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Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on October 23, 2009
Social History of Medicine 2009 22(3):531-552; doi:10.1093/shm/hkp064
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved.

Medical Refugees in Britain and the Wider World, 1930-1960

The Attitude of German Émigré Doctors Towards Medicine under National Socialism

Christian Pross*

* Center Survive, Center for the Treatment of Torture Victims GSZ, Turmstrasse 21, D-1559 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: c.pross{at}bzfo.de


  Abstract

The attitudes of émigré doctors provide some insight into whether Nazi medical atrocities were something peculiar and unique or whether they were an extreme consequence of widespread thinking and scientific concepts in medicine at the time. Doctors of the sexual reform movement and the political left partly welcomed the Nazi sterilisation law as an implementation of their eugenic ideas. Some labelled Nazi medicine plainly as charlatanism which is a protective claim by those who dream the dream of the genetic improvement of humanity. Others saw in it a cold-blooded utilitarianism, symbolising the triumph of a soldierly spartan life over the intricacies and agonies of the human soul. For those, the most important lessons of the past lay in protecting the chronically ill, the handicapped, the psychologically ill and the poor from radical utopias aimed at ‘making the national body healthy’.

Keywords: Nazi racial hygiene; eugenics; Nazi medical atrocities; German émigré; doctors


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