When “Genghis Khan Joined Hands with an Eugen Fischer”

Much has been written on the issue of Nazi medicine during the almost eighty years that have passed since Germany's liberation from Nazism.The Lancet's 70,000-word and 73page-long report on Nazi medicine was published eighty-five years-almost to the dayafter the Nazi pogrom.The pogrom became known by its Nazi term Kristallnacht, a word coined by top-Nazi and SS-Brigadefhrer Wilhelm Brger (1896-1962) when he claimed that "the Reichskristallnacht will enter history."Lancet's fifteen strong group of experts headed a commission from ten countries that specifically investigated "state-sanctioned mass murder and genocide" (1869) linked to Nazi medicine.Next to more direct forms of industrial murder, and long before Auschwitz, 1 Nazi medicine was one of the most abhorrent forms of evil.Nazi medicine included "forced sterilization legislation and [the performance of] these procedures on between 310,000 and 350,000 victims who were labelled genetically inferior" by Nazi ideology (1869).Under the Nazi regime, "at least 230,000 people with various mental, cognitive, and other disabilities, whose lives were deemed unworthy of living, were murdered in euphemistically named euthanasia programs in Germany and the conquered territories" (1869).The Nazi language used the term lebensunwertes Leben-life unworthy of life. 2 Much of this was merely the precursor of what was to come.Code-named Operation Reinhardt, the Nazi plan was to exterminate all Jewish people living in German-occupied Poland.This included "the murder of 1.7 million Jews and an unknown number of Roma and Soviet prisoners of war (overall, around 3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German camps)" ( 1869).Yet most did not simply "die"-the report says-but were humiliated, abused, beaten, starved or worked to death, tortured, or simply killed for Germany's war effort and for profit-making German companies.