This recent book by Florian G. Mildenberger is a notable contribution to the scholarly field of research on Nazi medical science. As a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of medicine, homoeopathic history, German social history, and the history of sexuality, Professor Mildenberger from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder is a suitable investigator to have taken on this research project. The main direction of the book regards the following thesis: “The role of Germany's Central Association [of Homoeopathic Physicians] has been insufficiently conceptualized in most preceding debates and often misunderstood. The background of the history of ideas, along with personal and ideological relationships of homoeopaths to National Socialism, have likewise not been addressed” (11). The book attempts to emphasize that this professional association and its members had not been directly involved in the medical experiments with human subjects in Nazi concentration camps. Instead, the author states that homoeopathic physicians’ work—despite active interest in homoeopathy by Nazi Party and SS leaders, such as Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) and Rudolf Hess (1894–1987)—could not be interpreted as political collusion and direct linkage of complementary and alternative medicine with National Socialism, particularly on the level of concentration camp medicine and coercive human subject experimentation.

The volume, organized in ten short chapters, first provides an overview of the history of ideas in German homoeopathy by focusing on the example of the Berlin surgeon August Bier (1861–1949), then assesses pragmatic and therapeutic approaches in contemporary therapy as well as changes in physicians’ theorizing, together with their use of homoeopathy during the year of the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933. This is a comparatively lengthy part in an altogether brief book (almost a third of the whole text), before chapter 4 introduces “The Central Association of Homoeopathic Physicians and Its Politically Denounced Members.” Chapter 5 discusses “The Associations’ Links to the Reich's Working Union towards New German Healthcare,” while chapter 6 explores contemporary “Experimental Series to Establish Efficiency in Homoeopathic Medicines.” It is particularly chapter 7 on “Homoeopathic Lay Associations in Nazi Germany” and chapter 8 on “The Central Association of Homoeopathic Physicians and Medical Doctors’ Use of Homoeopathy after 1939” (totaling 20 pages; 78–97) that lay out the main argument of the book—i.e., that members of the Central Association of Homoeopathic Physicians had not been directly involved in human subject experimentation in Nazi concentration camps. Primarily based on drug efficiency tests by the Reich Health Ministry (Reichsgesundheitsamt) in Berlin during the 1930s and early 1940s—among other archival sources—as well as focusing on the uses of homoeopathic drugs in medical care at the infirmary barracks of concentration camp Dachau near Munich (including the camp's “medicinal garden,” 92–97), the author puts forward that “Research on the efficacy of [the homoeopathic drug] ‘Spenglersan’ was likely thwarted by the more allopathically oriented, local physician of the SS Rudolf Brachtel (1909–1988) and by Reich physician of the SS Ernst Grawitz (1899–1945)” (90).

Chapter 9 on “Denazification and the Continuities in Personnel, Theory, and Practice until 1965” as well as the epilogue conclude the book by showing how smoothly homoeopathic physicians, who were previously supportive of and had sympathized with Nazi medical ideologies, pursued their careers in postwar Germany and continued practicing health care with few, if any, political or legal consequences. With regard to the general argument of the volume, it needs to be pointed out that this study had been funded by the German Central Association of Homoeopathic Physicians (Deutscher Zentralverein Homöopathischer Ärzte), in conjunction with the Robert Bosch Institute for the History of Medicine in Stuttgart. In 2013, the association's board decided to have its own history and Nazi past independently researched. This is pointed out in the foreword written by Cornelia Bajic, as the association’s current president (1. Vorsitzende) (7).

Mildenberger's book is somewhat weakened by the fact that his thesis depends on quite a narrow working definition of what counts as complementary and alternative medicine. The author focuses on traditional definitions of homoeopathy, rather than broadening the analysis further, while treating the German Central Association of Homoeopathic Physicians almost as a singular case, thus zooming in on its funding history from the Reich Health Ministry and the exceptional concentration camp site at Dachau. University-based research is mentioned rather tangentially, as are prevailing research interests and funding through the SS Foundation Ahnenerbe; these are not substantially investigated in the current study. Given the breadth of the topic at hand—individual homoeopaths’ enmeshments with Nazi ideologies, institutional affiliations, political influences, and overall research developments during the Third Reich—one may have anticipated the book to be more extensive in scope and longer than it is (124 pages of text, followed by individual biographies of homoeopaths and a source appendix). Nonetheless, Mildenberger's volume presents a pioneering study in this hitherto under-researched area and represents a worthy step forward in the field of complementary and alternative therapy and health care during the Nazi period.

This book will be of interest to specialized research libraries in the history of medicine and health care, centers for German history and German studies, along with scholars working on medicine, science, and technology topics in Nazi Germany.