Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews,

Scientists and physicians are respected in civilized societies for the objectivity, rigour and purity of scientific thinking. Yet fifty years ago human geneticists played a crucial role in the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Scientists had invented the theory of biologically inherited, invariant traits, and they developed the notion that some individuals were, because of their hereditary endowment, of greater value to society than others. This idea appealed to the Nazis, who feared and hated the Jews and other minority groups. Once the Nazis were in power, the scientific and medical establishment helped them in their campaigns to identify and persecute the Jews, the Gypsies, the feeble-minded and the mentally ill. Scientists justified such campaigns as scientifically based necessities, and benefited from them, obtaining jobs, funds and new institutes. Alive and after death, their victims provided valuable experimental material. Programmes were devised and human organs were obtained in ways which under other circumstances would be quite unthinkable. This book chronicles that destructive symbiosis between science and government.
Readership: biologists - especially geneticists, molecular biologists and anthropologists; psychiatrists; psychologists; historians of science and modern historians. The general reader.