by Cina, Joshua A. Perper, Stephen J. ; Cina, Joshua A. Perper, Stephen J.
Ramm criticized the widespread belief that a doctor should under no circumstances take a patient’s life, arguing that “euthanasia” was the most “merciful treatment” and “a central obligation to the Volk.” Ramm’s manual (which was mandatory reading for medical students) also specified that a doctor was to be a biological militant, “an alert biological soldier” living under “the great idea of the National Socialist biological state structure.” Further, “National Socialism, unlike any other political philosophy or Party program, is in accord with the natural history and biology of man” and “biology and genetics are the roots from which the national-Socialist world view has grown.” Many doctors joined the Party immediately after hearing Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess convincingly claim at a meeting in 1934 “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.” Many physicians saw themselves as professional flag bearers of the biological (racist) doctrine of Nazism.
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The Nazis also implemented a number of “positive eugenics” policies such as rewarding Aryan women who had large numbers of children and fostering practices in which “racially pure” single women could deliver illegitimate children. Nazi eugenists kidnapped thousands of Polish and Czech children that they considered
“racially valuable” or “racially pure” because they had the required blonde hair and blue eyes and brought them to Lebensborn centers were they were forced to forget their parents and adopt the Nazi beliefs. Those who refused were beaten or killed; SS families adopted the ones who accepted the “re-education”. It is estimated that up to 250,000 such children were brought to Germany but after the war, only 25,000 were returned to their families.
Dr. Fritz Lenz, a notable Nazi physician, advocated sterilizing people with minimal signs of mental disease. He soon recognized that a radical application of this principle would result in the sterilization of 20% of the total German population –
some 20 million people. Although one could argue that Hitler showed some subtle signs of mental imbalance, it seems very unlikely that Dr. Lenz would want to force his boss to get a vasectomy.
Anti-Semitism
Hatred and organized persecution of Jews started in Germany with the German Crusade of 1696. This was part of the First Crusade in which zealous peasants from France and Germany attacked many Jewish communities despite Pope Urban II condemning any such violence. Although anti-Semitism had existed in Europe for hundreds of years, this was the first recorded organized mass extermination program. This vat of anti-Semitism continued to simmer over the following centuries, heightening during harsh economic and social times and ebbing when societal conditions improved. In his biography and blueprint of Nazism “Mein Kampf ” Hitler relentlessly emphasized the pernicious nature of Jews as a Public Enemy of the Reich and “poisoners” of the German-Aryanic racial purity. For the good of Germany they had to be liquidated. Many German doctors accepted and agreed (or at least went along) with this virulent anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews that followed. In many instances, this incidentally improved their own economic status by eliminating competition by Jewish physicians.
Hitler was successful in tapping the overt and covert feelings of racial hatred and professional jealousy prevalent in the German medical community and German physicians rewarded him by joining the Nazi Party in droves. By supporting the Nazi approach to the “Jewish problem,” German doctors were following a long tradition of intellectual anti-Semitism. Prior to Hitler’s rise to power, Jewish doctors represented 13% of all German physicians, and in some large cities, they reached almost 50%. By 1941, the number of practicing Jewish physicians had essentially dropped to zero. Jewish physicians were referred to as “healers” rather than “doctors” and they could treat only Jewish patients under penalty of law.
Could This Nightmare Happen Again?
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Could This Nightmare Happen Again?
Genocide was not invented by the Nazis. There were despicable genocides before and after they soiled the world stage including the Armenian slaughter by the Turks, the Chinese genocide by the Japanese before the Second World War, the Sarajevo killings of Moslems by Serbs, and the murder of thousands of Africans in Sudan by local Arabs. The Nazis distinguish themselves by the methodical nature of their killings and the integration of physicians into the extermination of millions of human beings. When doctors are willing to stand by and watch or, worse, participate in the elimination of the very people they have sworn an oath to help, will the rest of society behave any better?
Section 3
In the Name of Science
Chapter 8
Hitler’s “Scientists”
Among the experiments that may be tried on man, those that
can only harm are forbidden, those that are innocent are
permissible, and those that may do good are obligatory. It is
immoral then, to make an experiment on man when it is danger-
ous to him, even though the result may be useful to others.
– Claude Bernard, French physiologist, 1865
Medical experimentation on humans began many centuries ago. The first “volunteers”
were slaves, considered at that time to be property rather than human beings.
One of the first experimenters was the famous Greek physician Herophilos (335–280 BC), co-founder of the great medical school of Alexandria and widely regarded as the “father of anatomy” (though Vesalius may argue this point). He was the first researcher to base his anatomic studies on dissection of the human body. Though this was scientifically valid and led to a greater understanding of the human body, he carried out the procedures on living slaves which raises questions about his ethics. Tertullian, a prolific Christian writer (AD 197–220) claimed that Herophilos had performed vivisections on more than 600 slaves.
The Egyptians also participated in scientific inquiry. In the first century BC, Queen Cleopatra devised a series of experiments to test the accuracy of the theory that it takes 40 days to fully fashion a male fetus and 80 days to create a female fetus. Whenever one of her handmaids were sentenced to death, Cleopatra had them impregnated and subjected them to subsequent operations to open their wombs at specific times of gestation. The results of these experiments have never been published. Eighteen hundred years later King George I offered free pardons to any inmate of Newgate Prison who agreed to be experimentally inoculated with infectious small pox. This might have turned out to be a fair trade given the condition of prisons of that era. John Hunter, the brilliant Scottish physician and scientist made many advances in surgery, anatomy and physiology. He also stole the skeleton of Charles Byrne, a 7¢ 7² Irish giant against his deathbed wishes. For £500 Hunter successfully bribed a member of the funeral party for the bones which he studied, wrote about, and subsequently published.
The unfortunate giant never received the burial at sea he had hoped for; J.A. Perper and S.J. Cina, When Doctors Kill: Who, Why, and How, 69
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1369-2_8, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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8 Hitler’s “Scientists”
his skeleton still resides in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Though these select historical examples range from the callous to the abhorrent, they were at least designed to advance science. The Nazis, however, conducted a myriad of horrific experiments to answer a different calling – curiosity-based sadism.
The Nazi Experiments
Children are afraid of terrifying monsters hiding in the dark, under the bed, or in the closet. At any moment, these living nightmares may pounce and bury long claws and sharp teeth into their shivering flesh. Caring adults switch on a light, tenderly hug the panicky tots and assure them that their fears are groundless. As they fall back to sleep, they are reassured that there are no monsters or that they have departed never to return. This usually works and life goes on. However, one could not have extended such comfort to the victimized chi
ldren in Nazi Germany.
Infants, toddlers and older children died on cold surgical tables after experiencing unimaginable pain as “scientific experiments” were performed without the distraction of anesthesia. Thousands of children died in the name of science during the Third Reich. Monsters do exist.
SS doctors carried out Nazi “medical” experimentation primarily in concentration camps often with the direct assistance and cooperation of civilian academicians from reputable medical schools and universities. These criminal experiments had three avowed goals:
1. To produce in healthy camp inmates bodily injuries or illnesses to which Nazi soldiers may be exposed and to try to reverse them
2. To expose inmates, adults and children, to different poisons in order to observe what are the lethal doses and survival times, and
3. To try to scientifically substantiate the genetic inferiority of so called inferiority races
With few exceptions, the scientific value of the experiments was virtually nil for a number of reasons. These included doubts about the integrity of the data provided by scientists/physicians who either felt pressure to provide the desired results or who wanted to substantiate the truth of their own racial beliefs; inconsistency of some of the results and the fact that they were never published in reputable journals; and the lack of reproducibility of these tortuous experiments that can never be replicated in any civilized society.
Between 1939 and 1945, more than 70 types of research projects involving dangerous experimentation on human subjects were conducted in Nazi Germany.
More than 7,000 Jews, Poles, Roma (Gypsies), political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, and Catholic priests were among the victims. It would be difficult to list all of the forms of experimentation performed on these unwilling Freezing Experiments
71
volunteers in a single chapter so we will attempt to highlight some of the more heinous acts committed by Nazi doctors in the name of science.
Freezing Experiments
Nazi doctors conducted the freezing/immersion hypothermia experiments for the German High Command and at the request of Air Force Field Marshall Erhard Milch. The experiments were conducted on young healthy prisoners of various religions and nationalities under conditions simulating the biting and disabling, freezing weather faced by the invading German Army in Russia and by pilots shot down over the North Sea. It was estimated during postwar testimony that 360–400 hypothermia experiments were conducted on 280–300 victims. The experiments were conducted at the Birkenau, Dachau (near Munich) and Auschwitz extermination camps by a number of SS physicians under the supervision and direction of Dr. Sigmund Rascher, an Air Force physician who reported directly to Himmler.
The freezing experiments were designed to establish how long it would take for a subject to die after exposure to cold and, secondly, to learn how to resuscitate frozen victims. The “experimental” subjects were exposed to sub-zero temperature by immersing them naked or fully dressed into long narrow tanks filled with ice water or by exposing them strapped naked to a stretcher in freezing weather. An insulated probe, which measured the drop in the internal body temperature, was inserted in their rectum and anchored to the intestinal wall.
Most victims lost consciousness and died in exquisite pain when the body temperature dropped to 25°C (77°F). Though most victims were lucky enough to die at this point, some of the volunteers were rapidly enrolled in the resuscitation or warming experiments. Several techniques were applied including forceful irriga-tion of the stomach, intestines, or bladder with very hot, almost boiling, water and rapid immersion of the entire body in hot water resulting in death by shock of the near-frozen victims. In a few cases, gradual exposure to heat in a warm bath resulted in some survivals. The surviving subjects were then eligible to participate in additional studies.
Heinrich Himmler, who was a close friend of Dr. Rascher’s wife suggested that he try to use sexual activity to warm up the frozen men. Rascher agreed to test this theory by placing semi-frozen males between two naked women and prompting them to engage in sex. These rewarming exercises failed miserably, perhaps due to impotence issues associated with exposure of the male sexual organs to cold. In 1942, Rascher presented the results of his freezing experiments at a medical conference entitled “Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter” claiming that the hypothermia experiments were not designed to produce fatalities and “only” a total of 13 deaths occurred. This is in conflict with the post-war testimony of two of his assistants who estimated 72
8 Hitler’s “Scientists”
that “at least 80 to 90 victims died during the experiments, and only two were known to have survived the war, both of whom became ‘mental cases.’” Like Dr. Rascher.
Genetic Experiments
Dr. Joseph Mengele, “The Angel of Death”, pioneered the Nazi genetics program.
His list of “experimental” murders is truly stunning. He dissected live infants; injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color; sterilized and castrated inmates without anesthetics; burned prisoners with incendiary bombs to examine their injuries; inflicted high-voltage electric shocks upon subjects of varying ages; froze inmates to study the effects of hypothermia; injected malaria-contaminated blood into test subjects; and exposed inmates to mustard gas and other poisons. After he had gassed any survivors of the experiments, he defleshed and skeletonized the victims for measurements of the bones to satisfy his interest in human anthropology.
Mengele had a particular interest in twins and always hunted for them upon the arrival of new batches of Auschwitz inmates. Initially the twins were extensively photographed for several days with special attention paid to their hair patterns.
They were forced to stand, bend, and kneel for hours in many uncomfortable positions to document their appearance and characteristics from all angles. They were then showered and shaved from head to toe and returned nude for a thorough physical examination. If any of the camp physicians performing the examinations missed any details they were likely to be harshly punished. Each twin then had full body x-rays resulting in exposure to carcinogenic levels of radiation. The next stage of the examination consisted of removing all of the twins’ remaining hair in a very cruel and painful manner. The twins were placed repeatedly in vats with very hot water to soften the skin then strapped to a table in order to have each hair plucked out including the roots. The next “medical” procedure consisted of forcing a gas though the nose and upper airways of the torture victims until they coughed and expectorated deep sputum which was collected for analysis. The twins then received a series of enemas each consisting of several liters of water which caused them much pain and discomfort. Once they had been cleansed, prison doctors forcefully distended the anus to facilitate a lower intestinal examination. This procedure was so painful that the victims had to be gagged to muffle their screams.
The male subjects received a thorough urological examination with no anesthesia and tissue samples were taken from the testicles, prostate, and kidneys. After 3 weeks of “medical experimentation” and collection of all available data, the twins were taken to an execution room and killed simultaneously by an injection of chloroform in the heart administered by SS physicians. The murdered twins were then autopsied and their organs were sent for further examination to the Institute of Biological, Racial, and Evolutionary Research in Berlin.
Experimental Poisoning
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High-Altitude Experiments
In 1942, experiments were conducted for the German Luftwaffe to investigate the effect of flying at high-altitude. The “volunteers” were prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp who were subjected to conditions designed to simulate those faced by German pilots forced to eject at high altitude. The experimenters placed camp inmates into low-pressure chambers that simulated altitudes as high as 68,000 ft and monitored their physiological response as they suffered, succumbed and died. Under conditions approximatin
g parachuting from an altitude of 8 miles without an oxygen supply, spasms began almost immediately and the victims rapidly lost consciousness. At 9 miles (15 km) they had additional breathing problems and there were instances when they stopped breathing altogether.
Nevertheless, the experiments went on to an altitude of 13 miles. Dr. Sigmund Rascher, the main experimenter, dissected the victims’ brains after their skulls were broken open while they were still alive and conscious to demonstrate the formation of tiny air bubbles (air emboli) in the blood vessels of the brain. Of 200
people subjected to these experiments, 80 died outright and the remainder were murdered and autopsied.
Antibiotic Experiments
Between July and September 1943 experiments were conducted at the behest of the German Army whose frontline soldiers often sustained infections of their wounds with resultant gas gangrene. Nazi physicians at the Ravensbruck concentration camp under the direction of Dr. Herta Oberheuser performed studies testing the efficacy of sulfanilamide and other drugs in curbing these highly lethal infections.
They intentionally injured many prisoners causing battlefield-like wounds which were inoculated with bacteria including Clostridium perfringens, the micro-organism responsible for gas gangrene. The doctors aggravated the resulting infections by rubbing ground glass and wood shavings into the wounds. In most of these cases, the response to this antibiotic was insufficient to avoid loss of limbs, sepsis, and death.
Experimental Poisoning
Nazi researchers studied a variety of methods of execution by injecting Russian prisoners with phenol and cyanide, placing different poisons in their food, and shooting them with poisoned bullets. Victims who did not die during the experiments were killed and autopsied with their remains analyzed for the presence of poison and evidence of tissue injury.