Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
34,2 (2020) 225-252
Keywords:
Lifton, Robert Jay,
;
National socialism and medicine History
;
Nazi concentration camps
;
Human experimentation in medicine History 1933-1945
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Moral and ethical aspects
Abstract:
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.
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