MURDEROUS SCIENCE:Elimination By Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany, 1933-1945.
Benno Müller-Hillü
Oxford University Press;
Oxford 208 pages; $24.95
RACIAL HYGIENE:Medicine Under The Nazis
Robert Proctor
Harvard University Press;
Cambridge; 414 pages; $34.95
REVIEWED BY FREDERICK H. KASTEN
In the 40 years since the Holocaust, the deadly pseudomedical experiments carried out on involuntary human guinea pigs have been investigated by scholars, and so has the psychological profile of the Nazi physicians at the selection ramps in Auschwitz. Now historians and scientists are turning to study the role of other German physicians who helped construct Nazi racial policy and implement the compulsory sterilization and euthanasia programs. The two books reviewed here are the first to be published in English on these specific issues. Both are well-documented, scholarly volumes.
The key to understanding the warped views of Nazi medicine lies in recognizing the historical rise of German eugenics or “racial ...
