Nearly 50% of all German doctors joined the Nazi Party already before Hitler’s putsch in 1923; this percentage is higher than for any other profession at that time (Proctor, 1992, 27; Hayse, 1994, 26–33), and is particularly remarkable regarding the fact that those doctors almost all had been trained by or worked with Jewish doctors (Haque et al., 2012, 473).

At first, the [Third Reich] gained the doctors’ trust by reorganising the medical profession and taking care of the unemployment problem that was present (Hayse, 1994, 50). Then, it was simply accepted by the doctors that some lives were not worth saving, as the [Third Reich] claimed, and once this was acknowledged, the doctors did not see it as problematic to harm them. From there, the group of people that was considered unworthy grew larger and the crimes committed became worse (de Leeuw, 2013, 47 and 124).

[Axis] doctors played an important rôle in the Holocaust, and particularly in the Final Solution (Caplan, 1992, 71; Drobniewski, 1993, 541). In the concentration camps, the doctors put aside their ethical and professional values to carry out the most atrocious acts on the prisoners (de Leeuw, 2013, 113). They judged hundreds of thousands of patients incurably sick or ‘racially inferior’, who were then starved to death or killed (Proctor, 1992, 34; Hayse, 1994, 26).

Other atrocities that [Fascist] doctors perpetrated were experiments on the human body, that of course violated the Hippocratic Oath and the entire medical deontology (Wormser-Migot, 1968, 508). Moreover, they collaborated with the [Third Reich] to introduce racial policies (Proctor, 1992, 41). Doctors were namely the ones that insisted on the ghettoization of the Jews, as in their opinion this was the only way to stop the spread of the ‘disease’.

Considering the extensive harm they have inflicted, many people think that all [Fascist] doctors were insane, reducing them all to the extreme sadism of some prominent doctors such as Mengele. However, a psychologist affirmed during the Nuremberg trials that most of the perpetrators were sane and that only a few of them were sadists, which was confirmed by camp survivors (Mann, 2000, 334). It is thus false to think that all these perpetrators were monsters; many of them were ordinary people (Vigorito, 1992, 11).

[…]

After the loss of the First World War, Germany was economically unstable; a certain shame was felt by the professional élites of society, including doctors, because of their lack of promotion and increased economic insecurity. Salaries dropped and the unemployment rate was high (Hayse, 1994, 26; Haque et al., 2012, 476). The absence of clientele or looming failure could explain the rôle of [Axis] doctors in the Holocaust because we will see that the [Third Reich] offered important career opportunities (Wormser-Migot, 1968, 512).

More over, Jews were blamed for the overpopulation of doctors and their subsequent economic instability, which is why they were removed from their posts by the régime. This led to an increase in job and promotion opportunities (Efron, 2001, 234–255; Hayse, 1994, 63; Proctor, 1988, 161). By taking care of the ‘Jewish problem’ and the unemployment problem in the medical sector, the [Third Reich] gained the trust of the doctors (de Leeuw, 2013, 47; Kater, 1989, 55).

Therefore, it is fair to argue that their participation in the Holocaust was also driven by a financial incentive. Additionally, this explains why many early [NSDAP] joiners were medical students as their studies were expensive and their future was far from certain (Haque et al., 2012, 475; Kater, 1987, 46).

However, this argument has to be nuanced, because most of the cruellest [Axis] doctors’ careers had not failed. Carl Clauberg, for example, was an eminent gynaecologist who enjoyed a wide and positive reputation before the war. He seemed to have taken advantage of an abundance of ‘material’ he was offered during the [Fascist era], referring to the prisoners in concentration camps in order to pursue his experiments on female fertility and sterility (Lifton, 1986, 271–277; Wormser-Migot, 1968, 512).

Karl Gebhardt, on the other hand, carried out experiments on Polish girls to find a cure for gas gangrene, an infection from which many German soldiers died, because he hoped Hitler would forgive him for failing to save Hitler’s close confidant, Heydrich, from this infection. These two doctors had already established themselves in the scientific field and did not suffer from the unemployment following the First World War.

The financial incentive cannot thus be generalized towards all [Fascist] doctors, but it was surely an important factor for many of them. However, even for the doctors who already had a quite impressive career and were not suffering from the crisis, the Third Reich would offer them opportunities that had not been possible before which would still boost their career (Wormser-Migot, 1968, 512; de Leeuw, 2013, 37–41).

Unmentioned by the author is that most of these physicians were petty bourgeois: by 1927, about 70% of German doctors ran private practices. Most of them were goyim, but quite a few others were Jewish. Needless to say, the goyim saw Jews as unworthy competitors.

If you have been reading my threads for a while, you should already know what drove so many Jewish adults to make a living through microbusinesses, but what attracted so many of them to the medical field in particular is less clear.

Like fashion and law, medicine’s popularity among Jews is at first puzzling, but the mystery unravels when you examine an ancient Jewish tradition: circumcision (and what to do when someone botches the job, which has sadly happened before). There are other reasons, of course, but circumcision is the simplest as well as the most obvious link between Judaism and medicine (even if circumcisions are rarely medically necessary), and few gentile physicians would have been willing to perform one for ceremonial purposes.