Abstract
Why did a trauma surgeon with an interest in humanism become Hitler's personal physician? John Quin reviews a fascinating new biography of Karl Brandt
Another day, another appointment panel. You make the decisions and then the lay chair passes some references for your attention: “An enthusiastic and intelligent student,” “Fulfilled all his duties with skill and speed and has shown a good understanding of the duties and responsibilities of the medical profession in every respect,” and “Worked with great zeal and conscientiousness.”
Déjà vu—when was the last time you read references like these? When was the last time you wrote references like these? Last month, last week, yesterday? Those hackneyed phrases that promise everything and nothing. Read them again and tremble for these are the words spoken in support of Karl Brandt, Hitler's Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, the man behind the notorious T4 euthanasia programme. Ulf Schmidt from the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in Oxford has given us a timely reminder and explication of “how a rational, highly cultured, literate young professional…came to instigate and become responsible for mass murder…on a previously unimaginable scale.”
Brandt was about as far away from the demonic image of a Nazi medical thug as one can imagine. He was no Mengele, no scary psychopath we can quickly label and file away in some dark cupboard of the mind marked “Bad.” Qualifying from the University of Freiburg in 1929 Brandt went on to specialise as a trauma surgeon. He “developed his career in a methodical and competent manner by gaining theoretical knowledge and practical experience…and clearly possessed significant expertise and skills and developed a good rapport with patients, patients' relatives and colleagues.” Now where have you read that sort of endorsement recently? In 1932 he flirted with the idea of going to Africa to work with the great humanist Albert Schweitzer—such are the ironies of the individual and history. Instead, somewhat in the manner of the doctor in Giles Foden's novel on Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, Brandt came to a dictator's attention by his medical intervention at a car accident. His ascent at the court was swift; he was popular with Eva Braun and the ladies; socially skilled he counted fellow professional Albert Speer as his friend. He was tall, handsome, polite, charming—they thought he was a delightful young man, a wonderful doctor.
By 1939 Hitler, in a written statement, charged Brandt “with the responsibility of enlarging the powers of specific physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgement, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after the most careful assessment of their condition.” Today Hans Scharoun's wonderful 1963 Philharmonie building, where the great and the good come to listen to Sir Simon Rattle's mighty orchestra, sits close by Tiergartenstrasse 4. However, in the early 1940s this address was the headquarters of Aktion T4, the euthanasia programme, which would ultimately claim the lives of an estimated 70,000 people.
With the war going badly for Germany after Stalingrad and the RAF bombings the pressures on the medical services mounted. Brandt then found himself giving agreements to swathes of nightmarish policies—experimentation on camp victims without consent on the effects of starvation, phosphorous burns, hepatitis contaminated serum, bullet wounds, then on to championing research into biological and chemical warfare.
Brandt believed that delivering the patient from pain at all costs was the doctor's task, even if the patient lost his life as a result. This nihilism intensified: the death of the mentally ill or the physically handicapped for the likes of Brandt, so Schmidt explains, “freed society from a financial, emotional and even aesthetic burden.” They “eliminated sickness by eliminating the sick.” Even after he was arrested and tried at Nuremberg, Brandt was determined to paint himself as an idealist, a doctor at ease with his conscience that he was only doing his best for his patients. “I was motivated by absolutely humane feelings.” Judge Harold L Sebring thoroughly exposed how individual morality and responsibility had been totally abandoned or corrupted. The inviolable dignity of the individual had been trampled upon. In his defence Brandt gave the game away by saying this—it was never meant to be murder.
Before he was hung, Brandt offered to submit himself to a medical experiment offering no chance of survival. Even at this late stage he still failed to comprehend the basic issue of consent that he had blithely ignored in his ignominious self serving career. Karl Brandt obeyed, he did as he was told, Brandt was the anti-contrarian of medical history and Schmidt's account of his life has, in our own troubled time of doctors as terrorists, of market driven “health reform”, of educational review and the New Genetics many, many disturbing reminders of the abyss we bestride.
Brandt was about as far away from the demonic image of a Nazi medical thug as one can imagine