Nazi Doctors, German Medicine, and Historical Truth

Abstract One purpose of research during the past decade has been to destroy German postwar legends of Nazism. This work has contributed to a better and deeper understanding of health policy in Nazi Germany, and of the motives and actions of Nazi physicians, by uncovering new, hitherto unknown material and by putting old material into a new context. Anti-Semitism and racism can no longer be identified as the sole driving forces behind Nazi politics, nor can the Nazi power elite be viewed as a small group of deviant monsters who misled a supposedly passive constituency. What for us today appears contradictory in the nature of Nazism was the reason for its success: the connection between destruction and modernization. Auschwitz cannot be seen without the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, or the SS regime of terror without the social security, health, and recreation programs provided by the Nazi trade union Deutsche Arbeitsfront. The so-called Neue deutsche Seelenheilkunde (new German psychotherapy) for the “superior” members of the Volk complemented the mass sterilizations of the “inferior.” The destruction of the latter created social guarantees for the former, and thus secured the standard of living of the productive community of a conformist petit burgeoisie and working class at the expense of excluded minorities.