Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine)

Rating:
Summary: Dangers of a Technocratic Elite
Review: Paul Weindling's work will take it's place with the best descriptions of pre-Nazi and Nazi policies leading to genocide. But be prepared to have your preconceived notions challenged. Weindling clearly portrays pre-Nazi Germany as a nation already in the grips of a racist and social elitist ideology-an ideology searching for the perfect man. He traces the growth of a national health movement bent on remolding man into the image of the bureaucratic technotronic elites which managed the programs. Ideas of Racial and Social Health merge with the slippery slop of Social Darwinianism to produce one of the most frightening pictures of modern history. As German researchers and medical officials plunged headlong on their reckless pursuit for perfection, no stone was left unturned. Every avenue of approach, no matter how strange or twisted, was explored. Every institution in Germany was gradually brought under the total manipulation of government health and social bureaucrats determined to transform society. By the 1920s the machinery was in place which would allow the Nazis to rule as they did. This work is not for the timid reader. It is a serious piece of scholarship and must reading for anyone trying to understand how average Germans could submit to the Nazi horror.