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Six years after it was first introduced into psychiatry in 1938, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) became the subject of criminal human experiments in Nazi Germany. In 1944, at the Auschwitz III / Monowitz camp hospital, the Polish Jewish prisoner psychiatrist Zenon Drohocki started experimental treatments on prisoners with an ECT device that he had constructed himself. According to eyewitnesses, Drohocki's intention to treat mentally unstable prisoners was soon turned into something much more nefarious by SS doctors (including Josef Mengele), who used the device for deadly experiments. This article provides an account of this important and little-known aspect of the early history of ECT, drawing on an extensive array of historical literature, testimonies, and newly accessible documents. The adoption of ECT in Auschwitz is a prime example of the \"grey zone\" in which prisoner doctors had to operate—they could only survive as long as the SS considered their work useful for their own destructive purposes.

In Polish historiography the contention exists that the prewar eugenic program in German Silesia was intended to rid the province of its Polish minority. In the light of the archives referring to eugenic sterilization in Silesia, this point of view cannot be maintained. Sterilization procedures did not distinguish Germans and Poles, and both groups were sterilized by the same method and to comparable degrees. It was only during World War II that experiments to work out methods of mass sterilization on anthropological racial grounds were carried out.

On account of eugenics being associated with Nazi racial policy, until recently there has been little discussion of Jewish eugenics. There is no doubt that eugenics, effectively a value judgment about the worth of human beings, has racist connotations. However, its evaluation solely in the context of the Nazi experience disregards the enormous popularity of eugenic ideas that related to social life, and the diversity of the international eugenic movement in the interwar period. The movement was not an ideological monolith, and the solutions to social problems postulated by the advocates of eugenic ideas were attractive for many societies aiming at the biological regeneration of the population. Historical sources reveal that the concept of a distinctive Jewish race, and the program to eliminate \"unfit\" elements of Jewish society, did receive backing from Jewish medical circles during the interwar period.

The history of eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe is a neglected topic of analysis in contemporary scholarship. The 20 essays in this volume, written by distinguished scholars of eugenics and fascism alongside a new generation of scholars, excavate the hitherto unknown eugenics movements in Central and Southeast Europe, including Austria and Germany. Eugenics and racial nationalism are topics that have constantly been marginalized and rated as incompatible with local national traditions in Central and Southeast Europe. These topics receive a new treatment here. On the one hand, the historiographic perspective connects developments in the history of anthropology and eugenics with political ideologies such as racial nationalism and anti-Semitism; on the other hand, it contests the 'Sonderweg' approach adopted by scholars dealing with these issues.