“In the Name of Humanity”: Nazi Doctors and Human Experiments in German Concentration Camps

During the Second World War over two hundred and fifty German doctors conducted medical experiments on human beings. Jurists and scholars have pondered ever since how doctors educated to heal could harm and even kill. Robert Jay Lifton has argued that psychological “doubling” could explain their cri...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: de Leeuw, Daan (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Oxford University Press 2020
In: Holocaust and genocide studies
Year: 2020, Volume: 34, Issue: 2, Pages: 225-252
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Summary:During the Second World War over two hundred and fifty German doctors conducted medical experiments on human beings. Jurists and scholars have pondered ever since how doctors educated to heal could harm and even kill. Robert Jay Lifton has argued that psychological “doubling” could explain their crimes: their Faustian bargain with Nazism outweighed their Hippocratic Oath. Here the author argues, however, that Lifton’s theory does not apply to these Nazi doctors because there is no indication that they recognized ethical constraints against human experimentation. To explain how “healers became killers,” the author focuses on the broader historical aspects of their behavior.
ISSN:1476-7937
Contains:Enthalten in: Holocaust and genocide studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1093/hgs/dcaa025