Cleansing The Fatherland

Against this background, Cleansing the Fatherland sends a stark message that is difficult to ignore.

This book focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Proctor demonstrates that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.

The first full-scale study in English of the Nazis' so-called 'euthanasia' programme in which over 200,000 people perished.

In this sweeping approach to the history of disease, historian J. N. Hays chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of western history. Hays frames disease as a multi-dimensional construct, situated at the intersection of history, politics, culture, and medicine, and rooted in mentalities and social relations as much as in biological conditions of pathology. He shows how diseases affect social and political change, reveal social tensions, and are mediated both within and outside the realm of scientific medicine. Beginning with the legacy of Greek, Roman, and early Christian ideas about disease, the book then discusses many of the dramatic epidemics from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, moving from leprosy and bubonic plague through syphilis, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, influenza, and poliomyelitis to AIDS. Hays examines the devastating exchange of diseases between cultures and continents that ensued during the age of exploration. He also describes disease through the lenses of medical theory, public health, folk traditions, and government response. The history of epidemics is also the history of their victims. Hays pays close attention to the relationships between poverty and power and disease, using contemporary case studies to support his argument that diseases concentrate their pathological effects on the poor, while elites associate the cause of disease with the culture and habits of the poor.

Conceived as the answer to all of mankind's seemingly insoluble health and social problems, and promoted as a substitute for orthodox religious beliefs, the pseudoscience of eugenics recruited disciples in many countries during the latter years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Nowhere was this doctrine more enthusiastically endorsed than in Germany, where the application of eugenic theory received its most fervent support. A program born of what were often contradictory opinions began, under Nazi rule, with the compulsory sterilization of thousands of Germany's citizens before morphing into the mass murder of the most vulnerable of the state's own population under the guise of so-called "euthanasia," before ultimately escalating into a continent-wide policy of extermination of those who did not fit the Nazi eugenic template. The progress of this inexorable descent into barbarity was marked by successive stages of development. From the practical application of euthanasia through the organization dedicated to it—later on called Aktion T4—and the killing centers that this institution spawned, to the centrality of Aktion T4 to Aktion Reinhardt and the Holocaust, important elements of the historical record can be seen to emerge. How did it happen? What impact has it had on contemporary society? And what of the character and fate of the individuals involved in the gestation and implementation of this murderously inhumane quasi-religion? These deceptively simple questions require complex and often disturbing answers, as shown by Melvyn Conroy in this important work.

Architects of Annihilation follows the activities of the demographers, economists, geographers and planners in the period between the disorderly excesses of the November 1938 pogrom and the fully-effective operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz in summer 1942. The authors, both journalists and historians, argue that this group of intellectuals, often combining academic, civil service and Party functions, made an indispensable contribution to the planning and execution of the Final Solution. More than that, in the economic and demographic rationale of these experts, the Final Solution was only one element in a far-reaching programme of self-sufficiency which privileged the German Aryan population.

Eighty years ago the largest genocide ever occurred in Nazi Europe. This began with the mass extermination of patients with neurologic and psychiatric disorders that Hitler's regime considered "useless eaters". The neuropsychiatric profession was systematically "cleansed" beginning in 1933, but racism and eugenics had infiltrated the specialty long before that. With the installation of Nazi-principled neuroscientists, mass forced sterilization was enacted, which transitioned to patient murder by the start of World War II. But the murder of roughly 275,000 patients was not enough. The patients' brains were stored and used in scientific publications both during and long after the war. Also, patients themselves were used for unethical experiments. Relatively few neuroscientists resisted the Nazis, with some success in the occupied countries. Most neuroscientists involved in unethical actions continued their careers unscathed after the war. Few answered for their actions, and few repented. The legacy of such a depraved era in the history of neuroscience and medical ethics is that codes now exist to protect patients and research subjects. But this protection is possibly subject to political extremes and individual neuroscientists can only protect patients and colleagues if they understand the dangers of a utilitarian, unethical, and uncompassionate mindset. Brain Science under the Swastika is the only comprehensive and scholarly published work regarding the ethical and professional abuses of neuroscientists during the Nazi era. The author has crafted a scathing tour de force exploring the extremes of ethical abuse, but also ways that this can be resisted and hopefully prevented by future generations of neuroscientists and physicians

Of all the horrors of the last century--perhaps the bloodiest century of the past millennium--ethnic cleansing ranks among the worst. The term burst forth in public discourse in the spring of 1992 as a way to describe Serbian attacks on the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but as this landmark book attests, ethnic cleansing is neither new nor likely to cease in our time.