Undue risk: secret state experiments on humans

informative book Medizin im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Arbeitsbuch in 1980, when the subsequent years saw him being driven out of the profession and into private scholarship. Not surprisingly, despite its bold title, Medizin und Verbrechen is not really about medicine and crimes in general, but on the peculiar entanglement of the two during the years of National Socialism. It is not a Festschrift in the usual sense either, but rather a homage of friends, currently active scholars, and people who have been witnesses of East and West Germany's reluctance to find out about, face and prosecute medical crimes committed under National Socialism. An objection to the volume could be that an assessment under the heading of "crimes" sets a fairly narrow frame for the history of medicine in the National Socialist period: it leaves aside questions about the transformation of "normal" science and medicine in the era that are quite essential, for example, in the recent re-evaluation of the history of the Kaiser-WilhelmGesellschaft. Still, the editor Christoph Kopke has assembled an interesting and well rounded volume. An opening essay on Wuttke's career by the Ulm psychiatrist Friedemann Pfafflin is followed by a series of papers that mostly document recent or almost recent research. Heinz Faulstich gives a shorter version of his work on starvation in German psychiatric asylums, Thomas Oleschlager writes on the relationship between racial hygiene and abortions, Susanne Hahn on geriatric care, Annette Schafer on conscript labour, Achim Thom on National Socialist science policy and cancer research, Gunther Grau on medical evaluations of homosexuality, Christoph Kopke provides a biographical sketch of the Nazi-physician Ernst Gunther Schenck, Klaus Drobisch writes on medical crimes in early (pre-1937) concentration camps, Claudia Schoppmann on lesbian women in concentration camps, the editor Kopke and Gerhardt Schultz on criminal experimentation with chemical weapons (Lost), and finally Karl-Heinz Roth and Angelika Ebbinghaus on surgical experiments in the camps. The volume closes with two remarkable contributions on the post-war prosecution of medical crimes in East and West Germany. Both are written by two formerly active prosecuting attorneys from both states, Willi Dressen and Gunther Wieland. They offer a fascinating combination of historical expertise and witness account. Dressen's contribution in particular gives a truly chilling picture of the 1960s and 1970s when, in the West, attempts at legal prosecution met with stiff resistance from medical and political elites. Even if not all the research presented in the volume is entirely new, most of the contributions are research based and many of them display a high awareness not only for Nazi doctors, but for their victims. What is equally remarkable is that the still very different research traditions of East and West Germany are present. Completed with a select bibliography of Wuttke's works and an index, the volume does certainly live up to the occasion.