My own private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's secret history of modernity

developed their genocidal methods, inventing and refining the techniques of transportation, selection and gassing, and the schemes of subterfuge used to hide these atrocities from relatives and potential pockets of opposition. To demonstrate the "intimate connections" between these two programmes, Friedlander chronicles the various stages in the Nazi campaigns against their most helpless victims, children and the mentally ill, whose tragic stories he sensitively narrates. He also spends considerable time on the identities, backgrounds and motivations of the perpetrators, often pointing out generational, social and psychological similarities. His attempt to deal with both sets of atrocities in the same framework is admirable, as is the attention Friedlander gives to relatively neglected groups, such as "Gypsies" and, in particular, "handicapped" Jews. He impressively incorporates a wealth of primary research into a tight and cogently argued study. However, Friedlander's central thesis imposes limitations on the material and at times seems overstated. Unlike Michael Burleigh, whose outstanding book on German "euthanasia" appeared one year earlier, Friedlander shows little interest in the economic roots of Nazi medical policy or in the prehistory of euthanasia in the Weimar era psychiatric reform movement. Determined to point out the connections between euthanasia and genocide, he offers too narrow an account of the origins of the "final solution". That the path to Auschwitz was "twisted" and was reached by trial and error-as Karl Schleunes so convincingly demonstrated-seems to contradict Friedlander's claims, which ignore such causative considerations as the impact of the war on Nazi racial policy or the strength of anti-Semitic sentiment in the German population. Finally, the book is plagued by an even more significant problem. Friedlander argues against the notion of "medicalized killing", repeatedly insisting that the murderous campaigns had little to do with medicine, and that doctors' constant presence at gassings was merely incidental. That the physicians who staffed the killing centres had medical degrees is, he asserts, "quite beside the point" (p. 219). Moreover, he sets out to show that Nazi eugenics "lacked a true scientific basis" and represented "scientific fraud" (p. 126). With statements like these, Friedlander seems to miss one of the essential points of this story. Indeed, as shown by Robert Proctor in 1989 and by many others subsequently, Nazi programmes against racial minorities and the disabled represented not a vulgar politicization of science, but rather the realization of ideas furthered by many of the leading scientists of the period. Friedlander …