Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene

Abstract

chapters in this volume painfully drive home point that certainly as far as Germany is concerned, lessons of Third have not yet been learned...These significant attempts by younger recruits to larger medical establishment to change things through eye-opening reflection and analysis, however uncomfortable, need support.-Michael H. Kater, author of Doctors under Hitler, in foreword. The infamous Nuremberg Doctors' Trials of 1946-47 revealed horrifying crimes -ranging from grotesque medical experiments on humans to mass murder-committed by physicians and other health care workers in Nazi Germany. But far more common, argue authors of Cleansing Fatherland, were doctors who profited professionally and financially from but were never called to task-and, indeed, were actively shielded by colleagues in postwar German medical organizations. The authors examine role of German physicians in such infamous operations as T euthanasia program (code-named for Berlin address of its headquarters at Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse). They also reveal details of countless lesser known killings-all ordered by doctors and all in name of public health. Maladjusted adolescents, handicapped, foreign laborers too illto work, even German civilians who suffered mental breakdowns after air raids were selected for treatment. (One physician who persisted in speaking of killings was officially reprimanded for his negative attitude.) The book also includes original documents-never before published in English-that give unique and chilling insight into everyday workings of Nazi medicine. Among them: * Minutes from a 1940 meeting of Conference of German Mayors, at which a Nazi official gives assembled politicians detailed instructions for secret burial of murdered mental patients. * A pre-Nazi era questionnaire sent by head of a state mental institution to parents of disabled children. (Sample question: Would you agree to a painless shortening of your child's life after an expert had determined him incurably imbecilic? Sample answer: Yes, but I would prefer not to know.) * The diary of Dr. Hermann Voss, chief anatomist at Reichs University of Posen (and later a highly respected physician in postwar Germany), who delights in flowers blooming outside his window and worries that overstock of Polish cadavers from his Gestapo suppliers might cause his crematory oven to break down. * Letters of Dr. Friedrich Mennecke, director of notorious Eichberg Clinic, who writes with cloying sentimentality to wife he calls mommy and comments offhandedly about visiting concentration camps to select patients for death. Today, as reports of mass death in Europe are once again cast in terms of public hygiene, and as euthanasia is advocated-even applauded-on U.S. television, relevance of what Michael H.Kater here calls the lessons of Third Reich is perhaps greater than ever. Against this background, Cleansing Fatherland sends a stark message that is difficult to ignore.

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