Description

"A brilliant attempt to explain the profound historical crisis into which medicine had plummeted during the Nazi period with the tried methods of social history.--Historische Zeitschrift

"The author has drawn from an extraordinary range of sources, and the weight of evidence he compiles will certainly give pause to anyone who still wants to believe that professionals kept their hands clean in this era of great and methodical crimes.--Journal of Modern History

"Kater's important book deserves close attention from historians of medicine and German historians alike.--Isis
In this history of medicine and the medical profession in the Third Reich, Michael Kater examines the career patterns, educational training, professional organization, and political socialization of German physicians under Hitler. His discussion ranges widely, from doctors who participated in Nazi atrocities, to those who actively resisted the regime's perversion of healing, to the vast majority whose ideology and behavior fell somewhere between the two extremes. He also takes a chilling look at the post-Hitler medical establishment's problematic relationship to the Nazi past.