Cleansing the Fatherland

Thanks to the work of Aly and his associates, those areas of medical criminality that escaped the retribution the Allies visited on the more obviously ghoulish experimenters… have at long last come out of the shadows. – Michael Burleigh Times Higher Education Supplement The gruesome medical experiments that Cleansing the Fatherland describes… were exposed during the Nuremberg doctors trials of 1946-47. But the book also contains annotated selections from the diaries of German anatomist Hermann Voss [which] offer a long look into the mind of a German medical scientist who by 1964 was widely regarded as ‘the most influential and respected anatomist in East Germany’ even though he had spent the war years dissecting unmistakably murdered bodies. Lingua Franca

Gotz Aly is a freelance political scientist and historian. He is editor of Beitrage zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik. Peter Chroust is on the scientific staff of the Zentrum fur Historische Sozialforschung at the University of Cologne. Christian Pross, M.D., is medical director of the Berlin Center for the Treatment of Torture Victims.