Doctors of the Holocaust

Arthur Caplan, editor of When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust, states, “The Holocaust, unlike many other instances of mass killing, was scientifically inspired, supervised and meditated genocide.” Since all genocides are a grand-scale effort to systematically eradicate populations, their success hinges on having large portions of a nation going along with genocidal policy. The individuals in a society must be convinced of genocide’s legitimacy in ‘their case’, they need to forget that it is murder. Genocide obtains it legitimacy for the people of a nation from professionals, those knowledgeable individuals that provide the ideological, intellectual, and scientific basis to justify the complete destruction of a group. It is the status these professional hold that okay destructive actions, all of the statements they make are thought to be important as well as accurate. A well-educated man in good standing...How could he be wrong?

In the case of Ger...