The corruption of German medical science under the Nazi regime was institutional and rapid. Between 1933 and 1939, the German medical profession, formerly among the most internationally respected in Europe, was reorganised around the principles of racial hygiene. Doctors joined the Nazi Party at a higher rate than any other professional group: by 1942, approximately 45 per cent of German physicians were party members, against around 25 per cent of lawyers and around 6 per cent of teachers. The discipline of human genetics was redirected toward producing the racial evidence that justified state policies of forced sterilisation, marriage prohibition, and ultimately mass killing. The corruption was not the work of a small group of fanatics on the fringe of the profession. It was the work of the senior figures at the centre of it.
The intellectual foundations
The corruption did not begin with Hitler. The international eugenics movement of the early twentieth century had developed many of the key concepts: the classification of populations by racial fitness, the proposal of forced sterilisation of the unfit, the language of “lives unworthy of living”. These had been mainstream international scientific positions in the 1900s and 1910s. The Carnegie Institution had funded eugenics research in the United States; American state legislatures had passed forced-sterilisation laws (the first, in Indiana, in 1907); the British and German eugenics societies had exchanged personnel and ideas. The 1933 German Sterilisation Law, which authorised the forced sterilisation of around 400,000 people deemed hereditarily unfit between 1933 and 1945, was drafted partly with reference to existing American legal models.
What changed under the regime was not the underlying eugenic framework but the institutional and political context in which it was deployed. The German Society for Race Hygiene, founded in 1905, was reorganised in 1933 as a state-aligned body. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem, under the directorship of Eugen Fischer and from 1942 of Otmar von Verschuer, became a state research institute providing the theoretical underpinnings for the regime’s racial policy. Verschuer’s research assistant from 1937 to 1942 was Josef Mengele, who was sent to Auschwitz from May 1943 with a continuing research relationship to the Berlin institute and a supply of biological samples flowing back to it.
The professional reorganisation
The German medical profession was reorganised under the regime through three principal moves. The Reich Physicians’ Chamber (Reichsärztekammer) under Gerhard Wagner from 1936 became the compulsory professional body, expelled all Jewish doctors from medical practice by 1938 (around 7,000 of the approximately 50,000 German physicians had been Jewish), and required every remaining physician to align professionally with regime priorities. The medical schools removed all Jewish faculty and revised their curricula around racial hygiene as a core subject. The medical journals, in particular Deutsches Ärzteblatt and the publications of the Race Hygiene Society, became vehicles for the new orthodoxy.
The result was a medical profession that operated, by 1939, with the regime’s racial framework as its working premise. The T4 Programme of forced euthanasia, which killed around 70,000 disabled and mentally-ill Germans between 1939 and 1941, was conducted by physicians who had been trained in this framework and who applied it without obvious internal opposition. The doctors who later staffed the camps’ medical departments, including Mengele, Carl Clauberg, Aribert Heim and Sigmund Rascher, came from the same trained cohort. The corruption was not their personal pathology. It was the trained professional behaviour of the institution they had been formed in.
What the corruption produced
The medical corruption produced a body of human-experimentation work in the camps that has its own page in this section. It produced the operational machinery of the T4 Programme, which became the technical model for the gas chambers of the Reinhard camps; the personnel who had run the T4 killing centres at Hadamar, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Brandenburg, Bernburg and Grafeneck were sent on to staff Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. It produced the racial classification work on which the Nuremberg Laws and the deportation operations rested, including the Verschuer institute’s Mischling case-file system. It produced, perhaps most consequentially, the trained cohort of German physicians who, after the war, were largely able to return to professional practice without sanction.
The post-war reckoning
The Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg in 1946 to 1947 prosecuted twenty-three figures of the German medical establishment. Sixteen were convicted; seven were sentenced to death and hanged. The trial produced the Nuremberg Code, which has its own page in this section. The Code is one of the most consequential documents to emerge from the post-war reckoning with Nazi medicine. The trial itself, however, prosecuted only the most senior figures most directly responsible for the named experiments. The wider profession that had carried the racial framework largely returned to practice. Verschuer was reappointed to a chair at Münster in 1951. Many of the T4 personnel returned to civilian medical and administrative work.
The reckoning with the wider profession came later, in stages. The German Medical Association issued a formal apology in 2012 for the medical profession’s role in the regime, sixty-seven years after the war ended. The apology was the work of substantial historiographical pressure built up over the preceding two decades, particularly through the work of Robert Jay Lifton, Michael Kater and Gisela Bock. The apology acknowledged the institutional character of the corruption and the inadequacy of the post-war reckoning.
Sources
- Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, 1986
- Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, University of North Carolina Press, 1989
- Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986
- Henry Friedländer, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press, 1995
- Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945, Cambridge University Press, 1989
- Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich, University of Chicago Press, 2010
- German Medical Association, Nuremberg Declaration of the German Medical Assembly, 23 May 2012, https://www.bundesaerztekammer.de
- USHMM, “The Doctors’ Trial”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org