Murderous Medicine Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus

Subjects:

• History » World War II
• Health/Medicine » Public Health
• History » Holocaust Studies
• Political Science » Civil/Political/Human Rights

Related Web Pages:

• http://www.baumslag.com

Awards:

• American Medical Writers Association 2006 Special Recognition Physicians' Category

Reviews:

• The case that the Third Reich engaged in biological warfare using typhus as an ethnic cleansing agent against Jews, gypsies, and Slavs is carefully constructed and fully documented here. Typhus can assume epidemic proportions when living conditions are unsanitary and nutrition is inadequate. Baumslag demonstrates that Nazi Germany deliberately sought to create environments that would engender typhus in the ethnic communities slated for liquidation, and then transported the lice-ridden inhabitants to extermination camps as a public health necessity. That contemporary medicine and public health measures were available to prevent typhus is attested to by the fact that in WW II only 104 cases of typhus were reported in all the Allied armed forces. In contrast, "at least 1.5 million prisoners died of typhus as a direct consequence of murder, malpractice, or deliberate negligence by German doctors." Through silence, interest in profit taking, and desire to engage in human experimentation, the International Red Cross, the German pharmaceutical industry, and the German medical establishment, respectively, collaborated with Hitler's Final Solution....Recommended. All academic libraries.
  —Choice
• Baumslag's book is an impassioned plea for her fellow physicians to remain committed to the "traditional medical ethics" of the Hippocratic Oath. By exposing the immorality and inhumanity of Nazi doctors, the courageous resistance and dedication of Jewish doctors and the cowardly behavior of the International Red Cross, she hopes to keep alive the memory of an atrocity that we dare not repeat.
  —H-German February 2006
• Baumslag provides useful background information that helps provide the context within which the Nazi regime justified its despicable policies. Thus, Murderous Medicine provides a description of how anti-Semitism influenced the organization and delivery of public health and medical care in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe. It also describes some of the processes by which the Nazi doctors made their decisions to conduct human experiments....The extensive documentation will be helpful to students interested in expanding their knowledge of what must be the worst example of human depravity on record.
  —American Journal of Epidemiology 2006
• In this book this terrible situation is systemically illuminated. It is written for a broad audience, and is an easily understandable presentation of the epidemiology, medical history and political use of typhus. The essential context and research on typhus is clearly presented. The author also describes the struggle of the Jewish prisoner-doctors against the typhus and their exploitation throughout the Nazi occupation. The analytical distance that Naomi Baumslag, a respected pediatrician from Georgetown University Medical School brings is admirable as is her dedication to human rights and engaging the role of medicine and the political use of public health.
  —German Medical Journal May 2006
• A MUST READ FOR ALL....Naomi paints a grim but very real picture of the pathetic conditions of Jews during the Holocaust. The prisoners were kept in pathetic, unsanitary and overcrowded conditions facilitating the spread of typhus... They were then killed under the garb of preventing further infection to other inmates. The horrendous acts of Nazis thus got passed of as acts of great benevolence, even as international agencies like the Red Cross kept watching helplessly.
  —Anil Aggrawal's Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology January-June 2006
• [W]e would do well to pay attention yet again to the lessons of history.
  —The New England Journal of Medicine April 13, 2006
• Baumslag documents the complicity by German and Austrian doctors in human experiments and genocide through the exploration of typhus and biological warfare.
  —SciTech Book News September 2005
• Murderous Medicine is thorough, profusely and admirably illustrated and tackles the medical issues clearly.
  —The Jerusalem Post March 2, 2006
• Murderous Medicine is an important book, a valuable contribution to the literature about Nazi "medicine" (the qualification is deliberate, as the Nazis' "medicine" and "experiments" were neither; they were bestial and torturous, ethically and morally bankrupt). The book should occupy a place on the shelf....Murderous Medicine forces us to remember, and hopefully to reflect....Today's headlines and newscasts remind us that we still have much to remember and learn. That is why this book is important. We are all responsible.
  —JAMA Journal of the American Medical Association March 1, 2006
• [T]hose who continue to ponder Nazi medical atrocities and want to reflect on the moral failures of Nazi doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and humanitarian organizations will find this book useful.
  —JCI The Journal of Clinical Investigation December 2005
• In Murderous Medicine Naomi Baumslag documents the complicity of Nazi doctors and pharmaceutical companies in murderous medical experiments related to epidemic typhus to further Jewish genocide....Baumslag argues that doctors pressured Nazi officials to proceed swiftly to quarantine and ghettoization to further the "eradication" of the disease - not typhus, but the Jews themselves. Typhus prevention rituals, including shaving and gassing, were used under the subterfuge of providing health care. Several million Jews were murdered as a direct consequence. Underlining the point that the goal was to kill Jews, she notes, "with all their barbaric and unethical experiments the German researchers were unable to control typhus and get rid of lice." Jews were left in a diseased environment and doomed to die. It is an important story, and one well worth documenting.
  —Journal of Clinical Medicine 2005
• Baumslag explores in impressive detail how typhus was characterised by Nazis as a Jewish plague.
  —The Lancet September 2005

• Endorsement From Edmund Pellegrino, M.D.
  Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Medical Ethics
  Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University: The central message here is the betrayal of the medical profession of its trust as a healing profession. Evil can never be done so that good may come of it. How often is that dictum violated with the Nazis and the other twentieth century physicians who have allowed arguments, from survival, patriotism, or exigency to drown out the voice of ethics.
• Endorsement From Solon Beinfeld
  Emeritus Professor of History
  Washington University, St. Louis: Baumslag offers a wide range of disturbing material dealing with the perversion and abandonment of medical and humanitarian ideals on the part of those sworn to uphold them: in the first instance the German medical and scientific community but also international organizations like the Red Cross. Written with passionate anger for those who betrayed their calling, Baumslag is equally passionate in her praise for those in the ghettoes and in camps who struggled to do all they could to protect inmates. At the same time, she gives the general reader a lively and informative introduction to the complex interrelation of war and disease.

Table of Contents:

• Illustrations
• Foreword by E.D. Pellegrino, M.D.
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Typhus: War, Lice, and Disinfection
• Decline of German Medicine: From Euthanasia to Murder
• Jewish Doctors Struggle to Conceal Typhus and Save Lives
• Pharmaceutical Companies, Typhus Vaccines, Drugs, Doctors and Inhuman Experiments
• The Red Cross Fails its Humanitarian Vision
• Germ Warfare: From Bodies to Bombs
• Appendix 1: Hippocratic Oath--Modern Version
• Appendix 2: Draft Revision Hippocratic Oath
• Appendix 3: Experimental Transmission of Typhus Exanthematicus by the Body Louse
• Appendix 4: Secret Communication from Privy Council's Office, Whitehall, Re: Professor Buxton's Lice Proofing Belt
• Appendix 5: September 1943 Invoice from Pasteur Institute to a Military Commandant for Vaccine
• Appendix 6: World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo (1975)
• Appendix 7: Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field. Geneva, August 22, 1864
• Appendix 8: Letter from George Vincent to Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. August 9 1921
• Appendix 9: Declaration of Geneva (1995)
• Appendix 10: Simon Wiesenthal Center Condemns IRC Defense of Holocaust Silence (1988)
• Appendix 11: Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction (1927)
• Appendix 12: Circular of the Minister of the Interior of the German Reich Concerning Guidelines for Innovative Therapy and Human Experimentation (1931)
• Resources
• Index