The easiest way to respond to the ethics of doctors, nurses, and health care in the Third Reich is to dismiss what happened as the product of fringe practitioners getting permission from, or being forced by, fanatical ideological leaders to undertake manifestly bad science upon hated minorities.
Unfortunately, a huge volume of scholarship, beginning with my book, When Medicine Went Mad, shows this story is utterly false.
Doctors and scientists were not dragged into Nazism from the fringe. Leading theorists and distinguished doctors enthusiastically fueled the racism that Hitler and his cronies molded into their fascism. This applied biology led to the euthanasia machine that was medicine in Germany during the 1930s and 40s.
Sound science, according to the standards of the day, drove lethal experiments supported by the German armed forces to find answers to hypothermia, decompression, typhoid, typhus, burns, and many other wartime issues.
Mainstream German medicine had an ethic that justified horrific experiments—sterilization and genocidal euthanasia—as necessary health measures.
What is more startling, albeit less analyzed, is the huge emphasis the Nazi government placed on public health, with an eye toward cancer prevention. The preeminent historian of the Nazi orientation to prevention and health promotion, Robert Proctor, has established that Nazi Germany was decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible.
Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking, aggressively promoted a healthy diet, and urged control of chemical exposures. They also created eugenic breeding programs to infuse health through “optimal” gene flow into the German population or “Volk.”
What is more startling, albeit less analyzed, is the huge emphasis the Nazi government placed on public health, with an eye toward cancer prevention.
Much of today’s battle against COVID is managed under the rubric of public health in the USA and other nations. And this means shifting focus from individual patients and their choices to community and population interventions, often with the power of government to encourage or enforce them.
Critics often embrace individual choice over community duties and some even invoke Nazism, communism, or other forms of totalitarianism to protest efforts to require or mandate community-oriented behavior.
On Jan. 31 through Feb. 1, NYU medical ethics, along with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will hold the first annual Sedley Holocaust and Medicine Symposium.
This year’s event will examine the ways in which racism shaped and continues to influence health care and public health from the Nazi era to today.
The meeting this year is all virtual (using Zoom), free, and open to the public. But you must preregister for what promises to be an important and timely event. The agenda is posted here, and the registration link is here.
