Ten testimonials on the back cover are a lot for a book from an academic press. Usually only the pulps get so many.
Princeton University Press, however, has reasons to make clear just how seriously several respected scholars are taking one of its spring releases.
In The Nazi War on Cancer, to be published next week, Robert N. Proctor makes a startling argument about Nazi science and medicine: “Fascist ideals fostered research directions and lifestyle fashions that look strikingly like those we today might embrace.”
Mr. Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Pennsylvania State University, is well known for his books on both cancer research and Nazi medical abuses. In his new book, he defends his argument by analyzing a little-known aspect of Nazi history: the Third Reich’s pioneering work in preventive medicine, public health, and environmentalism.
Before and even during World War II, many physicians and scientists in Germany -- after their Jewish colleagues were driven off -- collaborated with Nazi officials to start extensive campaigns aimed at, for example, reducing smoking and encouraging women to test themselves for breast cancer. They sought to reduce workplace hazards such as asbestos, radium, and radiation, along with the use of X-rays. And they advocated better diets -- for example, Nazi officials ordered bakeries to make only whole-grain bread, and promoted the soybean as the “Nazi bean.”
The movement’s bizarre poster child was the non-smoking, vegetarian Adolf Hitler himself.
Of course, writes Mr. Proctor, the benefits of such measures were to be limited to the Aryan “race.” Jews, Gypsies, and members of other vilified groups were not included in the quest for better health. Instead, they were characterized as contaminants and tumors, to be flushed or rooted out of the Nazi body politic. Indeed, during the war, slave laborers were assigned to increasingly hazardous workplaces.
Mr. Proctor argues that the long-neglected subject of Nazi health initiatives poses difficult questions about science, medicine, public health, and morality.
The matter is “delicate,” to be sure, as he puts it in an interview. He is at pains to make clear that he is not trying to redeem Nazism. “Of course my intention isn’t at all to minimize those other horrors. My goal is to put them in a more situated context and a more honest context.”
In The Nazi War on Cancer, he sounds this note repeatedly. “I would never have written the present book,” he writes in the prologue, “had I not already explored the heinous aspects of Nazi medical crime.” In Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Basic Books, 1988), he detailed the four categories that now compose a standard schema of Nazi atrocities: mass sterilizations, forced euthanasia, abusive experimentation, and mass murder.
He says he felt compelled to explore the Nazi effort against cancer in greater detail after touching on it in Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know about Cancer (Basic Books, 1995), which was featured in the 1998 public-television series Cancer Wars.
Having cited that research, Mr. Proctor plunges in to the thorniest of issues: “Did the Nazis do good work? Was some of that good work motivated by Nazi ideals?”
The notion that even a vastly evil regime might have happened onto some activities worthy of emulation by, say, peaceable democracies may not be entirely surprising. However, Mr. Proctor says -- and he seems to have the broad agreement of colleagues -- that Holocaust historians have avoided many aspects of the medical, scientific, and public-health histories of the Nazi era. They have dodged the subject not only because it is “tainted by virtue of being in the Nazi environment,” he says, but also, ironically, “because there’s very little horror associated with it.”
That avoidance, he argues, has prevented historians from dealing with important questions, including those about the very nature of science. “What is science that it so easily flourished under fascism?” he asks.
One response is simple: Science isn’t inherently good or bad simply because it’s practiced for moral or immoral ends.
For more-complex answers, Mr. Proctor writes, one needs to address “the complicity of science under fascism, but also the complexity of science within fascism.”
He is not content with such “banalities” as, “Good can come from evil.” Rather, he wants to examine why and how German culture embraced science of widely varied moral and intellectual standing, and to see what use other cultures have made of that science.
So, for example, he looks into the way the Allies readily adopted German military science -- its advances in biological warfare and rocketry. He disputes arguments that science is inherently authoritarian, or -- as many libertarians contend -- that government public-health campaigns always tend toward totalitarianism.
Such beliefs, he contends, comfortably rely on an image of Nazi “medicine gone mad,” without taking stock of how, given certain historical and economic conditions, “the routine practice of science can so easily coexist with the routine exercise of cruelty.”
It is not surprising, Mr. Proctor suggests, that the Nazis would be health-conscious: When you cling to a belief in attaining a utopia of racial purity, a fetish of bodily purity isn’t far away.
The overall health initiative, while it displeased some Nazi officials -- not least those who resented having to curtail their own smoking -- had undeniable appeal to many German citizens.
In one of its many successes, Nazi propaganda advanced the cause of wholesome living by disparaging white bread as a “French revolutionary invention,” made from chemically treated white flour.
The propaganda machine tried to link smoking to political sedition and cultural degeneracy -- jazz, swing dancing, and such.
Of the sum effect of such appeals to the Nazi faithful, Mr. Proctor writes: “We learn that Nazism was a more subtle phenomenon than we commonly imagine, more seductive, more plausible.”
His next sentence may seem appallingly implausible: “We learn that the barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are not as high as some would like to imagine.”
In fact, he argues, in some cases the barriers between prewar Germany and the United States were not high at all: Some U.S. temperance advocates “saluted the rise of Hitler to power and praised him for his anti-alcohol stance.”
Even a revered figure in American science was attracted to the Nazis. Wilhelm Heuper came to the United States from Germany in 1923 and eventually earned the honorific “father of American occupational carcinogenesis.” Mr. Proctor learned that in 1933, Heuper, who had become the University of Pennsylvania’s top cancer researcher, tried to join the Nazi anti-cancer effort, signing his letter “Heil Hitler!”
Heuper remains a hero among advocates of workplace safety in America, says Mr. Proctor. “To discover that he had Nazi sympathies was kind of unbelievable.”
The historian is not new to the issues of morality, ethics, and science that he examines in The Nazi War on Cancer. In addition to his books on cancer and on Nazi medical practices, he wrote Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Harvard University Press) in 1991.
His new book has already been praised by scholars of German history and of science and public-health history. David Rosner, a professor of history in the School of Public Health at Columbia University, writes in one of the dust-jacket blurbs that “Proctor’s analysis tears at the very fabric of our belief that good science is moral science.”
Mr. Rosner was one of five members of a committee of the American Public Health Association that recently chose The Nazi War on Cancer for this year’s Arthur Viseltear Prize, which is awarded for the best American book on public health.
There was considerable controversy among the panel members about whether the book made Nazis look good, Mr. Rosner says. “That was the basic gut problem we all had to confront.”
In the end, he says, Mr. Proctor’s careful arguments won the day, convincing the committee that “we can’t be complacent that our scientists are going to do moral things just because we’re a moral society.”
“It obviously is a very significant book, which is going to cause tremendous reaction in the public-health community,” Mr. Rosner says. “It goes against the grain of a lot of our shibboleths about the issues of morality, society, and public health.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Proctor has seen some indications of uneasiness with the new book. At a recent book fair in Germany, publishing-industry representatives told him that they would be surprised if anyone there would dare to publish a translation. He also detected “a sense of scandal” when he presented some of his findings at Germany’s National Cancer Institute, in Heidelberg.
He hopes that because he did much of his research during his term in 1994 as the first senior scholar-in-residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, the book will be invested with “a certain legitimacy,” he says.
He also believes that his work may have important implications for the current legal disputes over smoking. He recently was the chief historical expert witness in an unsuccessful class-action lawsuit in Ohio, one of several suits that have accused the U.S. tobacco industry of failing to inform consumers about the dangers of its product.
“The important question there is: Who knew what, when, and how early?” he says. German cigarette manufacturers clearly knew -- and tried to obfuscate, much to the annoyance of Hitler and other top Nazi officials -- that cigarette smoking caused cancer.
In fact, the German tobacco industry’s propaganda about smoking -- much of which American manufacturers adopted after the war -- apparently was effective. During the Nazi era, tobacco consumption rose sharply.
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Section: Research & Publishing
Page: A16