Nazi Medicine: Select Readings from the Collections of the Health Sciences Library: Nazi Medicine Books

Scientists and bioethicists have debated whether it is acceptable to continue to use the atlas for instructional purposes in light of its Nazi provenance. Opponents have asserted that any use of the atlas makes the user complicit in Nazi crimes and that modern technology, such as the Visible Human Project, will make the atlas redundant if it has not done so already. Proponents have countered that the knowledge gained from the atlas can be ethically separated from its origins nor can it be in some cases easily replaced by modern technology or other atlases.

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fate: to perform “scientific research” on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the infamous “Angel of Death”: Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele’s personal research pathologist. Miraculously, he survived to give this terrifying and sobering account.

During World War II, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele subjected some 3,000 twins to medical experiments of unspeakable horror; only 160 survived. In this remarkable narrative, the life of Auschwitz's Angel of Death is told in counterpoint to the lives of the survivors, who until now have kept silent about their heinous death-camp ordeals.

The infamous Nuremberg Doctors' Trials of 1946-47 revealed horrifying crimes —ranging from grotesque medical experiments on humans to mass murder—committed by physicians and other health care workers in Nazi Germany. But far more common, argue the authors of Cleansing the Fatherland, were the doctors who profited professionally and financially from the killings but were never called to task—and, indeed, were actively shielded by colleagues in postwar German medical organizations.

Twenty female prisoners' accounts of the horrific human experimentation by Nazi doctors at Auschwitz.

From 1933 to 1945, Hitler's Nazi regime attempted to realize its vision of a biologically healthy and ethnically homogeneous population through "racial hygiene" programs designed to cleanse German society of those perceived to threaten its biological health. Deadly Medicine examines the critical role German physicians, scientists, public health officials, and academic experts played in supporting and implementing the Nazis' program of racial eugenics, which culminated in the Holocaust.

"The tale told in these pages by Wolfgang Weyers, M.D., is the story of medicine, particularly the fields of dermatology and dermatopathology, in the Third Reich."

Antisemitism never went away, but since the turn of the century it has multiplied beyond what anyone would have predicted. It is openly spread by intellectuals, politicians and religious leaders in Europe, Asia, the Arab world, America and Africa and supported by hundreds of millions more. Indeed, today antisemitism is stronger than any time since the Holocaust. In this book, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen reveals the unprecedented, global form of this age-old hatred; its strategic use by states; its powerful appeal to individuals and groups; and how technology has fueled the flames that had been smoldering prior to the millennium.

Encyclopedia of the Holocaust is a comprehensive, authoritative one-volume reference that provides reliable information on this ignoble and frightening episode of modern history. It features eight essays on the history of the Holocaust and its antecedents, as well as coverage of such topics as the history of European Jewry, Jewish contributions to European culture, and the rise of anti-semitism and Nazism.

Describes the Nazi death camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, traces the history of anti-Semitism, and traces the history of Hitlers Final Solution.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researchers have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. That question is: "How could the Holocaust happen?" His own response is a new exploration of those who carried out the Holocaust and of German society and its ingrained anti-semitism - and it demands a fundamental revision of our thinking about the years 1933-1945.

In this study, author Anthony J. Sciolino, himself a Catholic, cuts into the heart of why the Catholic Church and Christianity as a whole failed to stop the Holocaust. He demonstrates that Nazism's racial anti-Semitism was rooted in Christian anti-Judaism. While tens of thousands of Christians risked their lives to save Jews, many more--including some members of the hierarchy--aided Hitler's campaign with their silence or their participation. Sciolino's solid research and comprehensive interpretation provide a cogent and powerful analysis of Christian doctrine and church history to help answer the question of what went wrong.

“An engaging, compelling and disturbing confrontation with evil … a book that will be transformative in its call for individual and collective moral responsibility." – Michael A. Grodin, M.D., Professor and Director, Project on Medicine and the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University

Descending from the transport train into the hell of the concentration camp, the Ovitz family—known widely as the Lilliput Troupe—was separated from other Jewish victims. When Dr. Josef Mengele was then notified of their arrival, he assigned them to sequestered quarters. His horrific “research” on twins and other genetically unique individuals already under way, Mengele had special plans for the Ovitzes. The authors chronicle Mengele’s loathsome experiments upon the family members, the disturbing fondness he developed for these small people, and their interminable will to make it out alive.

More than sixty years after the events, the medical experiments conducted in German concentration camps remain a relatively little known chapter of the Holocaust historiography. Being a survivor of the Holocaust and a medical school professor, the author felt a moral obligation to research this subject. After discussing the nazification of German medicine, Inhuman Research documents the various experiments followed by their ethical evaluation. The book also includes the names and biographical data of the doctors actively involved in the experiments, with photos of the main perpetrators

The world's most infamous doctor, Josef Mengele was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Jews to their death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz during World War II. His gruesome experiments in genetics research helped add to his reputation as one of the most cold-blooded villains of the twentieth century.

As Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt became the highest medical authority in the Nazi regime. He was entrusted with the killing of handicapped children and adults - the so-called ‘Euthanasia' Program - and played a part in illegal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. What drove a rational, highly cultured, idealistic and talented young medic to become responsible for mass murder and criminal human experimentation on a previously unimaginable scale? This riveting biography explores in detail the level of culpability of one of the most intriguing of the Nuremberg Nazis.

A memoir written by the Chairman of the New York Medical College Board of Trustees, Mark Hasten.

Contains 30 documents of source materials, carefully chosen from the thousands preserved at the U.S. National Archives. A detailed table of contents lists and provides the source for each document.

In an effort to create the Master Race, Nazi physicians and bioscientists, using American legislative models, money, and moral support, sterilized 400,000 and euthanized 200,000 German citizens while developing the gas chambers and crematoria used to murder 6,000,000 Jews. Rubenfeld and the contributors to this collection posit that German physicians betrayed the Hippocratic Oath when they chose knowledge over wisdom, the state over the individual, a führer over God, and personal gain over professional ethics. This groundbreaking work questions whether, since the best physicians of the early twentieth century could abandon their patients, the best physicians of the twenty-first century can be certain that they will not do the same.

The participation of German physicians in medical experiments on innocent people and mass murder is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Six distinguished historians working in this field address the critical issues raised by these murderous experiments, such as the place of the Holocaust in the larger context of eugenic and racial research, the motivation and roles of the German medical establishment, and the impact and legacy of the eugenics movements and Nazi medical practice on physicians and medicine since World War II.

This introductory book deals with the bonds created between German physicians and the Nazi biomedical vision based upon racial and eugenic conceptions.

Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death."

More than 1.5 million concentration camp prisoners died of typhus, a preventable disease. Despite advances in public health measures to control and prevent typhus outbreaks, German doctors, fuelled by their racist ideology and their medieval approach to the disease, would use the disease as a form of biological warfare against Jews, Slavs, and gypsies.

The Human Genome Project has associated many mutant genes with physical ailments and the genetic basis of certain behavioral characteristics is being seriously discussed. In the 1920s and 1930s, advocates for eugenics claimed that genes influenced human behavior, but with no valid evidence. In Germany the Nazis adopted their ideas to justify violent anti-semitism. In this new, expanded edition of the English translation of his compelling book Tödliche Wissenschaft,the distinguished German geneticist Benno Müller-Hill documents the long-suppressed collusion of eugenics and racist politics which resulted in the mass murder of millions.

The atrocities committed by Nazi physicians and researchers during World War II prompted the development of the Nuremberg Code to define the ethics of modern medical experimentation utilizing human subjects. Since its enunciation, the Code has been viewed as one of the cornerstones of modern bioethical thought. The sources and ramifications of this important document are thoroughly discussed in this book by a distinguished roster of contemporary professionals from the fields of history, philosophy, medicine, and law. Contributors also include the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and a moving account by a survivor of the Mengele Twin Experiments.

"This is not only one of the most important works on medical ethics yet written. It also breaks through the frontiers of historiography to provide a convincing psychological interpretation of the Third Reich and the crimes of National Socialism. No one will be able, in my view, to write perceptively about those times in the future without referring to this interpretation."--Neal Ascherson, "New York Review of Books"

This book offers a radically new and definitive reappraisal of Allied responses to Nazi human experiments and the origins of informed consent. It places the victims and Allied Medical Intelligence officers at centre stage, while providing a full reconstruction of policies on war crimes and trials related to Nazi medical atrocities and genocide. The analysis of the Medical Trial considers the prosecution, defense, judges and observers to present a rounded picture of the court and its context, and the aftermath in terms of Cold War politics, compensation and research ethics.

Following World War II, the American Military Tribunal indicted twenty-three Nazi doctors and administrators for performing agonizing and often fatal experiments on helpless concentration camp inmates. Using primarily court records, this book attempts to answer the following salient questions: What sort of medical experiments did the Nazi doctors perform? Who were their victims, and what was their fate? What, if any, were the medical results? What legal charges were brought against the doctors, and what was their defense? Who were the witnesses? Did the defendants try to reconcile their brutal acts with the Hippocratic Code never to do harm, or were they devoid of any medical ethics?

Winner of the Cantemir Prize of the Berendel Foundation Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the "perfectibility of man."