THE ATTACK ON REASON:

An Evil Ambition To Cure (CARL ROLLYSON, August 22, 2007, NY Sun)

"Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, Medicine and Power in the Third Reich" (Continuum, 400 pages, $29.95) is the first full biography of Hitler's escort physician, who became the Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, and the "Medical Supremo" responsible for Germany's infamous euthanization program and the horrifying medical experiments in concentration camps.

The Nuremberg trial judges declared that Brandt was guilty of crimes against humanity, rejecting his defense that euthanasia was a humane alleviation of human suffering and that the S.S. administrators bore full responsibility for whatever happened to inmates. He went to the gallows on June 2, 1948, the first of seven men condemned to death in the famous Doctors Trial.

Nothing in Ulf Schmidt's meticulously researched, if poorly written, book challenges the findings at Nuremberg. The chief value of Mr. Schmidt's biography is that he explores in excruciating detail how an idealistic man such as Brandt, who once applied to work with Alfred Schweitzer in Africa, came to believe in the virtue of mass murder.

Believers in the "rational utility" of mass murder are humane, they're just inhuman.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 22, 2007 8:15 AM