There has recently been a resurgent scholarly interest in the scientific reception and ethically questionable use of results from Nazi experiments with human subjects between 1933 and 1945. In this important book, Sabine Hildebrandt, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Boston's Children's Hospital and a lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School, offers an overview of the field of anatomy during National Socialism. She covers a wide spectrum of topics, with chapters such as “The Interactions between the NS State and Anatomists,” “NS Victims and the Use of their Bodies for Anatomical Purposes,” and “Developments in Professional Ethics in Anatomy.” Based on her research in archives in Europe and North America, Hildebrandt offers a learned and well-rounded account of the manifold facets of the field, including a discussion of the ethical transgressions of coerced human-subject research, the killing of concentration camp prisoners and inmates of mental asylums, and the compilation, uses, and application of knowledge within the most inhumane contexts.

The book first describes the marginalization of scientific critics active in the research community in the wake of the so-called seizure of power by the Nazi Party and the subsequent “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of university administrations, faculty members, and students. This pertained most directly to those physicians who were imprisoned in concentration camps because of their non-“Aryan” descent, such as pathologist Ludwig Pick (1868–1944), as well as gentile anatomists with oppositional allegiances ousted from their academic positions; the latter included Louis Jacobsohn-Lask (1863–1940), who fled to the Soviet Union. Most researchers who stayed in their academic positions joined the Nazi Party, however, and used the ethically widened boundaries to conduct investigations on human subjects, who were often selected and killed for the specific purpose of medical research. For example, Hermann Stieve (1886–1952), the “gynaecologists’ anatomist” at the Berlin Charité, deliberately requested that women prisoners from the Ploetzensee penitentiary be killed so that he could use their reproductive organs in endocrinological research.

A considerable number of contemporary anatomists became instrumental in the furthering of eugenic and racial ideals in German-speaking biomedicine, including August Hirt (1898–1945) in Strasbourg and Hermann Voss (1894–1987) in Posen. Hildebrandt intriguingly uncovers the motives, projects, and participation of the anatomical community in the formation of the Nazi academic landscape. Members of the Anatomische Gesellschaft not only became involved in political decision-making but also helped structure the ethical framework for their deadly research practices, which included targeting for imprisonment or oppression members of persecuted groups active in medical faculties, on research boards, as journal editors, and on the German Research Council.

These anatomists of infamy not only made their way through the academic ranks, actively participating in the development of Nazi medical philosophies, but also fully redefined the notion of body donors. They aimed to establish new models for procuring dissection “material” to support their anatomical work on medical education and histological research that often had direct military medical applications. The boundaries between the living and the dead bodies of patients passing away in hospitals and asylums were reframed and became ever more fluid. This dreadful process led to the loss of almost any ethical boundaries vis-à-vis most human populations subject to experiment; they were considered in a most macabre way to be the “future dead” (303). Hildebrandt's vocabulary is often hard and shocking when she describes the behavior and research activity of German Nazi anatomists. This is fully appropriate, however, given the historical sources of her study and given what she aptly describes as the “Great Silence” (258) of the German medical establishment after the end of World War II.

This book is thus of major importance to discussions of the ethical systems and medical regulations of human-subject experimentation in twentieth-century biomedical research. It is a remarkable achievement, but no work is entirely flawless, of course. It is regrettable, for instance, that more detailed information about the involvement of Nazi anatomists in specific Nazi organizations is not provided in table 1 (“Political Affiliations of German Anatomists, 1933–45”; 328–37). Furthermore, not all contemporary medical researchers and historical actors are introduced in the book. More information could have been provided as well about those anatomists who were dismissed or marginalized, as well as about their interaction with the leading anatomists of the postwar period. All in all, this is nevertheless an important and eye-opening book that will become standard literature for Holocaust studies programs, as well as for courses on medical ethics and the history of medicine and science during the twentieth century.