Book Review

Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans

N Engl J Med 2005; 353:1187-1188September 15, 2005

Article

Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans
By Vivien Spitz. 316 pp., illustrated. Boulder, Colo., Sentient Publications, 2005. $23.95. ISBN: 1-59181-032-9

Nearly 60 years ago, in the wake of Germany's defeat in World War II, the victorious Allies gathered the surviving leadership of Nazi Germany in the historic city of Nuremberg to call them to account for their crimes against humanity. Although the trial of the regime's political leaders is the best known of the prosecutions, it was followed over the next three years by trials of defendants involved in the Nazi medical, military, economic, justice, and extermination systems. The first of these subsequent prosecutions to take place was the medical trial, which exposed to the world the atrocities that were perpetrated in the concentration camps and the program of euthanasia of persons with mental and physical disabilities. This trial is best remembered today as the source of the Nuremberg Code, the first international effort to codify the ethics of human research.

(Figure)The Defendants' Dock in the Medical Case at the Nuremberg Trials, 1946.

Vivien Spitz was a 22-year-old court reporter from Detroit who was recruited by the War Department to help record the trials. Arriving in Nuremberg on a military-transport plane, she discovered a bombed-out city that, 18 months after the end of the war, still harbored unreconciled Nazis, who emerged at night from the ruins to bomb Allied facilities, including the hotel where she was housed, and to assassinate unwary members of the occupying forces. With no preparation for what she was about to hear, Spitz was thrust into the medical trials, rotating in and out for 15-minute segments in order to record in shorthand the testimony of the witnesses, sometimes while struggling to hold back her tears.

There is no shortage of accounts of the perverse acts committed by the Nazi doctors. But no academic summary that I have read transmits the horror of their actions so powerfully as this book does. Spitz arranges her account just the way you might expect of a court reporter — she assembles excerpts from the testimony of victims, witnesses, and perpetrators, letting them speak for themselves. And they do that with a power that may lead even physicians who have never thought of themselves as squeamish to decide that this is not a book to read before turning out the light at bedtime.

Dispassionate references to Nazi atrocities are common these days, but it is worth remembering what really happened at the hands of well-trained physicians in the extermination camps. Victims were placed in low-pressure chambers that simulated high altitudes or in vats of chilled seawater to see how long it would take them to die. Many of those who survived were killed so that autopsies could be performed. Inmates were deliberately exposed to malaria, typhus, and hepatitis; were forced to inhale or swallow mustard gas; had their skin coated with incendiary phosphorus, which was then ignited; and had wounds deliberately injected with pus to induce gas gangrene. Incisions were made into which bacteria and fragments of wood and glass were inserted. Sections of bone and entire limbs were removed from healthy inmates and then “transplanted” into other victims. A photograph in the book of a bin full of healthy severed legs bears witness to the insanity that overcame German medicine.

Years after her experience in Nuremberg, Spitz, who is herself of German descent, was stunned to find people and organizations denying that the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities had ever occurred. Since then, she has devoted herself to lecturing on her experiences in an effort to debunk the deniers. More than the most dispassionate treatise, this simply written, obviously heartfelt, and profoundly disturbing book makes clear just how thoroughly the calling of medicine can be corrupted.

Paul S. Appelbaum, M.D.
University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA 01655