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Summary: For the last time, there were no gas chambers
Review: Anyone conducting serious research into the so-called "final solution" will find that while Nazi Doctors DID commit horrendous acts against helpless subjects, and should be rightfully villified, there were absolutely NO GAS CHAMBERS at Auschwitz or any other camp. Look at the pictures of this so-called gas chamber at [...], and tell me who would work in this place to gas human beings? They would die along with the prisoners! There were no seals on the doors and the crematorium was adjacent to the room with no barriers of any sort! Did you know that the commendant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoss, was tortured and deprived of sleep and admitted to "crimes" that were patently impossible? That the old story of his wife having lampshades made of human skin were a fabrication? That the story of the germans making soap out of jew fat is absurd and admittedly, even by jewish authorities, false? The sign that used to read that 4 million had perished at Auschwitz now reads 1.0 million, which will probably be downgraded to 750,000 or less soon. Which is it, 6 or 2 million, or even less? How many (like Anne Frank) died of Typhus? Are my views popular? Am I a Nazi supporter? Of course not! But popularity is less important to me than the truth.
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Summary: NOTHING HAS CHANGED UNDER DEMOCRACY..
Review: Fascinating looks at the psychological make up of some of the most infamous people who, in absolute hatred of Jews and other so called undesirables, committed unforgivable crimes against humanity during the Second World War. The author gives a good case study of each of these doctors, and attempts to give an explanation as to why they believed their experiments were in the name of medical research. Chilling but real.
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Summary: Not for the faint of Heart
Review: I heard many stories about the Nazi Doctors in the war but I had always wondered why they were the way they were and how could they live with themselves. Well this book gave a pretty good explanation on how these Doctors were. I found each of the Doctors facinating and peculiar in their own manner.I was surprised that the Doctors did all the selecting and treated the people as cattle. They thought they were being the least cruel in this manner because the people suffered less. I also learned that typhus was one of the biggest diseases at the time. It was interesting to find out that only 15% of the people even had a chance to survive and the rest went straight to the gas chambers. Some of the Doctors were vicious while others were able to get away with not being cruel and inhuman. I have to admit I thought Mengele was quite a character in the way that he treated people. He thought he was so superior and the story of the eyes that people had that were different colors that he set out to other colleges in Germany, well that was pretty twisted. Also the part about him asking the kids if they wanted a ride in his car and he would drive them to the gas chambers was pretty psycho. Overall this was a well written book but it was also very graphic so you should take care when you decide to read this one.
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Summary: Very Fair Author
Review: Mr. Lifton is amazingly fair in trying to view the action of the Nazi doctors from their point of view. I was very impressed with his fairness. This is one of the first books on the holocaust that I read and it made my mind hungry for more information. It answered alot of my first questions about the holocaust in the first of the book. How they came to have such power to kill based only upon race. Then he goes on to speak of the doctors personaly; giving some background information on them and what "function" they performed in the consentration camps, along with some stories about them. It was a great read and now I am less ignorant of what happened during the holocaust.
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Summary: A Book About Us
Review: The Nazi Doctors is not about the dark side of war; it is about us. Given the proper circumstance, many of us are capable of acts of extreme callousness and cruelty. This is the important message of the book.
The Nazi Doctors could alert us to the fact that our rational explanations for our actions always need close scrutiny by others and ourselves when our actions entail harming others. In the case of the doctors choosing who would live and who would die at Auschwitz, the explanation was that the health of the German people would be enhanced by the extermination of the Jews; thus, these doctors were 'treating' the German people and assuring the Reich's health.
I was struck by the similarities between the argument used by the Nazi doctors to justify the mass murder and the argument used today by vivisectors to justify hurting and killing monkeys and other animals in the name of medical advancement.
I doubt that most readers will consider such parallels, but to the informed reader the similarities will be stark and poignant.
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Summary: a powerful exploration of institutionalized cruelty
Review: This book explores the question of how doctors, who are sworn to do no harm, became the integral organizers and managers of the Nazi death camps. Through exhaustive interviews with these doctors, people who knew them, and camp survivors, Lifton arrives at more than just individual psychological profiles of these professional killers. He presents us rather with a dense, psychosocial exploration of the dynamics of state-organized terror, along with enough history to describe the milieu in which these dynamics evolved. (Many people will be surprised to discover that the eugenics movement, which fueled the Nazi terror, had a large following in the United States during the 1930's.) The book reads like a novel in parts (especially the chapter on Josef Megele). However, I found the introduction one of the most interesting sections; in it Lifton describes the process he went through to gather and analyze his data. This included interviewing ex-Nazi doctors, who suspected or knew outright that Lifton himself is Jewish. Lifton's descriptions of the little verbal dances he and these doctors did around the German/Jewish conflict are fascinating.....For obvious reasons this book is not an "easy read," despite the quality of the writing. It will literally give you bad dreams. However, those dreams will spring from the collective human experience which we all share. For that reason this book is important to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, flawed book
Review: This book is a must for anyone interested in the direct psycho-social and material circumstances of the Final Solution--an enterprise that most people have found awesomely cruel. Like Arendt's _Eichmann in Jerusalem,_ _The Nazi Doctors_ attempts to demystify the motives of Holocaust perpetrators--in this case SS doctors and medical workers--and ends up contributing greatly to a modern, enlightened, psychological understanding of "evil." The formalization of Lifton's extensive research is probably what will continue to bring new readers to _The Nazi Doctors_. Despite the importance and persuasiveness of his overall thesis (that "medicalized killing" played an essential and often overlooked role in the Holocaust), Lifton's psychological theorizing about the etiology of individual doctors' behavior is usually either obvious or, if not obvious, simple. Of course there is no harm in stating simple ideas or facts, especially if they are new or have been overlooked. There is no harm, either, in stating the obvious: of course there are those to whom it isn't yet obvious. But this book states and restates basic psychological theories, and then summarizes its statements and restatements. For example, Lifton points to, among other things, a sort of psychological "doubling" phenomenon that took place in the personalities of Auschwitz doctors--most of whom began life as relatively normal people. This doubling allowed them to separate the non-murderous versions of themselves--the family men, the husbands, the fathers--from the men who felt compelled by circumstance or duty or some deviant inner need to conduct selections, murders, cruel pseudoscientific experiments, etc., on innocent people. While certainly true, it's a simple idea and could have been stated in far fewer pages and invoked far less often without thwarting the author's ends. It is Lifton's application of the idea, rather than the idea itself, which is original. The fact that he goes on for so long explaining such things makes the book seem bloated. This is a terrible injustice to his research. An added weakness for ostentatiously academic formulations makes Lifton seem at times almost unsure of the book's importance. I suppose the thing among career academics is to make a name with novel ideas. Though Lifton clearly succeeds in accomplishing a lot more than that, one can't help but feel subjected to a secondary effort to satisfy a tenure board. (The book was written in the mid-eighties, as straightforwardness was first being widely discouraged by the mainstream academy.) The real core of the book, for these reasons, is the unself-conscious, highly instructive, and direct middle section documenting the careers of Nazi doctors, among them Mengele and Wirths. Even the prose style in this section seems strikingly fluent in comparison with the rest of the book.
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Summary: Not deep enough
Review: This book is based on direct interviews with a number of Nazi Doctors, but rarely quotes from them. It covers a wide range of issues, but delves deeply into few of them. It purports to be a pyschological insight into why the Nazi doctors did what they did, and how the psychological mechanisms worked that allowed them to operate. Though Lifton is a Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, I didn't find his explanations particularly insightful. He repeats a few key ideas often, without going into how these mechanisms work. Instead, he fills the book with detail of what they did. On balance, it added little to my understanding of the subject. The detail of what the Nazi Doctors did is readily available elsewhere. I was hoping to find first hand accounts, of which very little was included, and psychological insights. Perhaps it would have been more useful if he had covered fewer people and situations in more depth, with more analysis. He actually spoke to these people, but the book mostly reads as drily as any history book. Disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: This is a fascinating look not only at what the Nazi doctors did during the reign of the Third Reich but also how they perceived what they were doing and the legislative precedents that culminated in the general acceptance of medicalised killing by many German doctors.
The book is easy to read. Whilst it is a factual account, it still flows with the continuity of a novel making it hard to put down.
Informative and fascinating. Well worth a read and makes you realise the importance of global medical ethical debate as its absence in pre-war Germany, most certainly contributed to the precedents that allowed legalised genocide.
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Summary: Good but no objective
Review: This was a all around informative book. I enjoyed reading it and it changed my perspective of the Nazis. It just proves my theory that this is what happens when you take yourself to seriously. It just amazes me that these were doctor and yet they still never used common sense. As the narrative goes, it is well written and thought out. He interviewed numerous doctor and survivors and amassed a large enough fact to construct a clear recount of the concentration camps. At most though this is a history book and most defitinely not a psychology book. Yes the author makes evaluations and tries to explain but it is very poor. He'll state an event and then throw in his two sense about what was going on. Everything is objective till he expresses his opinion and then it becomes boring. He is jewish but that doesn't mean that he couldn't of written an objective account. He simple doesn't try. He acts like he is compeled to speak his mind, almost ruining the entire chapter you had just read. I give him a five as a historian but a two in his opinions.
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