The Nazi Doctors

Doctors of Infamy; the Story of the Nazi Medical Crimes

How often have I thought to look at the patient's antecubital spaces to check on his story of never having had any "blood treatment"? Yet, the "scar at the bend of the elbow from faulty arsenical injections" may be more objective than the patient's memory. Just as we are beginning to think we can answer all the questions, a woman comes in because of inflammation of the right hand (she is right-...

Physicians and torture: lessons from the Nazi doctors

How is it possible? What are the personal, professional and political contexts that allow physicians to use their skills to torture and kill rather than heal? What are the psychological characteristics and the social, cultural and political factors that predispose physicians to participate in human rights abuses? What can be done to recognize at-risk situations and attempt to provide corrective...

Breaking through the postwar coverup of Nazi doctors in Germany.

When a dictatorial regime collapses the former power elite, the perpetrators, helpers and collaborators of the old regime do not vanish but, as history has repeatedly shown, manage to survive quite agreeably. This survival is made the more likely by the fact that many of them are, or make themselves, irreplaceable and indispensable as professionals. Such was the situation in Germany after the l...

The Nazi doctors trial and the international prohibition on medical involvement in torture.

The Nazi Cosmetic: Nazi Aesthetics in Action and the Practice of Medicine in Nazi Germany

This paper examines the conflation of vital and aesthetic norms in the practice of Nazi medicine, and eugenic practices. It argues that biological holism, though it served as the vehicle of Nazi ideology historically, did so contingently. The anti-totalitarian thinking of biological holist Kurt Goldstein speaks against the irrevocable use of biological holism to promote Nazi ideologies.