Re: The Nazi War on Cancer & Goring on Animal Experiments

[lsafi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Layla Safi)]

Yoshie, I haven't rushed out yet to buy this interesting $30 book.
You seem to be in agreement with Dr.  Miccozi's summation of wisdom he
gleemed from reading it......<that fascsm temporarily triumphed in the
first place> and that there is some sort of continuity between Hitler's
fascism, and progressive movements that try to discourage smoking by
trying to get government to pass legislation against the tobacco
industry.

Is this a new branch of the thread that tries to link Nazism and
Hitler's vegetarianism with ecology groups and anti-whaling campagns?
 I agree with Hitler that tobacco is a "hazard to the race".       The
man was clearly ahead of his time.        Go ahead, call me a fascist
now.      Call me a "smoke Nazi".

L. Safi



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I prefer free-range chickens to caged birds.  Ah, a sweet taste of freedom!
Yoshie

*****   The New England Journal of Medicine -- July 29, 1999 -- Vol. 341,
No. 5

The Nazi War on Cancer

By Robert N. Proctor. 380 pp. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press,
1999. $29.95. ISBN
0-691-00196-0

This book presents a powerful case for the primacy of German medical
research, including research on cancer and epidemiologic studies of the
link between tobacco and cancer, during the Nazi period. The book is very
well written and makes an important contribution to the social history of
medicine and medical research.

The first war on cancer was initiated not by Richard Nixon in the United
States in the early 1970s but by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in
Germany in the early 1940s. Hitler was known to be a vegetarian who
abstained from alcohol and tobacco and did not tolerate the consumption of
these substances in his presence (except by an occasional woman). Nazi
culture, Proctor tells us, was "a curious blend of the modern and the
romantic" -- Jeffrey Herf described it as "reactionary modernism" -- and
there was a romantic view of nature and a holistic approach to health. In
August 1933, Hermann Goring announced the end of the "unbearable torture
and suffering in animal experiments" and threatened to commit "those who
still think they can treat animals as inanimate property" to concentration
camps -- where, ironically and tragically, humans were soon to be used in
medical experiments instead.

Hitler's enlightenment (by today's standards) with respect to his personal
habits, as opposed to his political practices, may remind us of the words
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar uses about one of the assassins-to-be: "Let me
have men about me that are fat;/Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o'
night:/Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/He thinks too much: such
men are dangerous." Hitler and Goebbels did not sleep on the night of June
21-22, 1941. While launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the
Soviet Union, which within a matter of weeks would kill more than 1 million
people, they also had time to review recent German advances in cancer
research.

It is easily and readily forgotten that at first National Socialism was
viewed by many in Germany and around the world as a progressive movement.
The progressivism of Germany in the area of public health during the 1920s
and 1930s was tempered by the connection between health and productivity
(and ultimately, in the 1940s, war-fighting capability). As early as the
1870s, Otto von Bismarck had explicitly linked vital statistics
("state-istics") with the national capacity for sustained industrial
production and warfare in the struggle for dominance among European
nations. It is disturbing to our concept of National Socialism in Germany
to realize that Nazi doctors and public health activists were involved in
activities that many today would consider progressive and socially
responsible. In this context, the Nazi war on cancer was launched.

The first two chapters of Proctor's book consider the background of the
German campaigns against cancer, citing the great efforts made under Kaiser
Wilhelm and during the Weimar Republic, when Germany led the world in
medicine and public health. Chapters 3 and 4 review genetic and racial
theories of cancers, the persecution of Jewish cancer researchers, and
pioneering efforts to identify carcinogens in the workplace. Chapter 5
discusses Nazi views on food and the body. Tobacco is the focus of the
longest chapter in the book (chapter 6). Nazi Germany had the strongest
antismoking campaign and the most sophisticated epidemiologic studies of
tobacco-related disease that the world had yet seen. German leaders worried
that tobacco might prove a "hazard to the race." Antitobacco activists
pointed out that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt all used tobacco, whereas
Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were all nonsmokers.

Despite claims by historians such as Daniel Kevles that American and
British scientists first proved the link between tobacco and lung cancer,
in the 1950s, Proctor demonstrates that the link was originally established
in Nazi Germany, in the 1930s. Although the United States was quick to
capitalize on Nazi advances in aeronautics, armaments, and pharmaceuticals
after World War II, this public health achievement was apparently ignored.
In 1995, Philip Morris ran an advertisement in Europe -- titled, "Where
Will They Draw the Line?" -- which identified antismokers with Nazis. The
final chapter of the book describes how early public health optimism was
compromised by wartime urgencies.

Proctor challenges the comfortable assumption that Nazi Germany was unique
and defies comparison. He makes a case that the Nazification of German
science and medicine was more complex than commonly imagined, embracing
both forcible sterilization and herbal medicine, both genocidal "selection"
and bans on public smoking.

To some extent, the social intolerance of contemporary progressive
movements, such as animal rights, antitobacco activism, temperance efforts,
and enthusiasm for natural foods, may be seen as similar to the
"progressive" aspects of Nazi Germany, not only in their goals, but
increasingly and alarmingly also in some of the methods used to impose
collective solutions on individuals. For example, some scientists believe
that although the harmful effects of habitual cigarette smoking are clear,
the putative effects of passive smoking on morbidity and mortality, though
less clear, have been far more powerful in motivating public policy against
individual rights. As Proctor states, appreciating these complexities may
open our eyes to new kinds of continuities between the past and the present
and may lead to a better understanding of how fascism temporarily triumphed
in the first place.

Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D.
College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Philadelphia, PA 19103

Copyright © 1999 by the Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.
*****




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