Collective biographies of concentration-camps physicians.Careers in National Socialism and in after-war societies of the Federal Republic and the GDR

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Karl-Heinz Leven
• Subject Area: History of Science ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230125556

The collective biography of the group of SS physicians active in national socialist concentration camps is the objective of the project here proposed. For the first time, this key group in implementing nazi genocidal policies is tackled as a whole by systematic historiographical-empirical study. As a first step, a social profile of the target group before their involvement in concentration camps is established, their occupational careers ascertained, their motivational patterns and underlying mentalities examined and their options for decision making inside concentration camps analysed, thus furthering the still sketchy understanding of physicians and medicine in the national socialist years. Members of the academic elite, SS physicians rose from the midst of German society - it has to be asked in the second part of this study if and how they returned to this priviledged position in the post-war states. Which determining factors, mechanisms and networks advanced their reintegration into East and West Germany? How were the challenges handled posed by both criminal past and factual presence of these men and women? In writing the two-fold history of coming to terms with this well defined professional group in both German post-war societies this project pioneers this important chapter of medical history and, at the same time, provides the academic study of Vergangenheitsbewältigung with an paradigmatic example.Thus, the proposed methodology of collective biography exceeds mere reconstruction of biographical data and serves as vantage point for a wide-ranging scope of questions: the determinative influences and limits of ideological patterns of thought, changing social frameworks and power matrices can be scrutinized. Furthermore, continuities as well as changes at this crucial turning point of German history can be better understood. The proposed collective biography can contribute to the constitutive challenge of German contemporary historiography to bind together its three strings - the developments after World War I to 1945 and the histories of both the BRD and GDR - into one relational framework.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants