Medical experimentation on human subjects during the Third Reich raises deep moral and ethical questions. This volume features prominent voices in the filed of bioethics reflecting on a wide rang of topics and issues. Amid all contemporary discussions of ethical in science, many ethicists, historians, Holocaust specialists and medical professionals strongly feel that we should understand the past in order to make more enlightened ethical decisions.

The participation of German physicians in medical experiments on innocent people and mass murder is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Six distinguished historians working in this field are addressing the critical issues raised by these murderous experiments, such as the place of the Holocaust in the larger context of eugenic and racial research, the motivation and roles of the German medical establishment, and the impact and legacy of the eugenics movements and Nazi medical practice on physicians and medicine since World War II. Based on the authors' original scholarship, these essays offer an excellent and very accessible introduction to an important and controversial subject. They are also particularly relevant in light of current controversies over the nature and application of research in human genetics and biotechnology.

This open access book offers a framework for understanding how the Holocaust has shaped and continues to shape medical ethics, health policy, and questions related to human rights around the world. The field of bioethics continues to face questions of social and medical controversy that have their roots in the lessons of the Holocaust, such as debates over beginning-of-life and medical genetics, end-of-life matters such as medical aid in dying, the development of ethical codes and regulations to guide human subject research, and human rights abuses in vulnerable populations. As the only example of medically sanctioned genocide in history, and one that used medicine and science to fundamentally undermine human dignity and the moral foundation of society, the Holocaust provides an invaluable framework for exploring current issues in bioethics and society today. This book, therefore, is of great value to all current and future ethicists, medical practitioners and policymakers – as well as laypeople.

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the “future dead.”

Only one generation ago, the world watched as highly trained physicians abandoned medical ethics in response to the Nazi regime. Weyers' book takes an in-depth look at the circumstances which allowed this to happen and the steps necessary to ensure such genocide never happens again.

Rubenfeld and the contributors to this collection posit that German physicians betrayed the Hippocratic Oath when they chose knowledge over wisdom, the state over the individual, a führer over God, and personal gain over professional ethics.