The Third Reich is a black hole in German history. Like hypothetical black holes in space, it draws everything toward itself. At the edges of black holes, massive gravitational forces slow time to a stop. Anything falling toward a black hole, therefore, would appear to an observer to fall forever. Similarly, since 1945 historians of Germany have found themselves gripped by the gravity of teleology. The pull exerted by the Third Reich has often led, in the words of Richard Evans, to a view of modern German history “from Hitler to Bismarck.” Although it was not the aim of the German Historical Institute conference on “Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany: Ethics, Politics, and Law,” from which the chapters in this book stem, to detail the already well-documented medical crimes of the Nazis, it was the central purpose of the conference to place the medical crimes and collaborations of the National Socialist era into their larger German and Western contexts. In so doing, the papers, comments, and discussions attempted to pull the history of the Third Reich back into the history of Germany, Europe, and the West, rendering it less of a black entity unto itself than a part of other, broader constellations characterized as much by differentiation as by the historiographical problem of teleology.

On October 25, 1946, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, filed an indictment before Nuremberg Military Tribunal I charging twenty-three German defendants with “murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhumane acts.” Known officially as “The Medical Case,” the subsequent proceedings also became known as “The Doctors' Trial” because twenty of the defendants were physicians. On August 20, 1947, fifteen of the defendants were declared guilty. The next day seven were sentenced to death and five to life imprisonment. The charges encompassed four crimes: the Jewish skeleton collection, the project to kill tubercular Polish nationals, the “euthanasia” program, and medical experiments on civilian and military prisoners. The experiments included the following: high altitude; freezing; malaria; mustard gas; sulfanilamide treatment of gas gangrene; bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation; potability of sea water; epidemic jaundice, typhus, and other vaccines; poisoned food and bullets; phosphorus incendiary bombs; biochemical treatment of sepsis with phlegmon; blood coagulation with polygal; toxicity of phenol; chemical, surgical, and X-ray sterilization. The victims included Germans, Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Jews, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, theologians, resistance fighters, mental patients, so-called asocials, men, women, and children. The exact numbers are impossible to determine, but according to trial documents, approximately 3,500 people were used as test subjects. At least 800 died, as many as 400 of the 1,100 test subjects in the Dachau malaria tests alone.