The Nazi War on Cancer

Abstract

Collaboration in Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The euthanasia of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of the unfit. Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler's warped quest to create a German master race. The author of this text, Robert Proctor, made discovery however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible. Most startling of all, he argues, Nazi scientists were first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Proctor explores controversial and troubling questions that such findings raise: were Nazis more complext morally than we thought? Can good science come from an evil regime? What might this reveal about health activism in our own society? Proctor argues that we must view Hitler's Germany more subtly than we have in past. But he also concludes that Nazis' forward-looking health activism ultimately came from same twisted root as their medical crimes: ideal of a sanitary racial utopia reserved exclusively for pure and healthy Germans.

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