Hitler or Hippocrates
Paul Hoedeman

Medical experiments and euthanasia in the Third Reich.

Languages lapses into stunned silence faced with the atrocities perpetrated in the concentration camps by Nazi doctors in the name of scientific research. Equally culpable however was the cynical complicity displayed by Allied bureaucrats who sought the service of these criminals immediately after the war. Incriminating dossiers of potentially useful scientists were conveniently mislaid by the Americans. This chilling account of the actual experiments is meticulously researched and contains much new material including interviews with those camp doctors still alive who were not too reticent to discuss their role in Himmlers experimental and ‘euthanasia’ programs. A good deal of the documentation is deeply moving and unbearably shocking. Included in this latter category are the diary entries of J.P. Kremer, a professor of anatomy and camp doctor at Auschwitz. Typically, he treated prisoners solely as objects, sources of supply for the fresh internal organs he needed for research. The banality of evil becomes evident as in consecutive sentences, Kremer records mundane domestic events or describes his own administration of lethal injections to Jews. In the interests of a still-suffering humanity this book deserves our passionate attention and demands a committed response.