Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race

Rating:
Summary: Hitler's Professors
Review: This important book examines the medical and biological roots of Nazi Germany's campaign to rid itself of those deemed to be a threat to its biological health. Consisting of seven essays and 270 illustrations--photographs, images from Nazi publications, and historical artifacts--it describes how the Nazi regime enacted "racial hygiene" programs designed to purge German society of those it considered physically, mentally, and racially unfit.

The first four essays are by Sheila Faith Weiss ("German Eugenics, 1890-1933"), Daniel Kevles ("International Eugenics"), Gisela Bock ("Nazi Sterilization"), and Benoit Massin ("The 'Science of Race'").

The fifth essay--"Nazi 'Euthanasia' Programs" by Michael Burleigh'--describes the secret campaign Hitler launched in 1939 to rid Germany of those it declared mentally and physically unfit ("life unworthy of life"). The campaign began with the use of sedative overdoses, morphine injections, and starvation to kill children in hospitals. The "euthanasia" program then expanded to include adults who were gassed in specially built chambers at six killing centers inside the Third Reich--Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, and Sonnenstein in Germany and Hartheim in Austria.

In the sixth essay--"From 'Euthanasia' to the 'Final Solution'"--Henry Friedlander writes about how the Nazi murder of Germans judged physically and mentally unfit paved the way for the extermination of Jews in Poland. When Hitler ended the official phase of the euthanasia program in 1941 (the killings continued unofficially), much of the program's personnel and equipment were sent to Poland to set up and operate the Operation Reinhard death camps--Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor.

Many historians consider the mass killings of Jews in the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion as the beginning of the Final Solution, but Friedlander argues that the killing of Jewish disabled patients in Germany and German-occupied Poland in 1940 just because they were Jews was an even earlier starting point.

The book concludes with "Reflections of a German Scientist" by Benno Müller-Hill, who describes the "contagious mix of science with ideology that was so very destructive" during the Nazi era. He writes that after the war there was virtually total silence about what science and, more specifically, genetics had wrought under the Nazis. When Karl Saller's critical book about anthropology during the Nazi period was published in 1961, his German colleagues shunned him. The silence in German scientific circles continued until 1980. "Today, when most of the perpetrators are dead," writes Müller-Hill, "the history of eugenics under the Nazis can finally be written."

This book, written in conjunction with the current exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, shows how German doctors, scientists, public health officials, and academic experts entrusted with the responsibility of enhancing and protecting life came instead to be agents of persecution and death.

--review by Dr. Charles Patterson, author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust