Introduction

Summary

The Third Reich is a black hole in German history. Like hypothetical black holes in space, it draws everything toward itself. At the edges of black holes, massive gravitational forces slow time to a stop. Anything falling toward a black hole, therefore, would appear to an observer to fall forever. Similarly, since 1945 historians of Germany have found themselves gripped by the gravity of teleology. The pull exerted by the Third Reich has often led, in the words of Richard Evans, to a view of modern German history “from Hitler to Bismarck.” Although it was not the aim of the German Historical Institute conference on “Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany: Ethics, Politics, and Law,” from which the chapters in this book stem, to detail the already well-documented medical crimes of the Nazis, it was the central purpose of the conference to place the medical crimes and collaborations of the National Socialist era into their larger German and Western contexts. In so doing, the papers, comments, and discussions attempted to pull the history of the Third Reich back into the history of Germany, Europe, and the West, rendering it less of a black entity unto itself than a part of other, broader constellations characterized as much by differentiation as by the historiographical problem of teleology.