At the dawn of the age of genetics Alexander Katan's (1899–1943) only son managed to have live and skeletonized images of his father, illustrating German notions of ‘Jewish degeneracy’ and coerced human experimentation, taken down at Mauthausen and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Economist and linguist Katan was a Dutch Jew of short stature who was experimented upon at Mauthausen (Gusen) and killed to order for inclusion in a Nazi skeleton collection (Hedda van Gennep, Dood spoor?, 2001). His son never succeeded in officially locating his remains in order to provide him with a proper burial. In 2015 Paul Weindling criticized the Max Planck Institutes (successors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes) for the absence of documentation of its Nazi brain and wet specimens in the public domain and the neglect to clarify the identities of the victims which had been given a partial official interment as late as 1990. A mere two years later Weindling and his Oxford working group managed to present a victim database covering over 28,000 victims of National Socialist coerced human experimentation and research funded by the very same institution (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, ‘Max Planck Society to carry out complete review of its specimens collection’, 14 March 2016).

Whilst the impressive compilation under review further establishes this exciting new area of study within the crucial field of Nazi medicine it fails to give voice to the voiceless historical actors, throughout and consistently. First, because the disparate groups of victims and/or their descendants have, apparently, not all been invited to sit at the table of power guiding this project and predominantly known groups are included. It remains unclear if and how attempts were undertaken to obtain survivors’ and/or descendants’ permission for inclusion, nor are the important legal and moral–ethical pitfalls involved in such a project explained and analysed fully. Second, the overall picture is one of slight imbalance because some authors give the victims and (witness) perpetrators face by including a catalogue of names, data and images (Ravensbrück Rabbits, tuberculosis experimentees, etc.), often presenting them side by side, whilst others merely list victims of Nazi science by first name and initial only (child victims) because of the ‘personal rights of patients’ (p. 199 n. 1). Third, the included historiography of coerced human experimentation and research is incomplete as the investigations of liberated concentration camp prisoners and prisoner physicians who began to collect evidence before 1945 are only mentioned in passing. Fourth, the hundreds of perpetrators who were not available for arrest and prosecution fall by the wayside in this foundational study. Fifth, the names of identified victims included in full are not indexed, nor is clear information provided on possible database access for scholars and other interested parties. The delicate issues of medical care and compensation for the survivors are only referenced, not discussed for all nations involved, and leave the interested and informed reader wanting more on the life-histories front. Finally, the treacherous ground of victim–perpetrator prisoner physicians serving as witnesses is trodden but not examined in (medical) ethical terms.

This volume of essays consists of sixteen chapters, each written by different authors, subdivided into four sections. Section One, ‘Contexts’, contains chapters on a new historiography of the Nazi medical experiments and coerced research (Weindling); the use and abuse of medical research ethics (Roelcke); and the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists and eugenic and euthanasia research (Schmuhl). Section Two, ‘Clinics and the sciences’, deals with research on the boundary between life and death (Czarnowksi and Hildebrandt); August Hirt and the Anatomical Institute at Strassburg (Toledano); Nazi anthropology and face and death masks (Berner); experimentation and research at the Vienna School of Medicine (Czech); ‘therapeutic idealist’ psychiatrist Carl Schneider (Rotzoll and Hohendorf); and elimination at the Youth Psychiatric Clinic Loben (Uzarczyk). Section Three, ‘Concentration camps’, is dedicated to children as victims of medical experimentation in concentration camps (Ley); the Ravensbrück ‘Rabbits’ in photographic imagery (Loewenau); new perspectives on human experimentation on Dachau Soviet prisoners (Farron); and the Heissmeyer tuberculosis experiments in Neuengamme (Villiez). Section Four, ‘Legacies’, finally, relates the story of Eugen Haagen from the Nuremberg Medical Trial to the Struthof Medical Trials (Bonah and Schmaltz); medical experimentation testimonies of physicians in Czechoslovakia (Simunek); and post-war legacies, victims, bodies and brain tissues (Weindling).

This publication convincingly stretches the notion of coerced human experimentation and research by including scientific exploitation of human bodies, and is founded on an evidence-based reconstruction of victims of Nazi research (15,738 documented out of a possible group of 98,000 and counting (p. 8)). Weindling links social and cultural history of science and medicine to the history of euthanasia and racial policy. If we are to reinstate ‘medical experiments under National Socialism in the narrative of Nazism’ (p. 4) fully, then, to paraphrase Weindling, we need to combat the marginalization of victims and to (re)connect science to military and racial, as well as economic, aims in the historiography of the Third Reich, and to identify and foreground the victims and perpetrators, and link them to institutions as a form of accountability which has been lacking in current research on historical accountability of German research institutions which is aimed at structures and not at anonymized victims (resources). One can only hope that more research will be pursued in future along these lines.

May future scholars of the topic build on the groundbreaking work of Weindling and develop additional, bottom-up methods to examine the implications of science and the Holocaust. Only the creation of true life and ‘death histories’ of the victims of coerced human experimentation and research from all nations concerned will stop the perpetrators from inadvertently sounding out victims and survivors from Nazi science who could or would not speak for themselves.