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Doctors Under Hitler

In: Historical Events

Submitted By laurenmkc
Words 1888
Pages 8
Lauren Chapman
March 11, 2015
HIST 342
Book review

Doctors under Hitler by Michael H. Kater
The book Doctors under Hitler by Michael H. Kater, offers a lot more than its title suggests. Kater exposes us to a numerical image of the nazification of the German medical community through social, economic, and political views. He guides us through the years before and after Hitler’s regime with chapters full of statistical data, graphs, and tables demonstrating what it was like to be a doctor during this time. When preparing to read this book, I expected to read about a collection of twisted doctors under Hitler’s rule, performing atrocious “medical” experiments. Although this was discussed, the book detailed more on the entire medical profession under Hitler, and its primary focus being on the fortune and fate of physicians as one of the most significant specialized groups under the Nazi party. Kater states that, “doctors became Nazified earlier and more thoroughly than members of other professional groups and worked hardest to serve the regime (4).”
Kater makes his thesis known within the first few pages of the book, saying that “physicians become Nazified more thoroughly and much sooner than any other profession, and as Nazi’s they did more in the service of the nefarious regime than any of their extra professional peers (4-5). He breaks this statement down into chapters, filled with sections of information regarding the organizational and socioeconomic setting of doctors at the end of the Weimar Republic, and Nazi organizations like the Nazi Physicians League. He then proceeds into the dilemma of women physicians, medical faculties in crisis, and the infection of medical science with Nazi ideology. Finally he discusses the persecution of Jewish physicians, and ends with a conclusion of the crisis of physicians and medicine under Hitler. Kater uses a wide

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