Nazi Health and Social Policy
by Robert N. Proctor

Beitrdge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 1: Aussonderung und Tod: Die klinische Hinrichtung der Unbrauchbaren, ed. Gotz Aly. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1985. 189 pages.

Beitrage zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 2: Reform und Gezvissen: "Euthanasie" im Dienst des Fortsch ritts, ed. Gotz Aly. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1985. 197 pages.

Beitrdge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 3: Herrenmensch und Arbeitsvdlker: Ausldndische Arbeiter und Deutsche, 1939-1945, ed. Gotz Aly. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1986. 189 pages.

Beitrdge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 4: Biedermann und Schreibtischtdter: Materialien zur deutschen Mer-Biographie, ed. G6tz Aly. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1987. 207 pages.

Beitrdge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 5: Sozialpolitik und judenvemichtung: Gibt es eine Okonomie der Endldsung?, ed. Gotz Aly. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1987. 188 pages.

Beitrdge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 6: Feinderkldrung und Prdvention: Krim inalbiologie, Zigeunerforschung und Asozialenpolitik, ed. Gotz Aly. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1988. 214 pages.

Beitrdge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 7: Internationales Arztliches Bulletin: Jahrgang I-VI (1934-1939). Reprint, ed. Gotz Aly and others, Preface by Florian Termstedt, Christian Pross, and Stephan Leibfried. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1989. Facsimile ed. No pagination.

"Die Zahl der Opfer ist gross, gering die Zahl dEr verurteilten Tater." Text from a plaque erected in 1989 at No. 4 Tiergarten Street in West Berlin, formerly the administrative headquarters of the Nazi euthanasia operation.

Such studies have been slow in coming. Where were the studies of medicine, law, or science in Nazi Germany 20 or 30 years ago? It is true that, outside of Germany, there were studies of this character-Max Weinreich's pioneering Hitler's Professors, for example (first published in Yiddish in 1946), or Francois Bayle's Croix gammee contra caducge.2 In the United States, the Office of Strategic Services prepared a study of Nazi medical and social policy as early as 1944, as part of its plans for the coming occupation.3 Even in Germany, there were occasional lights in the darkness. A few studies treated the subject: Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke's work on "medicine without humanity," prepared at the request of the 51st meeting of German physicians (Deutscher Arztetag) to document the Nuremberg "medical trial"; Hans-Giinter Zmarzlik's essays on social Darwinism; Alice Platen-Hallermund's treatise on euthanasia; and the East German volumes by Friedrich Kaul.4 But the most important fact about the three and a half decades following the war is that the involvement of German science and medicine in Nazi policies was generally ignored. How can we explain this?

At the theoretical level, the fact that scientists (or physicians) had supported the Nazis (and vice versa) did not fit well with the popular postwar belief that science is either apolitical, disinterested, or inherently democratic. Allied governments, too, were less than enthusiastic about dwelling upon the past for longer than was "necessary." As Christian Pross and others have shown, American intelligence agencies were as interested in recruiting German scientific talent as they were in bringing war criminals to justice. The jobs were often confused, as when Leo Alexander served at the Nuremberg medical trial as both chief witness for the prosecution and chief officer for Project Paperclip.5 American intelligence authorities were not particularly eager to continue (in the words of the American Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency director) "beating a dead Nazi horse."6

In Germany itself, additional factors prevented full disclosure. Long after the war, many of the leading racial theorists continued to occupy positions of power in German universities. For example, Otmar von Verschuer, Mengele's doctoral advisor, continued research and writing until his death in 1967; and Fritz Lenz, one of the most influential racial theorists, continued publishing into the 1970s. German health authorities resisted what few efforts there were to dredge up the unpleasant past. Not until the 1980s did scholars begin to explore Nazi health and social policy in a systematic fashion. The turning point came with the 1980 Gesundheitstag (health meeting), organized in West Berlin in opposition to the traditional Arztetag (physicians' meeting) of the West German Medical Association. The legacy of the Nazi medical past was confronted as part of a larger critique of modern medical practice.7

Since that time, one of the most sustained efforts to explore Nazi health and social policy has been a series of volumes edited in Berlin by Gotz Aly and his colleagues from the Hamburg Institut fur Sozialforschung. The Beitrdge volumes are not his only contribution in this sphere. In 1984 Aly and Karl Heinz Roth were the authors of the pathbreaking Restlose Erfassung; Aly has subsequently edited a book on the T4 euthanasia operation, and a series of important essays on medicine under the Nazis for the Berlin Chamber of Physicians.8 He has also served as scientific advisor for a collection of essays on the KarlBonhoeffer-Nervenklinik.9

The thesis of Aly and his colleagues is that murder and modernization went together. Fascism flourished at a time of bold advances in highway design (the Autobahns), automotive engineering (the Volkswagen), computing, electron microscopy, synthetic rubber, television, rocket engines, nuclear fission, and many other innovations. All either got their start or were significantly advanced under the Nazis. Health policy was an integral part of this. Medicine was directed toward what Gotz Aly has called the "final solution to the social question": an unprecedented effort to rationalize the productive use of human labor, an effort that included the elimination of not only the mentally ill and physically handicapped, but also a wide class of Asozialen and Antisozialen (criminals, the homeless, prostitutes, Gypsies, and alcoholics, among others). This "final solution to the social question" was planned with an eye to reallocating food, jobs, hospital beds, homes, and land from "useless eaters" or "racial parasites" to productive Germans.10

The first volume in the Beitrdge series, Aussonderung und Tod: Die klinische Hinrichtung der Unbrauchbaren, builds upon the pioneering work of Ernst Klee, whose "Euthanasie" im NS-Staat has become the standard German source on the Nazi elimination of "lives not worth living."11 Through the work of Klee and others, the outlines of the Nazi euthanasia operation are by now well known. On 15 October 1939 Hitler issued a memo allowing physicians to grant a "mercy death" to incurable mental patients and the physically handicapped; the order was deliberately predated to coincide with the onset of war with Poland.12 The goal from the beginning was to exterminate 70,000 individuals in accordance with the formula 1000: 10:5:1 -that is, for every 1,000 individuals in Germany, ten needed some sort of psychiatric care, five needed continuous care, and one of these was to be exterminated. When the operation was halted in August 1941 (the muchheralded "protest sermon" of MiInster Bishop Clemens August von Galen, in Aly's view, had little effect on the decision to stop), the target had been achieved: 70,273 were killed in this first, systematic phase of the operation. Over the next three and a half years, 130,000 more would be granted a "mercy death."13

In his essay on "medicine against the useless,"14 Aly makes a strong case for the fact that it was ultimately patients judged incapable of work who were killed. The euthanasia operation was thus related to other efforts to eliminate the unproductive members of German society. In the fall of 1941, immediately after the end of the first phase of the euthanasia operation, T4 officials turned to the work shelters and halfway houses (Arbeits- und Bewahrungshduser), organizing those capable of work into brigades and eliminating the rest according to the principle of destruction through labor (Vernichtung durch Arbeit). On 12 January 1942 psychiatrists, euthanasia administrators, and criminal biologists met at the Berlin-Rummelsburg workhouse to devise a scheme to sort out beggars, alcoholics, prostitutes, addicts, sexual deviants, the homeless, and persons with "frequent job change" for elimination. This broadened the extermination project beyond the strictly medical euthanasia operation, bringing many other classes of asocials and antisocials into the class of those slated for extermination.

Aly also describes Aktion Brandt, Karl Brandt's decision to empty hospitals after the fall of 1942 when war conditions created a shortage of hospital beds. Killing was not to fulfill quotas, as was true for the first phase of the euthanasia operation, but rather according to "need." Hospitals for the mentally ill were kept in operation -patients "kept the beds warm," as Aly puts it. When beds were needed for war-wounded, patients were killed, freeing up beds for "lives worth living." Hospitals were cleared, first in the Rheinland (beginning early in 1943), then in Hamburg, Westphalia, and Berlin. In most cases, patients capable of productive work were spared. But Aly also documents how, in several cases, elderly people with no history of mental illness were killed, simply because they had been bombed out of their homes and had sought medical help in their distress. The same fate befell many elderly from Hamburg. As a memo of 5 July 1943 put it, "total war" precluded the use of hospital beds for the aged or infirm.

Angelika Ebbinghaus and Gerd Preissler15 add a Soviet voice to this discussion, translating D. D. Fedotov's 1965 account of the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union following the German invasion of 22 June 1941.16 According to SS Security Service documents, Einsatzgruppe A killed some 240,410 persons between 16 October 1941 and January 1942. In many areas, all mentally ill were killed. Some were starved, some poisoned, some shot, some "exploded." Gas vans were set up beginning in 1942 in Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Crimea, and the northern Caucasus when it was realized that shootings posed a heavy psychological burden on the SS.

Matthias Hamann 17 shows how SS troops began shooting patients of Polish psychiatric institutions as early as September 1939 in the towns of Owinska (near Poznan), Kochorow, and Swiecie. In the final months of the war, even tuberculosis had become grounds for extermination: from the end of July 1944 to March 1945 tubercular Poles and Russians were shipped to the psychiatric hospital at Hadamar (by then with several years' practice in exterminations), where they were executed. By 17 March 1945, 468 Soviet and Polish workers - including 21 children under the age of 15 -had been killed at Hadamar. The hospital by this time was more accurately a killing station; the presence of doctors and nurses constituted an effective disguise for the murder of unproductive lives.

Physicians charged with murder after the war argued in their defense that the individuals destroyed were "incurable," and fated to die soon anyway. Hamann, however, points out that the key was not curable or incurable, but whether they were fit for work. The physicians and caretakers at Hadamar were brought before an American military tribunal at Wiesbaden on 8-14 October 1945.18 Seven members of the staff were tried and convicted -three to hang. Landrat Fritz Bernotat, one of the primary overseers of the operation, escaped trial, assuming a false name and living near Fulda, where he died a natural death in 1951. Officials of the labor office, who had sent the workers to their deaths, were never even brought to trial, claiming not to have known about the fate of those they sent to die.19

Volume 2 of the Beitrdge continues this discussion of the links between murder and modernization. Aly's essay on "progress clean and soiled"20 shows that the architects of the euthanasia operation were not mindless thugs but professional reformers, defenders of progress. Paul Nitsche, one of the key figures in the T4 program, was director of the Dresden psychiatric hospital and a pioneer of work therapy (Arbeitstherapie), following the lead of Hermann Simon. His enthusiasm for euthanasia was not the perversion of a marginal man, but the culmination of a career of reform-minded psychiatry. Nitsche had maintained that for every disease there must be a therapy; euthanasia became the therapy for those judged incurable.

Aly's thesis is that it was not simply a case of "either we cure them or we kill them." Improvements in therapy continued alongside improvements in killing. Healing and killing went hand in hand -and not simply in the sense that Robert Lifton has argued, that racial elimination was a form of "therapy."21 German psychiatrists in the 1930s developed new drugs, new techniques of electroconvulsive shock and insulin therapy, new methods of counseling and work therapy. In 1943 and 1944, most German psychiatric hospitals got electroshock equipment. Nazi Germany saw the first publication of comprehensive psychiatric statistics (in 1938), new methods of psychosurgery (an improved lobotomy, the chordotomy), mandatory dissection of bodies for purposes of genetic research (1939), postgraduate education for physicians, and mandatory study of the history of medicine.

Psychiatrists did sometimes worry that with the routinization of euthanasia their claims to distinctive skills would be endangered: Why do you need psychiatrists when all you are going to do is kill patients? (According to the Nazi scientist Carl Schneider, the Nazi politician Bernotat once expressed this view.) But they also hoped and predicted that progress in therapy - electric shocks, for example - would help to transform incurables into curables. New techniques of healing and killing would allow one to move beyond the impotent "nihilism" of previous psychiatric practice; Schneider suggested that psychiatry would one day find its Copernicus, who would do for psychiatry what the mathematician did for astronomy. Schneider apparently envisioned himself as that Copernicus: he proposed the establishment of an interdisciplinary "Institute for Biological Anthropology" under his direction, with funding of some 15 million reichsmarks over a period of 15 years.

Aly shows that most of the killing stations worked closely with medical research facilities: Berlin-Wittenau with the pathological division of the Rudolf Virchow Hospital (under Berthold Ostertag) and the Pediatric Clinic of the Charit6 (under Georg Bessau); Leipzig-Dosen and Brandenburg-Gorden with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch; Munich-Haar with the Pediatric Clinic at the University of Munich; Ansbach and Kaufbeuren with Munich's Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Psychiatrie. Viktor von Weizsdcker's Neurological Institute in Breslau received children's brains from the killing station Loben in Upper Silesia; the Eichberg mental hospital maintained connections with the pharmaceutical research division of IG Farben. In 1939 Brandenburg-Gorden became a training ground for child-euthanasia under the direction of Hans Heinze; that same year, Heinze and Max de Crinis (successor of Karl Bonhoeffer at the Charite; Professor de Crinis also served as a T4 physician) were named members of the board of directors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research.

Aly asserts that a child-killing station was probably established at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research,22 but it remains unclear whether this ever came to pass. What is clear, however, is that Julius Hallervorden, chief since 1937 of the histopathology section of the institute, collected brains from the euthanasia operation for study at the institute. In July 1945 Hallervorden showed the brains to Leo Alexander, the U.S. Army health officer who, as a Jew, had left Vienna in 1933 and had returned after the war as a consultant for the United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Hallervorden informed Alexander that he had collaborated with the killing stations in order not to waste valuable research materials. Hallervorden explained that he told those doing the killing:

"Look here now, boys, if you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains out so that the material could be utilized." They asked me, "How many can you examine?" and so I told them an unlimited number-"the more the better".... "There was wonderful material among these brains, beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease. I accepted these brains of course. Where they came from and how they came to me, was really none of my business. "23

The cost of maintaining the mentally ill was a perennial theme of Nazi propaganda. Account after account is given of families who, with three or four defective offspring, are costing the state hundreds of reichsmarks every year for medical care and supervision. The RacialPolitical Office produced a dozen films on this theme, trying also to put a human face on extermination (often portrayed as "relief from suffering"). Such films were widely distributed: Opfer der Vergangenheit, released in April 1937, was shown in every one of Germany's 5,300 theaters.

The most powerful film in this genre, however was kh k1age an!, a romantic tale of a woman who, suffering from multiple sclerosis, asks to be granted a mercy death. Screened first in August 1941, the film won a prize in (fascist) Venice. The SS Security Service commissioned an opinion poll to gauge the public response to the film, and found that the greater part of the German populace

agreed, with some reservations, with the main premise of the film, namely, that severely suffering people, for whom there is no longer hope of a cure, should be led to a quick death, as allowed by law.25

Volume 3 of the Beitrdge describes the exploitation of foreign labor in German wartime industry. Nazi leaders for a time were divided over whether to employ foreigners in German farms and factories. The need for cheap labor was clear, but the elimination of "alien peoples" from the German workplace had long been a rallying cry of the Nazis. Ironically, Nazi planners ended up bringing unprecedented numbers of foreigners into German factories. Himmler in February 1940 conceded that "it would be better to do without these people ... but we need them."26 By April 1940, 210,000 Polish citizens had been transported to Germany. By August 1944, nearly 8 million foreign workers from all over Europe were keeping the German armaments industry going - including 2.8 million Soviets, 1.7 million Poles, 1.3 million French, and several hundred thousand each of Belgians, Italians, Dutch, and Czechs. A 1942 propaganda pamphlet boasted that "Europe works in Germany."

Eastern laborers worked without pension, without insurance, and sometimes without salary. The majority had not chosen to work in Germany; thousands of young Poles, for example, were simply kidnapped off the streets and shipped west. Foreign workers were segregated from the German populace and given entirely different standards of pay, housing, and working conditions. Polish men found to have sexual relations with German women could be publicly executed; women had their heads shaved. Penalties for traffic with French or Belgian workers were much less severe -though giving a couple of cigarettes to a French prisoner of war could still result in imprisonment. Soviet and Polish workers who became ill were deported, often to their deaths in concentration camps. Given the backbreaking pace of war work, this was often a substantial number. In 1943, 8 percent of the male and 4 percent of the female Polish work force were returned home - primarily for tuberculosis and digestive disorders. The first of those shipped home brought with them stories of the horrible conditions under which they were forced to work; subsequent deportees often never made it home.

Ulrich Herbert27 Suggests that foreign labor was needed because the Nazis were reluctant to violate their philosophy that German women should not work. Foreign laborers, in other words, filled jobs that women might have taken. In fact, as documents from the time make clear, the proportion of women employed outside the home grew substantially during the Nazi period: from 20 percent in 1933 to 36 percent in 1938.28 More to the point is the fact that, as Herbert himself points out, the failure of the blitzkrieg against the Soviets meant that soldiers were not going to return home to work very soon. There was also the issue of what to do with the millions of POWs the Germans had accumulated. The Germans had counted on a rapid victory over the Soviet Union, as in Poland in 1939 and in France in 1940; no provisions were made for the feeding or lodging of prisoners. Goring and Himmler's decision in the fall of 1941 to employ Soviets in German factories solved two problems at the same time: removing prisoners from the front and easing labor shortages at home.

Herbert reminds us that most Soviet POWs died before they ever reached Germany. By the end of 1941, after only six months of war, 60 percent of the 3.4 million Soviet prisoners of war had perished, 1.4 million of them in the first two months of the campaign, during July and August 1941. Of the 5.7 million Soviets taken prisoner during four years of war, 3.3 million died in German hands.29

Italians had it somewhat better than the Poles or the Russians. Christoph Schminck-Gustavus 3O describes the persecution of Italian soldiers after the capitulation of the Italian army in the summer of 1943. Germany occupied Rome and continued the fight against the Allies. The Italian navy had managed to escape largely intact to Malta, but Hitler ordered the transport of the remaining 600,000 members of the Italian army-roughly one-quarter of the entire Italian armed forces-to Germany for work in labor camps. In Germany life was made difficult for those unwilling to rejoin the fight against Germany's enemies. There was racism: Italy, after all, was "halfway to Africa," and Germans boasted of being the only ones keeping Italy from being totally swamped by "Negroes and Subhumans."

Much of Schminck-Gustavus's account is based on conversations with Attilo Buldini, an Italian officer who spent a year and a half building streets and bunkers in German forced-labor brigades. Buldini describes how Italian laborers constructing air raid shelters had to leave to make room for Germans when bombs began to fall and how German architects, for example, designers of bunkers, managed after the war to obtain government compensation for their services while laborers with back pay owed to them never could. Buldini details how Italian soldiers who refused to surrender to German armies were brutally crushed; on the island of Kephalonia alone, 4,000 soldiers were shot when the 9,000-man army resisted surrender. Buldini also tells how he and several compatriots made four- or five-day journeys on top of overfilled railway cars to return home, how several fell or were knocked off, and how the train had to be pushed to the next station when it ran out of coal.

These otherwise grim stories contain some relief. For example, Buldini chanced upon a munitions factory near one of the many train stops on his way home. He and several companions wrecked the machines with iron bars, venting their anger at the war. Later he was able to sell a motor he pried loose, providing his only income for several months. Buldini was fortunate to return at all: by one count, 60,000 of the 600,000 Italians brought into Germany died there.

The remaining articles in this volume detail other aspects of foreign workers' lives in Germany. Jochen August's article on Polish laborers includes an extraordinary account of a Polish worker's surprise at being offered for sale at an East Prussian "slave market," where wealthy farmers came to pick out Polish laborers, paying a fee to the transporter and hauling their catch back to their farms.31 Jochen also documents the elaborate means employed to segregate Polish from German laborers, including restrictions on travel, housing, personal contact, and so forth. Matthias Hamann 32 describes how Poles were to be treated: in Himmler's words, as a leaderless Arbeitsvolk, providing Germany with migrant workers on an annual basis, and laborers for special tasks (for example, street building and stone cutting).

Volume 4 of the Beitrdge presents the diaries or letters of three medical perpetrators: Hermann Voss, Director of the Anatomical Institute at the University of Posen; Friedrich Mennecke, the SS officer and euthanasia physician; and Otto Brautigam, the expert for the Eastern Territories and postwar diplomat. The contrast is a revealing one: Mennecke, the early supporter of Nazism from a lower-class background, received after the war a death sentence, commuted to life in prison, from a German court in Frankfurt, Voss and Brautigarn, the well-to-do Nazis, escaped postwar punishment and enjoyed illustrious postwar careers. AD three illustrate what Aly calls a dialectic of "banality and bestiality" in the lives of men at that time.

Mennecke's letters are perhaps the best known, cited as they were in the Nuremberg medical trial of 1946-1947.33 The introduction by Peter Chroust,34 preceding the extracts from the letters presented in Volume 4, describes Mennecke's role in the concentration camp and hospital "selections" of persons no longer fit to work, the so-called Operation 1413; at least 2,500 people were killed as a result of Mennecke's evaluations. Striking in the letters is how matter-of-factly he describes such activities -as if it were just another job. Also striking is the contrast between his sugary affection toward his wife, addressed as his "mama," and his biting hatred of Jewish Bolshevik "whores," with their "rapist" male consorts, in the occupied East. Sexual danger and Jewish Bolshevism are for Mennecke closely linked; he warns his wife against any and all contact with such elements.

The case of Hermann Voss is less well-known.35 Fleeing from the Red Army in January 1945, Voss left behind a 225-page diary containing praise for Nazi policies and hate-filled attacks on Jews, Slavs, and Communists. From 1933 to 1942, the year the diary breaks off, he celebrates the restoration of the draft, the withdrawal of Germany from the League of Nations, Hitler's "peace- loving" speeches, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. How fortunate, he writes, to live in such exciting times. Voss blames international tensions on "war-mongering Jews"; the Nazi struggle is by contrast one of "light against darkness." Communism is also a big danger. His diary entry for 13 April 1938 asserts that Communists "ought to be sterilized."

In February 1941 Voss was named Professor Ordinarius (and later dean) at the medical school of the newly Germanized Reich University of Posen. His diary shows little love for the Poles. He worries that the Poles are breeding "twice as fast as Germans," that Slawentum is on the march. As with the Communists, the problem is to be solved "in a biological manner": the Poles "must be destroyed, or they will destroy US."36 The Gestapo helped Voss to imagine how this might be done. In the fall of 1939, the Gestapo had taken over the crematorium in the basement of the institute, converting it into a nighttime disposal unit for the bodies of executed Poles. When he arrived in the spring of 1941, Voss was impressed with the operation:

If only one could incinerate the entire Polish people in such a manner! The Polish people must be exterminated; otherwise, there will never be peace here in the East.37

On a slow day, Voss visited the crematorium in the basement of his institute, marvelling at "how little remains of the human body after it is burned." Voss appears to have had few qualms about its energetic use (4,914 bodies of Poles and Jews were burned at the institute between 1939 and 1945). On 15 June 1941 the anatomist complained about how "uppity" (frech) the Poles had become in recent months, and that "as a consequence, the ovens are kept very busy. How wonderful [schdn] it would be, if the entire [Polish] population could be chased into such ovens!" In the meantime, if Poles were to violate that peace and perhaps even kill a German, punishment was to be swift and strong: Voss asserted that "a hundred Poles or more" should be executed for every German killed.38

Voss was not one to miss a research or business opportunity. When the Gestapo built a guillotine to speed up executions, Voss and his assistants were allowed to attend the killings, obtaining blood and tissue samples from bodies still quivering- sometimes as little as 40 to 80 seconds after death. Voss and his assistants convinced the Gestapo not to burn, and thereby waste, the bodies of the people they had killed. Voss obtained the bodies to prepare skeletons and facial imprints for sale to medical schools throughout the Reich: 150 RM for a skeleton, 15-30 RM for just the head. Gestapo contacts thereby helped the Anatomy Institute at Posen become one of the leading anatomical suppliers of Germany. Aly notes in his commentary that some of the body parts of executed Poles and Jews are still being used in German medical schools today.

The significance of the Voss diary lies partly in its author's illustrious postwar career. In 1952 he was appointed Professor Ordinarius at the University of Jena; the same year he was named co-editor of Germany's foremost anatomical journal, the Anatomischer Anzeiger. In 1948 Voss published the first volume of his influential Taschenbuch der Anatomie, a four- volume treatise that would become the most widely used anatomy text of postwar Germany with 18 editions and numerous translations.39 In 1959 the German Democratic Republic bestowed upon him the title Distinguished Scientist of the People (Hervorragender Wissenschaftler des Volkes) for "advancing science in the service of peace." The story has by now become a familiar one: a successful career under the Nazis, profit from the elimination of the Jews (he obtained one promotion when a Jew left), a stellar postwar career unburdened by his complicity in murder.

The story is similar in some respects to that of Otto Briutigam, deputy chief of the Political Department of Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the so-called Ostministerium. Brautigam corresponded with Hinrich Lohse, Reich Commissar for the Ostland in Riga, when the latter inquired whether it was the intention of the 0stministerium for "all Jews in the East to be liquidated," regardless of age, sex, or economic situation. Brautigarn responded by advising, first of all, that questions regarding such matters were to be clarified "orally"; he then advised Lohse that the Jewish question was to be solved "without regard to economic considerations."

Here was another man whose hands were dirtied only with paper and who therefore was freed from culpability in the postwar world. The introduction by H. D. Heilmann to the diary of Brautigam4O shows that he escaped prosecution and went on to become chief of the Eastern Department of the Bonn Foreign Office, a position he occupied until 1956. His diary, discovered shortly after the war but for unclear reasons never cited at Nuremberg, shows him to be a cultivated man rubbing shoulders with the top Nazi brass-men such as Rosenberg, Alfred Meyer, and Heinrich Himmler, occasionally the Fuhrer himself. His diary somehow ended up in the 1950s at the Library of Congress, by which time the Nuremberg trials were over and the cold war had set in. East German newspapers made much of the diary, but West German politicians by this time were reluctant to believe anything coming from the East. Brautigam retired from the Foreign Office in 1956, then assumed a position as General Consul to Hong Kong. In 1960 he was awarded the Grosse Bundesverdienstkreuz in recognition of his service to the Federal Republic.

Volume 5 of the Beitrdge turns to the destruction of the Jews to ask: Was there an economics of the final solution? The authors reject the simplistic notion that everything was done for narrowly economic reasons. How else does one explain the fact that pains were taken to deport 2,200 Jews from Rhodes in June 1944, when train space even for soldiers was short and heavy artillery had to be left behind? Such actions cannot be reduced to economic motives. But neither can racial hatred alone explain the dimensions of the effort.

Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim41 argue that the elimination of the Jews solved several problems simultaneously for the Nazis: removing a large portion of the poor of the East (58 percent of all Russian Jews were, by one Nazi estimate, paupers); clearing land to solve the "problem of overpopulation"; and providing Lebensraurn for new German settlements. Murder of the Jews contributed to what Aly and Heim call "the solution of the social question": freeing up jobs in the cities, putting a halt to unwanted population growth, establishing what one Nazi called an economic tabula rasa onto which Germans conquerors could lay their plans. Aly and Heim follow the Polish economist Tadeusz Kudyba in suggesting that the goal of the Germans in the East was not to reduce scarcities, but rather to eliminate that which was in excess -namely, the people of the region. Mass murder provided the answer.

A number of examples are produced to demonstrate that economic motives were at work in this process. German authorities reasoned that the murder of two million people would save a million tons of grain per year; five million tons of grain could be used to make 750,000 tons of meat, staving off hunger riots. (The German populace at this time presumably preferred to see their neighbors carted off to concentration camps than to have a few meals without meat.) The Jews were "useless eaters," like the mentally ill. Fritz ArIt's 1,940 paper on population policy in the General Government made this clear: deportation of Jews would lower the population density in Poland from 126 to 110 people per square kilometer, providing a "constructive solution" to problems of overpopulation in the region. Given that a substantial portion of the Jews in the East were classed as paupers, deportation (or soziologische Umschichtung, as Arlt put it) could be viewed as part of a larger program of "economic development" for the captive East. No state has ever attempted to move or kill so many people; never has population policy taken on such a dramatic character.

Volume 6 of the Beitnige takes up the theme of Gypsy persecution, chronicling German attempts to solve the "Gypsy problem" from Alfred Dillmann's 1905 Zigeunerbuch and the 1911 order for all Bavarian Gypsies to be fingerprinted to the murder of at least 277,000-and perhaps as many as half a million -Gypsies in the years 1941-1945.

Four groups conspired in the murder of the Gypsies: academic anthropologists, the police, the Reich Health Office, and the SS concentration camp system. The psychiatrist-criminologist Robert Ritter was a leading figure in each of the first three of these groups. As head of the Racial Hygienic Research Office at the Racial Health Office (founded in 1936) and the Criminal Biological Institute of the Reich Health Office (beginning in 1941), Ritter with his associates gathered anthropological measurements on thousands of Gypsies, constructing files that were used to round up Gypsies for deportation.

Ritter considered Gypsies remnants of a primitive race, a "powerful genetic stream" against which Germans had to defend themselves. Most dangerous, in his view, were the Gypsy half-breeds, whose "constitutional contradictions" led them to crime, shiftlessness, and other disorders. In Ritter's view, there were very few "pure Gypsies"most showed intermingling with other populations, usually defective individuals from those populations.

As Reimar Gilsenbach reports,42 Himmler shared Ritter's view that pure Gypsies were relatively harmless. The Reich Leader SS wanted to preserve a few pure (stammechte) Gypsy tribes to roam freely on tracts of land reserved for that purpose; on 29 January 1943 he issued an order that "pure race" Sinti and Lalleri were to be spared from deportation to Auschwitz. (Romani and Balkan Gypsies were not so fortunate.) Himmler also agreed with Ritter, however, that very few Gypsies were "pure" in this sense; the January 1943 exemption order was interpreted to include only nine "Gypsy chiefs" and their families. From the Gypsy camp at Marzahn, for example, established to isolate Berlin's Sinti population prior to the 1936 Olympics, only Hermann Steinbach (the Gypsy chief) and two dozen of his relatives were spared from deportation. The 1,500 others ended up in Auschwitz.

German authorities commonly failed to distinguish between "racial" Gypsies (Sinti, Romani, and so on) and people who simply "acted like Gypsies" (vagabonds and the chronically unemployed, for example). Racial hygiene orthodoxy held that traits such as Wanderlust or crime were inborn; the vagabond (der unsesshafte Mensch) was therefore a genetic "threat" regardless of whether he was a Gypsy in the ethnic sense or not.43 In a second contribution to the volume,44 Gilsenbach argues that Eva Justin, Ritter's premier student and collaborator, helped to secure that orthodoxy, establishing at the same time criteria for extermination. In her 1943 doctoral thesis, Justin claimed that Gypsy behavior was racially anchored and that Gypsy children raised in nonGypsy families still exhibited Gypsy behavioral traits. Like the distinguished readers of her thesis - Eugen Fischer, Richard Thurnwald, and Robert Ritter-Justin obviously failed to appreciate Franz Boas's distinction of race, language, and culture.

It remains today unclear, at least to this reviewer, how much Eva Justin knew about the fate of those she sent to Auschwitz. It is hard to believe she was unaware of the fate of those she so carefully evaluated; the assessment of Gilsenbach may well be correct, that her dissertation was "written in the blood of the Sinti."45 Still, it is hardly an indictment of Justin to learn that, as Gilsenbach tells us, "Dr. Josef Mengele, researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Genetics, was being transferred to the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau" on or about the same day that Justin was taking her doctoral exams.46 The two events are not connected, and it is wrong to intimate that they are. Justin was brought to trial in 1960 for "deprivation of liberty resulting in death committed by an official of the state" (Freiheitsberaubung im Amt mit Todesfolge), but she was never convicted. We need to know more about her actions and her motives.

After the war, Gypsy researchers such as Eva Justin and Hermann Arnold - both Ritter students - continued to portray the objects of their research as crafty, greedy, and criminally minded. A 1958 volume by Arnold, introduced by Otmar von Verschuer, described Gypsies as possessing a "genetic tendency toward vagrancy"; a 1957 essay by Arnold at an international congress of Gypsy scholars twisted history to argue that "pure Gypsies" had never been deported to "so-called extermination camps." Subsequent articles by Arnold suggested that Gypsy accounts of persecution could not be trusted because Gypsies "tell you what you want to hear." Arnold denied that treatment of the Gypsies by the Nazis was "racist"; he also tried to whitewash the career of Ritter and his associates. Ritter is said to have loved his objects of study, "at least the pure ones."47

Volume 7 of the Beitrdge chronicles a quite different side of this period, reprinting the entire six-year run (1934-1939) of the Internationales Arztliches Bulletin, the official journal of the socialist physicians in exile. The reprint is welcome, given that a complete set of the journal is to be found nowhere in Germany. The journal is so difficult to find in the United States that the normally reliable Union List of Serials does not even acknowledge its existence. The journal's precursor, Der Sozialistische Arzt, was founded in 1925 as the official organ of the Association of Socialist Physicians (including both socialist and communist physicians), the most important group of physicians opposing the Nazi movement prior to 1933 and in exile after 1933. Historians of German medicine and anyone with a general interest in the history of socialist medicine will find the volume a valuable source.

Gotz Aly and his associates did not set out to provide a detached or neutral account of Nazi health and social policy. These are activist essays, self- consciously concerned to point out continuities between the past and the present. The first of the Beitrfige volumes compares the Nazi euthanasia movement to recent right-to-die movements, warning that many of the arguments for euthanasia have not changed: concerns about the burden to society in a time of spiraling costs, fears that mothers will give birth to less than perfect babies, and so forth. Volume 3 draws a separate set of parallels, comparing the Nazi treatment of foreign workers to the discrimination against Turks in present-day Germany. Volume 6 devotes a great deal of space to postwar Gypsy efforts to obtain compensation for persecution; also to how, for many years, Gypsy deportations were classed by the West German judiciary as "justifiable police measures."48 Several of the volumes end with book reviews and notices of recent events, highlighting the fact that inquiry into Nazi health policy is not just of antiquarian interest.49

This activist impulse must also be understood in light of the fact that the question of the Nazi past has become a pivotal one in the politics of the German medical profession. In January 1987 the Fraktion Gesundheit, an alliance of left-leaning physicians worried about the deteriorating conditions of medical practice, managed to win the elections of the West Berlin Chamber of Physicians, culminating more than a decade of political activity on the part of young "alternative" physicians. The new head of the Berlin Chamber, Ellis Huber, was one of the primary organizers of the 1980 Gesundheitstag at which German physicians for the first time raised the question of medical involvement in Nazi racial and social policy. Christian Pross and Gotz Aly, both editors of the Beitrdge volumes, were recently commissioned by the West Berlin Chamber to prepare an official history of medicine under the Nazis, published in 1989 as Der Wert des Menschen.50

The Beitrdge volumes are refreshingly light on interpretation, heavy on documentation. There is no attempt to trace the roots of fascism to Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation; Haeckel and the Monist League; Nietzsche's nihilism; or the demon seed of Darwin, Hitler, and Gobineau. There is no attempt to psychologize the Nazi phenomenon no mention of victims identifying with their torturers or of the dual personality that Lifton calls "doubling." The emphasis instead is upon how smoothly people managed to move from the banal to the bestial:

Today a civil servant in the Interior Ministry, tomorrow a staff member in a concentration camp; today a university lecturer, tomorrow in the service of the Reichsprotektor; today physician, tomorrow expert for courts-martial; today researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute, tomorrow in Auschwitz cutting off heads; today a traffic cop, tomorrow the commandant of a labor camp.51

If these things are modern, then so were the Nazis. But presumably so were Einstein and Kafka, the architects of the Bauhaus, the planners of the TVA, the commissars of Stalin's Russia, and so on. Nets as loose as these may capture very little. How is it of interest that fascists were proponents of reform? What is the value of a term that encompasses both Auschwitz and the Bauhaus, Franz Boas and Adolf Hitler? Perhaps all that is meant is that Nazi crimes were perpetrated as part of a larger program of rationalizing economic production consistent with economic growth. But rationalizing production was only one of several Nazi goals. The Nazis also sought a more "organic" - that is, biological - way of living, one that would be in harmony with presumed natural and racially specific laws. We should recall that Nazi authorities banished white bread as a chemical product, scorned DDT, revived midwifery, and banned smoking in public buildings. Dachau produced organic honey; the SS controlled most German mineral baths and waters. There is a curious mix of enlightenment and romance in the Nazi view of the world. Above all, it is a worldview that postulates a strict hierarchy of useful and useless lives, the clean and the dirty, the good citizen and the worthless parasite. Productivity was an important part of this value system, but not the whole. It is difficult to believe that Jews were excluded from the Viennese economy in order to increase produc- tivity. The Nazis themselves would never have made such a claim; they were more likely to speak of eliminating unhealthy competition or reducing Jewish domination. Jewish industries were confiscated not because they were not productive, but because they were Jewish -or because their Jewish productivity was something the Nazis could not stand. Eliminating Jews from the Ukraine was advertized as reducing overpopulation, but one must not forget that only certain populations were reduced.

Given the scope and politics of the volumes, it is surprising that certain topics were not addressed. There is no discussion of the dis- tinctive role of women, either as victims or perpetrators. There is no effort to distinguish how Catholics acted compared with Protestants, or how various groups (apart from the socialist physicians) voiced resistance. A discussion of the role of nurses would complement the attention usually given to physicians. Hopefully some of these themes will emerge in future volumes.

There is much to recommend here. It is important to recall that intel- lectuals were at the root of the Holocaust: seven of the 13 participants in the notorious Warmsee conference possessed the doctorate; 11 of the 17 leaders of Einsatzgruppe A, responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in the northern parts of the occupied Soviet territory, were lawyers -nine of them with doctorates. Germany at the time Hitler rose to power was the premier scientific power in the world, the world's leader in science, medicine, and the arts. Nazi health and social policy must be studied because there are disturbing continuities that bind the past and present.53 If we take a long-term view, it may be significant that the decade which saw the possibility of a reunited Germany was also the decade which saw German intellectuals finally come to grips with the Holocaust. After a long and uneasy silence, Germans have become their own best critics, and the Beitrdge volumes are certainly among the best testimonies to this transformation.

NOTES

1. Recent works include: Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im National sozialismus (Opladen, 1986); Hendrik van den Bussche, ed., Medizinische Wissenschaft im "Dritten Reich" (Hamburg, 1989); Heidrun Kaupen-Haas, ed., Der Griff nach der Bevdlkerung (N6rdlingen, 1986); Stephan Leibfried and Florian Tennstedt, Berufsverbote und Sozialpolitik 1933: Die Auswirkungen der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung auf die Krankenkassenverwaltung und die Kassenfirzte (1979), 3rd ed. (Bremen, 1981); Benno Midler-Hill, Tbdliche Wissenschaft: Die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeunern und Geisteskranken 1933-1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1984); Karl Heinz Roth, ed., Erfassung zur Vemichtung, von der Sozialhygiene zurn "Gesetz iiber Sterbehilfe" (Berlin, 1984); Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie (G6ttingen, 1987); Achim Thom and Horst Spar, eds., Medizin im Faschismus (Berlin [East], 1983); and Peter Weingart, Jurgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1988).

2. Max Weinreich, Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People (New York, 1946); Fran~ois Bayle, Croix gamm6e contra caducee (Neustadt, Palatinate, 1951).

3. See Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution Archives: U.S. Office of Strategic Services (Research and Analysis Branch), "R and A Reports," Report No. 3114.7, "Principal Nazi Organizations Involved in the Commission of War Crimes, Nazi Racial and Health Policy." The document is unsigned, though Barry Katz suspects that Oscar Weigart may have been the author (personal communication).

4. Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke, Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit (Frankfurt, 1960; original publ. 1949), English edition as The Death Doctors (London, 1962); Hans-Gunter Zmarzlik, "Der Sozialdarwinismus in Deutschland als geschichtliches Problem," Vierte1jahrshefteffir Zeitgeschichte 11 (1963): 246-73; Alice Platen-Hallermund, Die Tdtung Geisteskranker in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1948); Friedrich Kaul, Arzte in Auschwitz (Berlin [East], 1968); idem, Nazimordaktion T4 (Berlin [East], 1973).

5. Christian Pross, paper delivered at the conference "Medicine With out Compassion," University of Cologne, Genetics Institute, 28-30 Sept. 1988.

6. See Linda Hunt, "U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists," Bulletin of theAtomic Scientists (Apr. 1985): 20.

7. See Gerhard Baader and Ulrich Schultz, eds., Medizin und National sozialismus (Berlin, 1980).

8. See Gbtz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, Die Restlose Erfassung: Volkszdhlen, Identifizieren, Aussondern im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1984); Gotz Aly, ed., Aktion T4 1939-1945: Die "Euthanasie"-Zentrale in der Tiergartenstrasse 4 (Berlin, 1987); and G6tz Aly and Christiar Pross, eds., Der Wert des Menschen: Medizin in Deutschland, 1918-1945 (Berlin, 1989).

9. Totgeschwiegen 1933-1945: Die Geschichte der Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik, ed. Arbeitsgruppe zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Karl- BonhoefferNervenklinik (Berlin, 1988).

10. For a connection between the murder of the handicapped and the murder of the Jews, not emphasized directly in the Beitrdge, see Henry Friedlander, "Jiidische Anstaltspatienten im NS-Deutschland, " in Aktion T4, pp. 34-44; idem, "Das nationalsozialistische Euthanasieprogramm," in Geschichte und Verantwortung, ed. Aurelius Freytag, Boris Marte, and Thomas Stern (Vienna, 1988), pp. 277-97. See also Nationalsozialistische Massent6tungen durch Giftgas: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rilckerl (Frankfurt, 1983).

11. Ernst Klee, "Euthanasie" im NS-Staat: Die 'Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens" (Frankfurt, 1983).

12. Early euthanasia plans grew out of the recognition that during World War I tens of thousands of psychiatric patients had starved to death -45,000 in Prussia; 7,840 in Saxony. The Hoche and Binding text that defended the killing of 'lives not worth living" arose partly in an effort to justify those deaths. See Alfred Hoche and Rudolf Binding, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Leipzig, 1920). Karl Heinz Roth, in his essay on film propaganda (Beitrdge 2:133), points out that the war was a key event in the euthanasia operation, fostering as it did a crisis mentality, a sense that if healthy Germans were dying on the front, defectives could not be allowed to live "in luxury" at state expense. According to Roth, even the most ardent euthanasia enthusiasts did not expect the extermination of massive numbers of Germans to continue after the war.

13. These are figures for Germany. Aly also describes how, in the early weeks of the war, thousands of hospital patients were shot by German security forces - not just in Poland, but also in West Prussia and Pomerania.

14. "Medizin gegen Unbrauchbare," Beitrdge 1: 9-74.

15. "Die Ermordung psychisch kranker Menschen in der Sowjetunion," ibid. 1: 75- 107. D. D. Fedotovs original account appeared in the journal Voprosi sotsialnoi i klinicheskoi psichonevrologii (Moscow, 1965), pp. 443-59.

16. See also Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938-1942 (Stuttgart, 1981).

17. "Die Morde an polnischen und sowjetischen Zwangsarbeitern in deutschen Anstalten," Beitrdge 1: 121-87,

18. See The Hadamar Trial: Trial of Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahimann, Heinrich Ruoff, Karl Willig, Adolf Merkle, Irmgard Huber, and Philipp Blum, ed. Earl W. Kintner (London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, 1949).

19. On the postwar trials of Nazi war criminals in the courts of the Federal Republic of Germany, see Adalbert Riickerl, NS-Verbrechen vor Gericht (Heidelberg, 1982); Henry Friedlander, "The Judiciary and Nazi Crimes in Postwar Germany," SWC Annual 1 (1984): 27-44.

20. "Der saubere und der schmutzige Fortschritt," Beitrdge 2: 9-78.

21. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 1986).

22. Beitrdge 2: 64.

23. Cited in the original English. Ibid. 2: 67-68.

24. "Filmpropaganda fur die Vernichtung der Geisteskranken," ibid. 2: 125-93.

25. Ibid. 2: 170.

26. Ibid. 3: 20.

27. "Der Auslandereinsatz," ibid. 3: 13-54.

28. See Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1988), p. 127.

29. See also Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im "Fall Barbarossa": Eine Dokumentation (Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, 1981); and Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen (Stuttgart, 1978).

30. "Herrenmenschen und Badoglioschweine: Italienische Militdrinternierte in deutscher Kriegsgefangenschaft 1943-45," Beitrdge 3: 55-102.

31. "Erinnern an Deutschland: Berichte polnischer Zwangsarbeiter," ibid. 3: 109-30. See the account of the slave market on pp. 115-16.

32. "Erwunscht und unerwiinscht: Die rassenpsychologische Selektion der Ausldnder, " ibid. 3: 143-80.

33. The Hamburger Institut fur Sozialforschung has recently published the entire 2,500 pages of original correspondence. See Peter Chroust, ed., Innenansichten eines medizinischen Tdters im Nationalsozialismus: Briefe eines "Euthanasie"- Arztes an seine Frau (1935-1944), 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1987).

34. "Friedrich Mennecke: Innenansichten eines medizinischen Taters im Nationalsozialismus. Eine Briefauswahl," Beitnige 4: 67-122. Introduction on pp. 67-79; letters on pp. 79-122.

35. "Das Posener Tagebuch des Anatomen Hermann Voss," ibid. 4: 15-66 (introduced and annotated by G6tz Aly).

36. Ibid. 4: 41 (entry 2 June 1941).

37. Ibid. 4: 41 (24 May 1941).

38. Ibid. 4: 43-44.

39. Hermann Voss and Robert Herrlinger, Taschenbuch der Anatomie (Jena, 1948). The text is still in print today.

40. "Das Kriegstagebuch des Diplomaten Otto Brautigam, " Beitrdge 4: 123-87. The introduction is found on pp. 123-30.

41. "Die bkonomie der'Endlosung': Menschenvernichtung und wirtschaftliche Neuordnung," ibid. 5: 11-90. Aly and Heim elaborated on their argument in "Me Economics of the Final Solution: A Case Study from the General Government," SWC Annual 5 (1988): 3-48.

42. "Die Verfolgung der Sinti," Beitrfige 6: 11-41.

43. Anthropologists at that time argued that spiritual qualities were inherited to a stronger degree even than physical traits. See Robert N. Proctor, "From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde: Concepts of Race in German Physical Anthropology," in History of Anthropology, ed. George Stocking (Madison, 1988), pp. 138-79.

44. "Wie Lolitschai zur Doktorwiirde kam," Beitrdge 6: 101-34.

45. Ibid. 6: 131.

46. Ibid. 6: 114-15.

47. Ibid. 6: 137-39.

48. On the more general question of postwar restitution, see Christian Pross, Wiedergutmachung: Der Kleinkrieg gegen die Opfer (Hamburg, 1988).

49. One interesting case of contemporary relevance concerns the files recently recovered from Friedrich Panse's Rheinisches Provinzialinstitut ftir psychiatrisch-neurologische Erbforschung in Bonn. From 1935 to 1943, the racial hygienists Friedrich Panse and Kurt Pohlisch gathered files on more than a million persons suspected of being carriers for various genetic defects. In 1943 the files were shipped to Thuringia (now in East Germany) for storage, where they remained until recently. In 1988, after several years of negotiations, the 20 tons of files were returned to the Rheinisches Krankenhaus in Bonn, where they have become the object once again of study by West German human geneticists, especially Herwig Lange of Diisseldorf's Center for the Study of Huntington's Disease. Critics worry that the files -containing detailed records of at least 130 families with a history of Huntington's chorea-may be used to discriminate against carriers of the fatal disease. Others argue that carriers have a right to be informed that they may transn-dt the disease to their offspring and that the Nazi origins of the data have no bearing on how they should be used today. See Beitrdge 6: 204-5; also the report on the debate in Stern, 25 Nov. 1987.

50. See note 8.

51. Beitrdge 4: 8.

52. See Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939-1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1989).

53. On science and Nazi crimes, see also Benno Muller-Hill, Todliche Wissenschaft; English edition as Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany 1933-1945, trans. George R. Fraser (Oxford, 1988).