amednews: Nazi war crimes provide lessons in medical ethics :: Dec. 6, 2010 ... American Medical News: German physicians and scientists helped carry out the regime's policies. What can today's doctors learn from this tragic history?
In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of German medical professionals took part in a euthanasia program that targeted children younger than 3 years old with severe birth defects. Doctors and midwives were required to report such cases, and parents were told that advanced care could be given to children at 30 special pediatric wards around Germany. Instead, the children were murdered, usually with sedatives. Physicians drew up falsified death certificates, and parents were told their children died of natural causes such as pneumonia. An estimated 5,000 children fell victim to physicians and other medical professionals who went from healers to killers.
These actions were far from the exception in Nazi Germany. As evil as these actions appear in retrospect, they arose out of a highly sophisticated German medical culture. More than half of the Nobel Prizes that were awarded in science through the 1930s went to Germans. Where German medicine then went wrong is that physicians began to view improving the health of the "body politic" as a whole as their principal aim.
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