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More than 7% of all German doctors became members of the Nazi party during World War II, a far higher percentage than the general population.
In 1942 more than 38,000 German doctors, half the total number of doctors, had joined the Nazi party
Doctors who were working for the state, and not for their patient, using a Mendelian type of logic chart, saw extermination of their patients as the correct solution to the problem of mental illness and the genetically defective.
"The participation in the ‘betrayal of Hippocrates’ had a broad basis within the German medical profession. Without the doctors' active help, the #Holocaust could not have happened." wrote E Ernst in the International Journal of EPIDEMIOLOGY
The Doctors' trial (officially United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.) was the first of 12 trials for war crimes of German doctors that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg
Courtroom at the DOCTOR'S TRIAL, Nuremberg, December 12th 1946
DOCTOR JOSEF MENGELE WAS ALSO A GOVERNMENT DOCTOR and Medal for the Care of the German People.
"More than 7% of all German physicians became members of the Nazi SS during World War II, compared with less than 1% of the general population. In so doing, these doctors willingly participated in genocide"
The participation of physicians in torture & murder both before & after WWII is a disturbing legacy seldom discussed in medical school, & underrecognised in contemporary medicine. IS THERE SOMETHING INHERENT IN BEING A PHYSICIAN THAT PROMOTES A TRANSITION FROM HEALER TO MURDERER?
"The value of physicians to the Nazi regime is clear: their support gave scientific legitimacy to the principles of eugenics on which the Nazis built their Rassenpolitik (racial policy) and rationalised murder under the logic of medical necessity."
"WITHOUT ACTIVE PHYSICIAN PARTICIPATION, THE NAZI REGIME COULD NOT HAVE ACHIEVED ITS MURDEROUS AIMS SO EFFICIENTLY: physicians disguised the horrors by systematising them and cloaking them in misleading medical jargon."
"Physician involvement in torture & murder has been a stain on the profession throughout history. In just the last decade, American physicians have been accused of murder in the form of ‘mercy killing’ during the worst of Hurricane Katrina & torturing prisoners in Guantánamo Bay"
"By 1945, half of all German physicians had joined the Nazi party, 6% before Adolf Hitler gained power. Furthermore, 7% of all physicians were members of the Schutzstaffel (SS), compared with less than 1% of the general population."
"Eichmann, Arendt argued, was not a monster but a conventional bureaucrat, motivated by career ambition rather than hatred for his victims. I view the physicians completing the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme, recommending life or death with simple strokes of ink, in a similar light."
"Physicians joined the Nazi party and the killing operations not at gunpoint, not by force, but of their own volition.
These physicians were normal, sane individuals who chose to commit murder."
These physicians were normal, sane individuals who chose to commit murder."
"IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, SITUATIONISM DESCRIBES THE IDEA THAT HUMANS MAKE CHOICES BASED ON THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THEIR SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT RATHER THAN AN UNDERSTANDING OF RIGHT AND WRONG."
"The famous obedience experiments performed by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s showed that, when instructed to do so by a person they perceived to be an authority figure, normal people willingly inflict severe pain on fellow humans."
"As one Holocaust scholar and physician has written, ‘medicine as a profession contains the rudiments of evil, and even some of the most humane acts of medicine are only small steps away from real evil’"
"Specific moral vulnerabilities exist within the medical profession, which, when combined with enabling political circumstances, have in multiple instances facilitated the almost unfathomable transition from physician to murderer."
MORAL VULNERABILITIES OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION:
Hierarchy and socialisation
Medical culture is a rigid hierarchy..Questioning superiors is often uncomfortable, for fear both of negative consequences and of being wrong..The Nazis utilised that hierarchy and power of socialisation to enlist physicians in their cause.
Medical culture is a rigid hierarchy..Questioning superiors is often uncomfortable, for fear both of negative consequences and of being wrong..The Nazis utilised that hierarchy and power of socialisation to enlist physicians in their cause.
"By calling on young doctors to do their national duty as ‘soldiers’, they added a level to the existing hierarchy & made physicians accountable to the state. As one physician put it, ‘according to a “Führer order”, service in a concentration camp was considered FRONT-LINE duty"
"Auschwitz [LOCKDOWN, FACE MUZZLING, SOCIAL DISTANCING, UNEMPLOYMENT, STARVATION, SUICIDE] was an existing fact. One couldn't… really be against it, you see, one had to go along with it whether it was good or bad’."
"By watching their more experienced peers perform ramp ‘selections’ and by commiserating with them afterwards, doctors new to Auschwitz rapidly came to view the culture of the camp as an unchangeable fact."
Career ambition
"Career ambition in medicine was commandeered by the Nazis. As eugenics came into prominence in the USA & UK through Charles Davenport & Francis Galton, & as the Nazis began to adopt those ‘scientific’ principles, savvy physicians &scientists jumped aboard."
"Career ambition in medicine was commandeered by the Nazis. As eugenics came into prominence in the USA & UK through Charles Davenport & Francis Galton, & as the Nazis began to adopt those ‘scientific’ principles, savvy physicians &scientists jumped aboard."
"The T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme, which preceded the extermination camps, specifically recruited young physicians for their ambitiousness: ‘T4… recruited younger men who still needed to establish themselves. Such men had to be ambitious for advancement in the new Germany’
The ‘licence to sin’
"Physicians are allowed to perform actions that, in other contexts, are taboo. This ‘licence to sin’ was crucial to medicine within the Nazi regime. By having a doctor make every decision that sent a person to death, murder became a medical procedure"
"Physicians are allowed to perform actions that, in other contexts, are taboo. This ‘licence to sin’ was crucial to medicine within the Nazi regime. By having a doctor make every decision that sent a person to death, murder became a medical procedure"
"Actions that were unacceptable for a state to undertake became acceptable if a physician did them. In the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme, three junior physicians marked brief questionnaires about mentally handicapped individuals with a red ‘+’ (for death) or a blue ‘–’ (for life)."
Inflicting pain
"the physician's duty was shifted from the health of his individual patients to the health of the German Volk (populace). As Dr Rudolf Ramm, author of an influential eugenics manual, opined, each doctor should be a ‘physician to the Volk’, a ‘biological soldier’
"the physician's duty was shifted from the health of his individual patients to the health of the German Volk (populace). As Dr Rudolf Ramm, author of an influential eugenics manual, opined, each doctor should be a ‘physician to the Volk’, a ‘biological soldier’
Medical terminology and euphemism
"Physicians in Nazi Germany used euphemism to great effect. They were not sending children and families to die by suffocation; they were ‘selecting’ them for ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung) or Terapia Magna Auschwitzciense in ‘showers’
"Physicians in Nazi Germany used euphemism to great effect. They were not sending children and families to die by suffocation; they were ‘selecting’ them for ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung) or Terapia Magna Auschwitzciense in ‘showers’
Detachment
"Their powers of detachment were so strong that, as one physician who had worked in Auschwitz noted, ‘In the beginning it was almost impossible. Afterwards it became almost routine. That's the only way to put it"
"Their powers of detachment were so strong that, as one physician who had worked in Auschwitz noted, ‘In the beginning it was almost impossible. Afterwards it became almost routine. That's the only way to put it"
"It is well documented that medical students become less empathetic & even less ethical as we progress through medical school; perhaps one part of leading an ethical life as a physician, then, is not allowing one's existing moral compass to be recalibrated by authority"
"The Nazi physicians cast a shadow on our profession. We must escape that shadow by guarding against our own moral erosion." https://jme.bmj.com/content/38/7/435
