Comment peut-on expliquer les crimes des médecins nazis à Auschwitz ?

Abstract

The Nazi doctors committed crimes in the camp of Auschwitz which constitute the darkest page in the history of medicine of the twentieth century. They were largely directly involved in the murder of the 1.1million Jewish majority and about 21,000gypsies who were transported from all over Europe. How can we explain the intellectual journey of those men who had embraced the medical career to relieve their neighbors? How could these cultivated and refined men, from the most prestigious faculties of medicine, have been able to achieve activitiesethically unacceptable? Eight factors help to explain the crimes committed by these educated and cultivated SS doctors: indoctrination fervent to Nazism, adherence to racial hygiene, a false sense of participation in a "public health enterprise", virulent anti-Semitism, unreserved obedience to orders, the opportunity to avoid the danger of fighting areas, the ambition to carry out medical research and the desire to improve surgical knowledge.