Murderous science: elimination by scientific selection of Jews, Gypsies, and others: 1933–1945

Murderous science is a short, complex book with an importance that extends far beyond the purview of World War Two historians. Muller-Hill's contention is that anthropologists, geneticists, and psychiatrists created, supported, and implemented Nazi racial-inferiority laws and policies. Moreover, there is a direct line from the 1933 job-exclusion laws that saw German scientific and other institutions hastening to cast out their Jewish colleagues, through the laws that enforced sterilization on hundreds of thousands of German citizens who had incurable racially-significant "diseases" (1936-9), past the murder (so-called "euthanasia") of deformed children and asylum inmates of all ages (1938-40), directly to the extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, and the like between 1939 and 1945. Here, from 1943 on, it was physicians who greeted the incoming masses and, with a wave ofthe hand, sent men, women, and children to immediate death, or to labour before dying. The fulminations of Adolf Hitler against the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, and others were based on the assumption of explicit and unalterable genetic differences. When these fevered claims became a central plank in the platform ofthe National Socialists, there was no shortage of geneticists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists scrambling to maintain research funding by shifting their goals to coincide with those of the Party. This book outlines some of the ramifications of this relationship. One component of this book is a detailed chronology of the identification, proscription, and extermination of "those who were different". This opens the first of two main sections of the book, the narrative historical account of this process and the vital roles played in it by various German scientists. Step by step, the scope of activities widened. One particularly significant event was the passage ofa sterilization law in 1933. By its terms, carefully devised by a committee of scientists, sterilization could be ordered to combat a wide range of "hereditary" conditions. The other section of Murderous science contains excerpts from interviews with 13 Germans either related to central figures in the scientific community of the Third Reich, or themselves participants in various ways in the racial-inferiority studies. Muller-Hill interviewed many more individuals relevant to this book, but the published transcripts are those that have been reviewed by the interviewees and approved for publication. It has become a truism of postwar investigations of Nazism that almost no one interviewed was himself a Nazi or knew what …