The Nazi War on Cancer (Paperback)

Historian Robert N. Proctor guides readers through Hitler-led Germany in "The Nazi War on Cancer." He examines a ruling regime and society grappling with health problems such as the exposure of factory workers to carcinogens in the plant, the damage caused by alcohol and tobacco use and the impact of poor diet. Proctor considers how public health concerns influenced the goal of creating a stronger, healthier and racially-pure population.

The deliberation over public health during the Nazi era pushed German researchers and scientists ahead of their counterparts around the rest of the industrialized world in connecting many health problems to the fast-paced and often stressful twentieth century lifestyle. Proctor does not portray the German medical elite as being completely manipulated by the Nazis. In fact, many men of sceince used the Nazi takeover of Germany as an opening to purge Jews, Socialists and Communists from important research positions. Proctor concludes that the Nazi experience with public health gives us an opportunity to understand the appeal and triumph of fascism as more than an aberration. Overall, Proctor presents a solid study of German medicine under Nazi rule. He brings many interesting facts to light which may surprise many readers who picture the Nazis as an all-powerful wave washing over and consuming all of Germany. In presenting his study, Proctor is mindful that many may misuse his facts to discredit modern public health iniatives or to justify the existence of Nazism though he does not let this stop him from delivering a thougt-provoking interpretation of a little known aspect of twentieth century history.

For instance, while Hitler wanted to eventually ban smoking, he was ultimately defeated by cultural resistance to the notion and the desire to keep tobacco taxes coming in and tobacco exports leaving. Still, it was Nazi science that first indicated that smoking was harmful though its general emphasis on clinical studies with few patients caused it to be ignored by epidemiologists in other countries. However, the Anglo-American scientists who made their reputations by proving that smoking was a major cause of lung cancer were preceded more than 10 years by Franz H. Muller's dissertation on that link, the first "case-control epidemiologic" study to do so. And he did it in 1939 Germany.

Besides its material on Nazi scientific efforts to diagnose, cure, and prevent cancer, the book also has some very interesting illustrations of Nazi public health propaganda. My favorite illustration, though, is of various animals giving the "Heil" salute to Goering who banned vivisection in 1933.

My one quibble with the book is Proctor's insistence that his book provides no aid and comfort to those, like libertarian Jacob Sullum -- whose book FOR YOUR OWN GOOD: THE ANTI-SMOKING CRUSADE AND THE TYRANNY OF PUBLIC HEALTH is specifically mentioned in the final chapter -- who wish to link anti-smoking efforts with Nazis. I've never heard any anti-smoking activist propose euthanasia programs or putting people in concentration camps. However, the Nazi regime justified its coercive public health measures with the philosophy that your body was state property and "nutrition was not a private matter". And, as in modern America, economic rationales were given for the Nazi laws intended to make life difficult for smokers. Proctor also speculates, in the Prologue, that public health measures like the Nazi war on tobacco could have been one of the appealing tunes in the siren suite of Hitler's fascism. Not everyone became a Nazi to kill Jews. And not all the doctors who signed up with the Nazi Party were quacks. This book does provide some evidence that coercive public health measures that go beyond mere education can spring from a totalitarian impulse.