Description
Book SynopsisBorn in 1904, Brandt played a major role in the first mass killing programme of the Third Reich, the so called 'euthanasia' programme. As Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt became the highest medical authority in the Nazi regime; he initiated experiments on concentration camps inmates and was eventually put in charge of biological and chemical warfare. How was it that a rational, highly cultured, literate, young professional could come to be responsible for mass murder and criminal human experiments on a previously unimaginable scale? In this riveting biography, Ulf Schmidt explores in detail that Brandt belonged to a generation of a young 'expert elite', who in the 1930s and 1940s were willing, and empowered, to support and conceive an oppressive, militarist, and racist government policy, and ultimately turn its exterminatory potential into reality. Through a critical biography of Brandt, Schmidt re-evaluates the system of communication at the centre of Hitler's regime. The book extends our understanding of the culture of detachment between a regime that was geared towards total destruction, and a government that was almost totally removed from its people.
Trade Review"Karl Brandt (1904-1948) was for a time the leading medical authority in the Nazi regime. He was responsible for the euthanasia program, in which tens of thousands of handicapped individuals were killed.... As British historian Schmidt (Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors' Trial) shows, a belief in eugenics, combined with a dash of ambition, motivated Brandt. During the war, he saw it as "legitimate to sacrifice individual human lives in the name of science." Outside of the diaries he wrote during the Nuremberg trials, which Schmidt had partial access to, Brandt left few writings, so Schmidt is forced to make informed guesses about the degree of Brandt's involvement in certain projects, such as the gruesome medical experiments conducted on concentration camp inmates, as well as about some of his motivations. Schmidt concludes that whether Brandt backed the genocide of the Jews is almost impossible to know. There's a lot to wade through, but readers who do will learn about a man of culture and science who turned medicine into a tool of murder."- Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2007 -- Publishers Weekly
"[Schmidt] has produced an extraordinary study of an individual, a government, and an era that few biographies can hope to equal." --New York Sun
"He [Schmidt] skilfully demonstrates Brandt's trajectory from idealistic but ordinary medical student... to Hitler's private doctor... [a] detailed examination" -- Dan Stone, The Times Higher Education Supplement
"Remarkable new research by a German historian [Schmidt] is revealing the idealogical evolution of one of Hitler's closest associates. The research - which has taken nine years to carry out - shows how an apparently decent caring man metamorphosed into a mass murderer... Professor Schmidt's research... is likely to provoke controversy" -- BBC History Magazine, David Keys
"Many historians are wary of biography, but this author's study of Karl Brandt ought to challenge suspicions about this genre of history...This is a fine study." -Larry Thornton, The Historian, Vol. 71
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments; List of Plates and Figures; Abbreviations; Prologue; The Ambitious Idealist; Becoming Hitler's Doctor; Hitler's Envoy; The 'Euthanasia' Doctor; The General Commissioner; Detached Leadership; Human experimentation; Medical Supremo; Nuremberg; Trial; Under Sentence of Death; Bibliography; Index.
