Nel giugno 1941, mentre stanno per lanciare l'operazione "Barbarossa" contro l'Unione Sovietica di Stalin, Adolf Hitler e Joseph Goebbels promuovono anche un'altra offensiva, quella a che dovrebbe segnare la "soluzione finale" nella lotta al cancro. Robert Proctor, storico della scienza attento soprattutto ai problemi etici della ricerca medica, ricostruisce una delle più enigmatiche e misteriose vicende del regime nazista. Non meno ricca di colpi di scena, di suspence, di personaggi ambigui, fu anche la guerra di Hitler contro quello che è stato definito il "male del secolo". Gli orrori della medicina nazista sono ormai sotto gli occhi di tutti. Molto
meno noto è il fatto che il Terzo Reich, sfruttando i propri apparati totalitari, non solo fece propria una politica proibizionista ma si rivelò pioniere in quelle "misure salutistiche" ed" ecologiche"- dal bando delle sostanze inquinanti fìno alla campagna contro il fumo - che oggi sono il vanto di non poche democrazie avanzate. ( )

There's a lot of interesting material in this book: Nazi ideas of the proper diet, indications that the Nazi Institute for Cancer Research may have been a cover for developing bioweapons, and, of course, the chapter that has garnered the most attention: "The Campaign Against Tobacco". Throughout the book Proctor uses the Nazi concern with cancer to show that Nazi science, while often motivated by bizarre or evil notions, wasn't always shoddy. He also shows that it's a mistake to think of Nazi Germany as a totalitarian monolith that always reflected Hitler's will.

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. ( )

This is an excellent book that not only provides a detailed look at science and medicine as it was practiced in the Third Reich, as well as how that government institutionally directed the focus of science, but it also raises important questions about what constitutes good or bad science. Is valid science performed for evil intent good science - good in the sense of usable and valid for other purposes? ( )