Reckoning with Medicine’s Unseemly Past

“How does such an advanced nation and forward-looking profession embrace ‘medicalized mass murder’ and a philosophy calling for the ‘annihilation of life unworthy of living’? How did those who pledged to follow ‘the Hippocratic tradition of healers,’ they ask, ‘become killers’?”

In November of 2023, The Lancet published a lengthy treatise illuminating “[the] distinctive and disturbing…role health professionals played in formulating, supporting, and implementing inhumane and often genocidal policies” during Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Recognizing that “health science curriculums…rarely cover” this tragic saga in world history, the esteemed medical journal argues the “medical crimes committed” by Nazi doctors are the “best-documented historical example of medical involvement in transgressions against vulnerable individuals and groups.” That ugly chapter, the authors of executive summary further state, is a much needed “roadmap for the integration” of the profession’s “shameful history” into current “health science curriculums worldwide.”

Despite its belated propagation, The Lancet’s commission should be commended for addressing a much overlooked issue—research ethics—and publishing a well-documented, nearly 75-page chronicle of the embarrassing “historical evidence” exposing medical complicity in the Holocaust. This Commission believes that its document is invaluable for educating young doctors and what they call “teaching for tomorrow.” Centered on Nazi Germany’s moral collapse and the disturbing fact that “physicians joined the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations in higher proportions than any other profession,” The Lancet’s commission hopes to show “that scientific logic alone cannot prevent ethical transgressions.” What is needed is an educational environment that requires “learning about and reflecting on this history” and its “importance for all the health sciences.”

The report not only examines the “disturbing fact” that “German physicians willingly joined the National Socialist German Workers Party” in shocking numbers but also “collaborated in the dismissal and persecution of their Jewish colleagues”; participated in the “forced sterilization” of hundreds of thousands of those deemed genetically inferior; subjected many thousands more to “forced medical research”; and, ultimately, played a significant role in killing “people on an industrial scale.” The evidence further discloses “few health professionals openly refused to collaborate in any of these activities…arguably the most extreme example of medical complicity in unethical transgressions.”