[Without shame, no moral. How physicians could commit murder].

Abstract

The German doctors and their almost unanimous participation in the atrocious murderies of psychiatric patients, retarded or handicapped people as well as their medical experiments on prisoners are viewed in a historical context. Hence, their acts and violation of human dignity are seen as part of a development that was inaugurated in the Enlightenment by the glorification and wholesale cultivation of rationality as the supreme criterion of humanity. Consequently, the faculty of moral perception was seriously impaired because the emotions and above all, the feeling of shame--a civilizing assert of Western man, were largely suppressed in the pursuit of scientific acknowledgement and awards.