Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88633 in Books
• Published on: 1988-04-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nazi doctors did more than conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses. Lifton (The Broken Connection; The Life of the Self shows that this medically supervised killing was done in the name of "healing," as part of a racist program to cleanse the Aryan body politic. After the German eugenics campaign of the 1920s for forced sterilization of the "unfit,"it was but one step to "euthanasia," which in the Nazi context meant systematic murder of Jews. Building on interviews with former Nazi physicians and their prisoners, Lifton presents a disturbing portrait of careerists who killed to overcome feelings of powerlessness. He includes a chapter on Josef Mengele and one on Eduard Wirths, the "kind," "decent" doctor (as some inmates described him) who set up the Auschwitz death machinery. Lifton also psychoanalyzes the German people, scarred by the devastation of World War I and mystically seeking regeneration. This profound study ranks with the most insightful books on the Holocaust.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This extraordinary work analyzes the terrible, seemingly contradictory phenomenon of doctors becoming agents of mass murder. With chilling power, it limns the Nazi transmutation of values that allowed medical killing to be seen as a therapeutic healing of the body politic. Based on arresting historical scholarship and personal interviews with Nazi and prisoner doctors, the book traces the inexorable logic leading from early Nazi sterilization and euthanasia of its own citizens to mass extermination of European Jews and other "racial undesirables." Ultimately the book asks how doctors rationalized being "killer-healers." Lifton's responsea multifaceted evaluation of genocide, of the seductive power of Nazi ideology, and of the psychological process of "doubling"is both profound and thought-provoking. A remarkable achievement; it is essential reading. Benny Kraut, Judaic Studies Dept., Univ. of Cincinnati
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ingram
This powerful study, the result of ten years of painstaking research and extensive interviews, casts new light not only on the origins of the Holocaust, but explains how physicians, sworn by oath and conviction to ease suffering, were transformed from healers to systematic killers.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating insight into the darkness of war.
Fascinating looks at the psychological make up of some of the most infamous people who, in absolute hatred of Jews and other so called undesirables, committed unforgivable crimes against humanity during the Second World War. The author gives a good case study of each of these doctors, and attempts to give an explanation as to why they believed their experiments were in the name of medical research. Chilling but real.

Not deep enough
This book is based on direct interviews with a number of Nazi Doctors, but rarely quotes from them. It covers a wide range of issues, but delves deeply into few of them.

It purports to be a pyschological insight into why the Nazi doctors did what they did, and how the psychological mechanisms worked that allowed them to operate. Though Lifton is a Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, I didn't find his explanations particularly insightful. He repeats a few key ideas often, without going into how these mechanisms work. Instead, he fills the book with detail of what they did.

On balance, it added little to my understanding of the subject. The detail of what the Nazi Doctors did is readily available elsewhere.

I was hoping to find first hand accounts, of which very little was included, and psychological insights. Perhaps it would have been more useful if he had covered fewer people and situations in more depth, with more analysis.

He actually spoke to these people, but the book mostly reads as drily as any history book.

Disappointing.

Must read for those concerned with bioethics!
When I read The Origins of Nazi Genocide, which came out in 1995, the author referred to this original book concerning the physicians and scientists who had exploited the 'situation' in Germany to their own ends. I had also come across references to this book in many, many professional papers...yet, made the stupid decision that I didn't need to read it. I finally decided I had to read this when my advisor in science education recommended it because he was using it in teaching bioethics to science teachers.

Though Friedlander's book is excellent, and was my introduction to The Medical Holocaust (especially as concerned the disabled) Lifton's book goes much further and deals with the physician/scientists within the concentration camps as well as in the psychiatric institutions which became involved in the killing machinery of the Nazis. Lifton's book explores the rationalizations made by these men to take advantage of a situation to experiment on those who could not give informed consent. Though Lifton tends to make a few speculations concerning motives from his interviews with physicians who were not prosecuted or were absolved of their involvement in these camps...his speculations are on target (mostly) and he backs up his statements with the words of these doctors from letters and interviews with those people who had the most to do with them: the prisoner physicians forced to work in these environments not only to save their own lives, but the lives of so many others.

Of course, more information is in this book concerning the atrocities. Sometimes, I had to put the book down and leave it for a while because the information is so horrendous. It is so beyond belief that so many physicians could rationalize the experimentation, using a statement I've grown to recognize in legal documents and even in newspapers in the U.S. ('for the good of society'). I just cringe now when I see this or sentences like this. Science should never replace the rights of the individuals. And scientists are never objective...they have the same prejudices and biases that society has and it permeates their work...to the point of biasing the information they find.

My only complaint about Lifton's book is occasional repetition or dwelling on certain topics/agendas. Sometimes, it seemed as if I had just reread the same pages, but Lifton was trying to make a point in most of these cases, or make a case for what he was saying...

The need to teach ethics in all fields of endeavors, including medicine and research science is all the more important today. If we don't, the work of Lifton and FRiedlander to remind the world of the horrors of The MEdical Holocaust will have been in vain. The slippery slope is growing with advanced technology, genomics, cloning, and stem cell use, without the accompanying legal protections. The Nuremberg Code, etched into the history of mankind in 1947, seems to have been forgotten.

To remind your students of the need for morals and ethics within all fields, this book is a necessary addition for required reading. I will certainly make it required for those I work with....

Karen Sadler,
Science Education,
University of Pittsburgh