Perpetrator Motivations and Nazi Medicine

I’ve realized that this blog gets the majority of it’s views based on searches into the Browing-Goldhagen debate on Holocaust perpetrator motivations.  While I have posted a few works on the blog on the topic, I have not posted my final research on the subject in my blog, simply due to the length of the project.

I will rectify that by now posting the link and research abstract to the online journal in which my research was published:

http://history.csusb.edu/studentsAlumni/journal2009/fuller.htm

The Ideological Scalpel: Physician Perpetrators, Medicalized Killing and the Nazi Biocracy
By MATTHEW D. FULLER

ABSTRACT:

With the conclusion of the Nuremburg Doctor’s trials in August 1947, the role of German physicians in the concentration camps of Europe became a widely discussed and researched topic in the historiography of the Holocaust. Like many other perpetrators indicted by the Allies following the Second World War, German physicians claimed to have been swept up in the mass indoctrination of the National Socialist movement and had ultimately become powerless cogs within the Nazi totalitarian regime. While this claim may be true in some cases, the historiography of German physicians-turned-killers reveals different sources of motivation which allowed doctors in the Third Reich to reverse the precepts of the Hippocratic Oath in order to therapeutically kill for the greater health of the German Völk.

I hope this research will help any individuals pursuing information into the field of perpetrator motivation.

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