The Nazi War on Cancer - Hardcover

Proctor, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691001960 ISBN 13: 9780691001968

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Collaboration in the Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The "euthanasia" of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of "the unfit." Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler's warped quest to create a German master race. Robert Proctor recently made the explosive discovery, however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible. Most startling, Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Proctor explores the controversial and troubling questions that such findings raise: Were the Nazis more complex morally than we thought? Can good science come from an evil regime? What might this reveal about health activism in our own society? Proctor argues that we must view Hitler's Germany more subtly than we have in the past. But he also concludes that the Nazis' forward-looking health activism ultimately came from the same twisted root as their medical crimes: the ideal of a sanitary racial utopia reserved exclusively for pure and healthy Germans.


Author of an earlier groundbreaking work on Nazi medical horrors, Proctor began this book after discovering documents showing that the Nazis conducted the most aggressive antismoking campaign in modern history. Further research revealed that Hitler's government passed a wide range of public health measures, including restrictions on asbestos, radiation, pesticides, and food dyes. Nazi health officials introduced strict occupational health and safety standards, and promoted such foods as whole-grain bread and soybeans. These policies went hand in hand with health propaganda that, for example, idealized the Führer's body and his nonsmoking, vegetarian lifestyle. Proctor shows that cancer also became an important social metaphor, as the Nazis portrayed Jews and other "enemies of the Volk" as tumors that must be eliminated from the German body politic.


This is a disturbing and profoundly important book. It is only by appreciating the connections between the "normal" and the "monstrous" aspects of Nazi science and policy, Proctor reveals, that we can fully understand not just the horror of fascism, but also its deep and seductive appeal even to otherwise right-thinking Germans.

About this title

About the Author

Robert N. Proctor is Professor of the History of Science at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know about Cancer; Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis; and Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge.

From the Back Cover

"Robert Proctor is an outstanding historian of science and an outstanding historian of the Third Reich. By establishing Nazism's pioneering contributions in the areas of preventive medicine, environmentalism, and public health, he takes us right to the heart of the most difficult questions in the analysis of fascism. His treatment of smoking and cancer will be a revelation. This book troubles the politics and ethics of historical interpretation in the very best ways."--Geoff Eley, author ofReshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck

"Racily and wittily written, Proctor's interesting book is a brilliant demonstration of how marginal the Nazi past has become to contemporary health issues. A conclusion long since obvious to the former inhabitants of Bosnia or Rwanda, shot or hacked to death, in the very long shadow of the Holocaust."--Michael Burleigh, author ofEthics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide

"A profound and provocative analysis of the very essence of medical research and health policy. While Robert Proctor focuses on cancer research in Nazi Germany, his book is a detailed examination of the basic value system underlying medical research and public health policy. This unsettling and fascinating account is a 'must read' for every medical scientist."--William E. Seidelman, M.D., University of Toronto

"This book is a major contribution to the history of science and medicine in the Nazi era. Nazism emerges as a kind of vast hygienic experiment that tried to create an exclusionist utopia, by using both 'good science' and laudable health drives, along with murderous practices aimed at the Jews and others deemed to be 'unworthy of life.' The book should be of interest to anyone concerned about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science."--Robert Gellately, author ofThe Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy

"Robert Proctor has once again produced a brilliant volume that will both fascinate and infuriate readers.... Just as he did in his previous bookRacial Hygiene Proctor's analysis tears at the very fabric of our belief that good science is moral science. ...This book will force all of us to sit up and think about the consequences of our actions and our moral responsibilities to account for just what we are doing in the name of scientific neutrality and objectivity."--David Rosner, author ofDeadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth Century America

"Professor Proctor has written a compelling and wonderfully readable account of how Nazi physicians confronted cancer. Sophisticated research went with racial megalomania, as German researchers targeted diet, occupation, smoking, and radium as cancer-inducing. Understanding the Nazi politics of medical research and disease eradication is both haunting and instructive for modern efforts to overcome cancer."--Paul Weindling, author ofHealth, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945

"Proctor's book should fundamentally alter the way we view science under the swastika. Without minimizing either the crimes of the Nazi regime or the complexity of its internal politics, Proctor shows that National Socialist health initiatives ran the entire spectrum from barbaric to benign. This should be essential reading, not just for historians of science and medicine, but for anyone interested in the history of the Third Reich."--Diane Paul, author ofControlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present and The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate

"A fascinating account of medical and public-health ideas and policies in Nazi Germany. Its ironic emphasis on the--in retrospect--'

From the Inside Flap

"Robert Proctor is an outstanding historian of science and an outstanding historian of the Third Reich. By establishing Nazism's pioneering contributions in the areas of preventive medicine, environmentalism, and public health, he takes us right to the heart of the most difficult questions in the analysis of fascism. His treatment of smoking and cancer will be a revelation. This book troubles the politics and ethics of historical interpretation in the very best ways."--Geoff Eley, author of Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck

"Racily and wittily written, Proctor's interesting book is a brilliant demonstration of how marginal the Nazi past has become to contemporary health issues. A conclusion long since obvious to the former inhabitants of Bosnia or Rwanda, shot or hacked to death, in the very long shadow of the Holocaust."--Michael Burleigh, author of Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide

"A profound and provocative analysis of the very essence of medical research and health policy. While Robert Proctor focuses on cancer research in Nazi Germany, his book is a detailed examination of the basic value system underlying medical research and public health policy. This unsettling and fascinating account is a 'must read' for every medical scientist."--William E. Seidelman, M.D., University of Toronto

"This book is a major contribution to the history of science and medicine in the Nazi era. Nazism emerges as a kind of vast hygienic experiment that tried to create an exclusionist utopia, by using both 'good science' and laudable health drives, along with murderous practices aimed at the Jews and others deemed to be 'unworthy of life.' The book should be of interest to anyone concerned about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science."--Robert Gellately, author of The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy

"Robert Proctor has once again produced a brilliant volume that will both fascinate and infuriate readers.... Just as he did in his previous book Racial Hygiene Proctor's analysis tears at the very fabric of our belief that good science is moral science. ...This book will force all of us to sit up and think about the consequences of our actions and our moral responsibilities to account for just what we are doing in the name of scientific neutrality and objectivity."--David Rosner, author of Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth Century America

"Professor Proctor has written a compelling and wonderfully readable account of how Nazi physicians confronted cancer. Sophisticated research went with racial megalomania, as German researchers targeted diet, occupation, smoking, and radium as cancer-inducing. Understanding the Nazi politics of medical research and disease eradication is both haunting and instructive for modern efforts to overcome cancer."--Paul Weindling, author of Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945

"Proctor's book should fundamentally alter the way we view science under the swastika. Without minimizing either the crimes of the Nazi regime or the complexity of its internal politics, Proctor shows that National Socialist health initiatives ran the entire spectrum from barbaric to benign. This should be essential reading, not just for historians of science and medicine, but for anyone interested in the history of the Third Reich."--Diane Paul, author of Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present and The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate

"A fascinating account of medical and public-health ideas and policies in Nazi Germany. Its ironic emphasis on the--in retrospect--'rational' aspects of Hitler-era attitudes toward environmental conta

Reviews

This book presents a powerful case for the primacy of German medical research, including research on cancer and epidemiologic studies of the link between tobacco and cancer, during the Nazi period. The book is very well written and makes an important contribution to the social history of medicine and medical research.

The first war on cancer was initiated not by Richard Nixon in the United States in the early 1970s but by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in Germany in the early 1940s. Hitler was known to be a vegetarian who abstained from alcohol and tobacco and did not tolerate the consumption of these substances in his presence (except by an occasional woman). Nazi culture, Proctor tells us, was "a curious blend of the modern and the romantic" -- Jeffrey Herf described it as "reactionary modernism" -- and there was a romantic view of nature and a holistic approach to health. In August 1933, Hermann Goring announced the end of the "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments" and threatened to commit "those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property" to concentration camps -- where, ironically and tragically, humans were soon to be used in medical experiments instead.

Hitler's enlightenment (by today's standards) with respect to his personal habits, as opposed to his political practices, may remind us of the words Shakespeare's Julius Caesar uses about one of the assassins-to-be: "Let me have men about me that are fat;/Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' night:/Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." Hitler and Goebbels did not sleep on the night of June 21-22, 1941. While launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which within a matter of weeks would kill more than 1 million people, they also had time to review recent German advances in cancer research.

It is easily and readily forgotten that at first National Socialism was viewed by many in Germany and around the world as a progressive movement. The progressivism of Germany in the area of public health during the 1920s and 1930s was tempered by the connection between health and productivity (and ultimately, in the 1940s, war-fighting capability). As early as the 1870s, Otto von Bismarck had explicitly linked vital statistics ("state-istics") with the national capacity for sustained industrial production and warfare in the struggle for dominance among European nations. It is disturbing to our concept of National Socialism in Germany to realize that Nazi doctors and public health activists were involved in activities that many today would consider progressive and socially responsible. In this context, the Nazi war on cancer was launched.

The first two chapters of Proctor's book consider the background of the German campaigns against cancer, citing the great efforts made under Kaiser Wilhelm and during the Weimar Republic, when Germany led the world in medicine and public health. Chapters 3 and 4 review genetic and racial theories of cancers, the persecution of Jewish cancer researchers, and pioneering efforts to identify carcinogens in the workplace. Chapter 5 discusses Nazi views on food and the body. Tobacco is the focus of the longest chapter in the book (chapter 6). Nazi Germany had the strongest antismoking campaign and the most sophisticated epidemiologic studies of tobacco-related disease that the world had yet seen. German leaders worried that tobacco might prove a "hazard to the race." Antitobacco activists pointed out that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt all used tobacco, whereas Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were all nonsmokers.

Despite claims by historians such as Daniel Kevles that American and British scientists first proved the link between tobacco and lung cancer, in the 1950s, Proctor demonstrates that the link was originally established in Nazi Germany, in the 1930s. Although the United States was quick to capitalize on Nazi advances in aeronautics, armaments, and pharmaceuticals after World War II, this public health achievement was apparently ignored. In 1995, Philip Morris ran an advertisement in Europe -- titled, "Where Will They Draw the Line?" -- which identified antismokers with Nazis. The final chapter of the book describes how early public health optimism was compromised by wartime urgencies.

Proctor challenges the comfortable assumption that Nazi Germany was unique and defies comparison. He makes a case that the Nazification of German science and medicine was more complex than commonly imagined, embracing both forcible sterilization and herbal medicine, both genocidal "selection" and bans on public smoking.

To some extent, the social intolerance of contemporary progressive movements, such as animal rights, antitobacco activism, temperance efforts, and enthusiasm for natural foods, may be seen as similar to the "progressive" aspects of Nazi Germany, not only in their goals, but increasingly and alarmingly also in some of the methods used to impose collective solutions on individuals. For example, some scientists believe that although the harmful effects of habitual cigarette smoking are clear, the putative effects of passive smoking on morbidity and mortality, though less clear, have been far more powerful in motivating public policy against individual rights. As Proctor states, appreciating these complexities may open our eyes to new kinds of continuities between the past and the present and may lead to a better understanding of how fascism temporarily triumphed in the first place.

Reviewed by Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Proctor treads a narrow path, from which he might encounter on one side condemnation for finding something good to say about a barbaric regime and on the other side praise for bravery in making his point. Recognizing his position, he writes: "I should reassure the reader that I have no desire to efface the brute and simple facts--the complicity in crime or the sinister stupidities of Nazi ideology." But there was, he adds, "a lesser-known 'flip side' of fascism--the side that gave us struggles against smoking, campaigns for cleaner food and water, for exercise and preventive medicine." He thinks it is worthwhile "to explore the troubling phenomenon of 'quality science' under Nazism: science that we might well celebrate as pathbreaking were the circumstances of its origins peeled away." In particular, he focuses on German efforts to prevent cancer through work on occupational carcinogens and diet and the campaign against tobacco. Proctor, professor of the history of science at Pennsylvania State University, has researched his subject thoroughly.

A fascinating look at German contributions to the study of cancer. Nazi doctors are known for the cruel human experiments they conducted on concentration camp inmates, their euthanasia program, and their willing participation in the selection process at the death camps. Proctor (History of Science/Pennsylvania State Univ.) detailed some of this hideous behavior a decade ago in Racial Hygiene (1988). Here, he makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the other side of Nazi medicine, the study of disease. Proctors account is well-researched and richly illustrated, and he delineates carefully documented facts in fluid prose. But the book is marred by an unclear argument exemplified by its deceiving title. Its actual subject is German research surrounding the cause, prevention, and cure of cancer, not just under the Nazis, but from the late 19th century through the early Cold War period. This includes the leading role German scientists played in diagnosing and fighting occupational hazards that caused cancer, in particular the proof they marshaled in the 1940s that smoking cigarettes caused lung cancer. Efforts to improve health through bans on smoking and alcohol were encouraged in the more racially and hygienically conscious circles of the Nazi hierarchy, especially the SS. Yet war shortages and stress led many Germans at home and at the front to booze it up and fill their lungs with smoke; Proctor never explains sufficiently why a health-obsessed totalitarian regime so seemingly effective in policing its citizenry allowed its Volk to indulge in liquor and cigarettes. He only vaguely touches on the complex nature of life under Nazism (explored by many scholars during the past two decades) and ventures onto shaky ground when discussing the relation of medical researchers to the greater society. Despite its shortcomings, an important, instructive book that expands our knowledge of the role medical researchers played in Hitler's Germany. (39 b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In a book that plumbs both the dark and light sides of the utopian impulse, Penn State history of science professor Proctor (Racial Hygiene; Cancer Wars; etc.) takes a look at the healthy side of fascism. Hitler's government implemented many laudable public health measures, including the regulation of pesticides, asbestos and food dyes. Germany, Proctor notes, had the most aggressive anti-smoking campaign in the world, and German scientists were the first to link smoking with lung cancer. As Proctor outlines the sophistication of German medical science and the ambitions of Nazi public health policy, he asks provocative questions about the relationship between scientific culture and political culture, describing, for instance, how cancer metaphors were used to describe the "subhumans" the regime sought to exterminate as tumors on the German body. Proctor's moral compass stays true: he doesn't exonerate Nazi science but rather looks at how the cult of the Aryan race, which stressed healthy living, played out in the everyday work of scientists who concerned themselves with public health. "My intention is not to argue that today's antitobacco efforts have fascist roots, or that public health measures are in principle totalitarian," he writes. Instead, Proctor seeks to give his readers a more comlex appreciation of "how the routine practice of science can so easily coexist with the routine exercise of cruelty." At this, he succeeds admirably, giving readers a thoroughly researched account of Nazi medical science and posing difficult questions about the ultimate worth of good research carried out under the auspices of evil. Illustrations.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Discovering that forward-looking health restrictions (about smoking, asbestos, radiation, and diet) were mixed in with the monstrous policies of Nazi-era German medicine, Proctor investigates without sensationalizing. His first-rate history restores complexity and a squeamishly recognizable contemporary element to our often cartoonish picture of that time. An excellent work of scholarship that is also well told. (LJ 4/15/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Under the Nazis, German epidemiologists were the first in the world to prove that smoking was the major cause of lung cancer. Proctor brings up other advances the Germans made, such as noting the dangers of passive smoking and radon, most of which have been overlooked by American historians. That oversight is most interesting, considering that after the war the U.S. military commissioned many of the German scientists involved in cancer research to write up their work. Proctor describes the Nazi-era programs and scientific work with tobacco, alcohol, and industrial chemicals in detail, enlivening his account with anecdotes and a smooth sense of humor. He also reports how the tobacco industry fought back. The text is well documented, and the illustrations--posters and other propaganda pieces--are striking and pertinent. The Nazis saw tobacco as a hazard to the race. Hitler had given up smoking before coming to power and seldom drank alcoholic beverages, and other Nazi leaders also served as role models. Fascinating stuff. William Beatty

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691001960
• ISBN 13: 9780691001968
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 380