and some even had access to high offices of the state. But
like those more commonly considered “ordinary” in the literature, pro¬
fessionals generally did not formulate state policy; rather, they were
often co-opted by the state to implement policy, first in Germany and
later throughout Europe.

Over the past generation, scholars have considered the attitudes and
roles of Germany’s most educated and talented citizens, its profession¬
als in the worlds of business and industry, the arts, education and aca¬
demia, science, and medicine. Certainly, an early exception to this time
line is Max Weinreich’s Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Ger¬
many’s Crimes against the Jewish People . 10 Published in 1946, it is a study
that faults German scholarship for providing the ideas, techniques, and
justification for Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity. But it was
not until the last two decades of the twentieth century that scholars
turned their full attention to the subject of the professions and their
role in the crimes of the Third Reich. Studies of German industry in
the Third Reich during these years range from Joseph Borkin’s The
Crime and Punishment ofIG Farben: The Unholy Alliance of Adolf Hitler
and Germany’s Great Chemical Combine, to Peter Hayes’s Industry and
Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, to Neil Gregor’s recent Daimler
Benz in the Third Reich. 11 Most recently, the arts and the role of artists
and historians in Nazi Germany have became the subject of scrutiny by


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Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener


scholars with the publication of works such as Alan Steinweiss Art, Ide¬
ology and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music,
Theater and the Visual Arts , Michael Kater’s The Twisted Muse: Musi¬
cians and Their Music in the Third Reich, and the collection of papers
on German historians in the Third Reich edited by Winfried Schulze
and Otto Gerhard Oexle, Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus . 12
Important studies on science and the role of scientists in the Nazi state
and society have included Alan Beyerchens Scientists under Hitler: Pol¬
itics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich, Kristie Macrakiss
Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany, and Ute
Deichmanns Biologists under HitlerP

Complicity in or indifference to the crimes of the Nazi state by some
of the most educated people in German society is unquestionably one
of the most disturbing issues that students of Nazi Germany and the
Holocaust must confront. The most troubling example of highly edu¬
cated professionals acting as perpetrators in this context is certainly the
medical establishment. Trained to care for the sick, relieve suffering,
and save lives, some physicians withheld care, inflicted pain by experi¬
menting on human subjects, and committed murder. Of those who did
not participate in such crimes, most were indifferent or acquiescent to
the behavior of their colleagues and the suffering of their colleagues
victims. Physicians and others in the medical professions became some
of the most lethal perpetrators of Nazi crimes.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the publication of major studies of the
German medical profession during the Nazi period. Robert Jay Lifton
published The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Geno¬
cide, the first in-depth study of the complicity of leading German
physicians in systematic mass murder. 14 This was followed in quick suc¬
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