Main description:

Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler's regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.

Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword

William E. Seidelman

Introduction to the Volume: Recognizing the Past in the Present

Sabine Hildebrandt, Miriam Offer, and Michael A. Grodin

Part I: The Past

Chapter 1. Non-Mechanistic Explanatory Styles in Interwar German Racial Theory: A Comparison of Hans F. K. Gunther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss

Amit Varshizky

Chapter 2. From "Racial Surveys" to Medical Experiments in Prisoner of War Camps

Margit Berner

Chapter 3. "Der Doktor": The Writings of Mordechai Lensky During the Interwar Period

Miriam Offer

Chapter 4. Rabbinic Responsa During the Holocaust: The Life-for-Life Problem

Johnathan I. Kelly, Erin L. Miller, Rabbi Joseph Polak, Robert Kirschner, and Michael A. Grodin

Chapter 5. Un(B)earable: Pregnant Bodies and Obstetrical Genocide

Annette Finley-Croswhite

Chapter 6. "Complete Mastery of the Subject": The Connection between Forced Sterilization and Gynecological Fertility Research in National Socialism

Gabriele Czarnowski

Chapter 7. Deference, Pragmatism, Ideology: The Medical Student Kurt Gerstein and the Predicament of Ethical Conduct under National Socialism

Mathias Schutz

Chapter 8. Ludwig Stumpfegger (1910-1945): A Career at the Interface of Hitler, Himmler and Ravensbruck Concentration Camp

Stephanie Kaiser and Mathias Schmidt

Chapter 9. Between Participation in National Socialist Medicine and Everyday Administrative Action: On the Economic Argument of the Psychiatric Planning Commission (1941-1945)

Felicitas Soehner

Chapter 10. Dentists in National Socialist (Nazi) Germany: A Fragmented Profession

Matthis Krischel

Chapter 11. Only Following Orders? Aviation Medicine in Nazi Germany

Alexander von Lunen

Chapter 12. Blood and Bones from Auschwitz: The Mengele Link

Paul J. Weindling

Part II: The Present: Postwar Continuities, Legacies, and Reflections

Chapter 13. Renewed Trauma: Abraham De La Penha's Testimony against Dr Franz Lucas in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial

Andrew Wisely

Chapter 14. "Schluss mit der Rassenschande!" From Separation to Extermination: The Fate of Jewish Mentally Ill Patients in Germany and Occupied Poland 1939-42

Kamila Uzarczyk

Chapter 15. "Since she was in Auschwitz the patient feels that she is being persecuted": Holocaust Survivors and Austrian Psychiatry after World War II

Herwig Czech

Chapter 16. "To Prevent Further Unfounded Aly Constructions"

Goetz Aly

Chapter 17. Baneful Medicine and a Radical Bioethics in Contemporary Art

Andrew Weinstein

Chapter 18. The History of the Vienna Protocol

Sabine Hildebrandt, Joseph A. Polak, Michael A. Grodin, and William E. Seidelman

Conclusion: The Past in the Present and the Future

Index