When the Nazi government came to power it purged Germany of its 6,000 to 7,000 Jewish doctors.[1]
Reportedly more than 7% of all German physicians became members of the Nazi party during World War II, a far higher percentage than the general population.[2] In 1942 more than 38,000 German doctors, half the total number of doctors, had joined the Nazi party.[3][4] While most of these doctors were physicians, some held doctorates (PhDs) in biology, anthropology, or related fields.
Doctors who were working for the state, and not for their patients, using a Mendelian type of logic chart, saw extermination of their patients as the correct solution to the problem of mental illness and the genetically defective.[5][6][7][8]
"The participation in the ‘betrayal of Hippocrates’ had a broad basis within the German medical profession. Without the doctors' active help, the Holocaust could not have happened." wrote E Ernst in the International Journal of Epidemiology.[9]
Psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin was the founder of the psychiatric genetics field and was also a founder of the German racial hygiene movement.[10]
Killing and experimentation[11] became medical procedures as they were performed by licensed doctors. A doctor was present at all the mass killings for legal reasons.[12] During the Doctors' trial, the defense argued that there was no international law to distinguish between legal and illegal human experimentation,[13] which led to the creation of the Nuremberg Code (1947).
After Nazi Germany surrendered, some doctors attempted to change names to escape capture and trial, such as Werner Heyde[17] and Robert Ley,[18] Other doctors, such as Walter Schreiber, were covertly moved to the United States during "Operation Paperclip" in 1951.
Alphabetical list of World War II Nazi physicians:
^Strous, Rael D. (2006). "Nazi Euthanasia of the Mentally Ill at Hadamar". American Journal of Psychiatry. 163 (1): 27. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.163.1.27. PMID16390885.
^Gazdag G, Ungvari GS, Czech H (2017). "Mass killing under the guise of ECT: the darkest chapter in the history of biological psychiatry". Hist Psychiatry. 28 (4): 482–488. doi:10.1177/0957154X17724037. PMID28829187. S2CID9732068.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)