The Nazi Doctors, the long-awaited book by Robert Lifton, a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is an extraordinary volume that sheds new light on the role of the Nazi doctors in Hitler's Germany. It describes their transformation from healers to killers.
The author regards most of the doctors he interviewed as being average, neither brilliant nor stupid. How then can we understand the involvement of physicians in the Nazi killing machine?
The subversion of the ethical physician and the violation of the Hippocratic oath contrast with the outstanding contribution of German medicine in the past. To understand this contradiction, Lifton examines the prewar Nazification of the German medical profession.
The physician was to become a "cultivator of the genes," "caretaker of the race," "biological soldier" and "genetics doctor"—all with the goal of keeping the Aryan blood clean and free of "dangerous genes." ...
