Medicine and morality in Nazi Germany

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Medicine and morality in Nazi Germany Tessa Chelouche

F

or decades since the Second World War, Auschwitz has become synonymous with the unrestrained tyranny, the power of terror and the systematic murder of millions of human beings during the German Nazi rule. Auschwitz was

the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, with the highest death rate among the death camps. Auschwitz was in reality composed of more than 40 camps and subcamps spread across Polish soil. The gruesome history and enduring horror of

Auschwitz can be attributed primarily to the machinery for mass extermination of human beings created by the Nazis at the nearby Birkenau camp, a unit of Ausch­witz. This was designated as the centrepiece for the “final solution of the Jewish question”: the elimination of the Jewish race. According to the best estimates now obtainable, more than one million Jews were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival at Auschwitz and their bodies were incinerated in the camp’s crematoria without the victims being ever registered. Of those murdered upon arrival, no trace remained: no name, no record, and no precise information. Around 400 thousand prisoners were actually registered in the camp, while about 200 thousand perished there.1

About the author: Tessa Chelouche is Co-Chair of Department of Bioethics and the Holocaust, UNESCO Chair in Bioethics (Haifa), and Co-Director of the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust (USA). She is a family physician and renowned scholar of medical history. She has served as co-director and lecturer of a pre-graduate course on “The Study of Medicine and the Holocaust” for medical students as part of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel, for the past 10 years. She has published numerous articles on the subject of medicine and the Holocaust, including Casebook on Bioethics and the Holocaust.

1

Gutman, 1998.


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