Cleansing
the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene
by Gotz Aly,Peter Chroust,
Christian Pross, Belinda Cooper (Translator)
Foreword by Michael
H. Kater
ALL the world knows of Adolf Hitler and the
atrocities committed under his leadership during the Nazi era. But were
he and his small band of accomplices alone? Psychiatrists supplied the
flawed theories and ideas of eugenics and biochemistry which provided the
justification for wholesale slaughter of the "inferior". Timely reading
because modern psychiatry is treading down the same path once again - forgetting
about healing and concentrating instead on biology, genetics, and brain
chemistry. All concepts of humanity become lost amidst the insane "scientific
impulse for knowledge" to "improve the genetic stock" of certain assumed
to be "better and more deserving races".
Synopsis
The authors argue that racial
hygiene was a consensus value within the German medical profession, serving
to reform treatment for the curable and to justify murder of the incurable.
{According to the authors} few German physicians protested against euthanasia;
many who did participate went on to distinguished postwar medical careers."
Reviews and Commentary
From The Publisher:
"The chapters in this volume
painfully drive home the point that certainly as far as Germany is concerned,
the lessons of the Third Reich have not yet been learned.... These significant
attempts by younger recruits to the 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 the Foreword
From J.R. White - Choice:
This book contains translations
of scholarly articles and edited primary sources - diary extracts by anatomist
Hermann Voss (Univ. of Posen) and letters by euthanasia participant Friedrich
Mennecke to his wife. Both well illustrate the work's thesis. The journal
Beitrage
zur Nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits - und Sozialpolitik,
which Aly edits, originally published most of the contributions (1985-87)...
Illustrations are excellent, but several criticisms are in order. Aly denies
the racist content of eugenics, although physicians and Nazis saw themselves
as improving German racial stock, both through better medical care and
mass murder.
From A.J. Nicholls - The Times Literary
Supplement:
{The authors} illustrate the
continuities between eugenically inclined medical practice before 1933
and its more sinister development in the Third Reich. They also point to
the extent to which apparently respectable medical authorities... collaborated
with the euthanasia programme to further their own research.
From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers Weekly:
It's no wonder this book caused
a flurry when first published in Germany. The authors, who are German,
offer compelling evidence that the 350 doctors tried at Nuremberg in 1946-47
were not the so-called black sheep of the German medical profession, but
rather a small part of a much larger group of doctors, university professors,
scientists and researchers involved in medical crimes. The authors draw
their chilling conclusions directly from the archives of mental institutions,
hospitals and experimentation centers. An abundance of evidence, sometimes
absorbing, sometimes overwhelming, demonstrates how the Nazis employed
medicine to "cleanse" Germany of the "sick, alien, and disturbing" - a
goal firmly supported by the intelligentsia. By 1939, euthanasia was the
method ordained by the Nazis to eliminate the infirm, mentally ill, socially
or racially "inferior" and anyone unable to work. Hundreds of thousands,
including children, were killed while medical professionals profited. Dr.
Hermann Voss, chief anatomist at the Reich University of Posen, turned
a handsome profit on the sale of the skeletons and skulls of dead Poles.
His diary is an illustration of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, "Yesterday,
two wagons full of Polish ashes were taken away. Outside my office, the
robinias are blooming beautifully, just as in Leipzig." Much of this information,
which was available at the end of WW II, was suppressed because many of
those involved in these heinous crimes still hold leading positions.
Readers may be driven to examine their own beliefs concerning the benefits
of doctor-assisted suicide, when confronted with a society that takes this
seemingly benign idea and turns it into a great evil.
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