Cleansing The Fatherland Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene [Paperback]

The chapters in this volume painfully drive home the point that certainly as far as Germany is concerned, the lessons of the Third Reich have not yet been learned... These significant attempts by younger recruits to the larger medical establishment to change things through eye-opening reflection and analysis, however uncomfortable, need support. Michael H. Kater, author of Doctors under Hitler, in the foreword.

The infamous Nuremberg Doctors' Trials of 1946-47 revealed horrifying crimes ranging from grotesque medical experiments on humans to mass murdercommitted 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 taskand, indeed, were actively shielded by colleagues in postwar German medical organizations.

The authors examine the role of German physicians in such infamous operations as the T 4 euthanasia program (code-named for the Berlin address of its headquarters at Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse). They also reveal details of countless lesser known killingsall ordered by doctors and all in the name of public health. Maladjusted adolescents, the handicapped, foreign laborers too illto work, even German civilians who suffered mental breakdowns after air raids were selected for treatment. (One physician who persisted in speaking of killings was officially reprimanded for his negative attitude. )

The book also includes original documentsnever before published in Englishthat give unique and chilling insight into the everyday workings of Nazi medicine. Among them:

Minutes from a 1940 meeting of the Conference of German Mayors, at which a Nazi official gives the assembled politicians detailed instructions for the secret burial of murdered mental patients.

A pre-Nazi era questionnaire sent by the head of a state mental institutiol“ž