From Clinic To Concentration Camp: Reassessing Nazi Medical And Racial Research, 1933-1945 (the History Of Medicine In Context)
by Paul Weindling /
2017 / English / PDF
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Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human
experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume
deliberately break from a top-down history limited to
concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and
the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments
(where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within
a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book
considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated
within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up
in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were
opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy. The sacrifice
of so many prisoners, patients and otherwise healthy people
rounded up as detainees raises important issues about the
identities of the research subjects: who were they, how did they
feel, how many research subjects were there and how many
survived? This underworld of the victims of the elite science of
German medical institutes and clinics has until now remained a
marginal historical concern. Jews were a target group, but so
were gypsies/Sinti and Roma, the mentally ill, prisoners of war
and partisans. By exploring when and in what numbers scientists
selected one group rather than another, the book provides an
important record of the research subjects having agency,
reconstructing responses and experiential narratives, and
recording how these experiments – iconic of extreme racial
torture – represent one of the worst excesses of Nazism.
Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human
experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume
deliberately break from a top-down history limited to
concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and
the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments
(where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within
a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book
considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated
within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up
in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were
opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy. The sacrifice
of so many prisoners, patients and otherwise healthy people
rounded up as detainees raises important issues about the
identities of the research subjects: who were they, how did they
feel, how many research subjects were there and how many
survived? This underworld of the victims of the elite science of
German medical institutes and clinics has until now remained a
marginal historical concern. Jews were a target group, but so
were gypsies/Sinti and Roma, the mentally ill, prisoners of war
and partisans. By exploring when and in what numbers scientists
selected one group rather than another, the book provides an
important record of the research subjects having agency,
reconstructing responses and experiential narratives, and
recording how these experiments – iconic of extreme racial
torture – represent one of the worst excesses of Nazism.