Publication: The Holocaust and the Medical Professions

17 November 2025

Photo: Public Domain

Written by Ulf Schmidt

Since the end of the war, scholars have engaged with the Holocaust’s legacy for the practice of medicine and the reputation of the medical professions. The crimes under discussion at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial (NDT), especially the Nazi concentration camp experiments, represented a profound departure from previously accepted medical and human behaviour. It was the “low water mark in twentieth century moral culture,” as Robert Proctor poignantly remarked, the “ultimate refutation to ethical relativism and solipsistic egoism. These issues are part of a wider political and cultural history of medicine in terms of the history of ideas that has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years. How do utopian visions and state authorities shape the understanding of ethics and the code of conduct of the medical professions? How can ethical beliefs and common values connect the medical professions across ideological divides?

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