RT Article
T1 “In the Name of Humanity”: Nazi Doctors and Human Experiments in German Concentration Camps
JF Holocaust and genocide studies
VO 34
IS 2
SP 225
OP 252
A1 de Leeuw, Daan
LA English
YR 2020
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1814485511
AB 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.
DO 10.1093/hgs/dcaa025