From Clinic to Concentration Camp

Reassessing Nazi Medical and Racial Research, 1933-1945

Paul Weindling, Paul Weindling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317132394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume deliberately break from a top-down history limited to concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments (where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy. The sacrifice of so many prisoners, patients and otherwise healthy people rounded up as detainees raises important issues about the identities of the research subjects: who were they, how did they feel, how many research subjects were there and how many survived? This underworld of the victims of the elite science of German medical institutes and clinics has until now remained a marginal historical concern. Jews were a target group, but so were gypsies/Sinti and Roma, the mentally ill, prisoners of war and partisans. By exploring when and in what numbers scientists selected one group rather than another, the book provides an important record of the research subjects having agency, reconstructing responses and experiential narratives, and recording how these experiments – iconic of extreme racial torture – represent one of the worst excesses of Nazism.

Part One
Contexts

1
Introduction

A new historiography of the Nazi medical experiments and coerced research

Paul Weindling

There has long been public nervousness about abuse of patients and other vulnerable persons in clinics and custodial institutions as human guinea pigs. These anxieties stretch back to the rise of experimental medicine in the seventeenth century, and especially to the bacteriological and surgical breakthroughs in the later nineteenth century.¹ Nazi Germany was heir to a highly scientised system of medicine, and saw a colossal rise in coerced medical experiments and other forms of exploitative, non-consensual research. The experiments and coerced research took multiple forms, but the scale under Nazism was unprecedented, finding a parallel only in the more centralised organisation of Japanese military medical experiments on Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners of war.² At the end of the Second World War a shocked world learned of the German medical experiments and coerced research in concentration camps and clinics on a monstrous scale.³

The experiments and associated forms of coerced research have remained in public understanding as among the worst Nazi atrocities. Yet for many years they were marginalised as “pseudo-science”, so that they were disconnected from mainstream German medical science and academia.⁴ The purpose of this collection is to examine not only rationales and motivations of the perpetrators, but also the identities and responses of victims. The extent of experiments and the collecting of body parts have been greatly underrated, and hitherto unknown instances are still being uncovered by determined historical researchers. The coercive institutional structures, distinctive intellectual and academic agendas, the extent of the experiments and victim responses provide important insight into the dynamics of power and persecution in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Rather than random and marginal, the experiments, their perpetrators and the victims can be understood in structural terms as well as located in coherent historical processes. The experiments, their resourcing and their corralled victims reflect the twists and turns of Nazi racial policies, and the medical aspects of “total war”, and the “final solutions” of the Jewish, Roma and psychiatric “problems”. Nazi doctors stockpiled bodies, body fluids, brain tissues, skulls and bones on a massive scale. The scale of the coerced research on living persons was unprecedented; after the war ended, the outcomes in terms of death, survival and injury reached deep into the Federal Republic and Austria as regards the stored corpses and brain tissues of the dead.⁵ To take one example, the Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele’s collecting of twins is well known to a wider public, and yet the twins remain poorly understood in terms of their identities and numbers, what happened to them and why, and they achieved belated compensation only in the 1980s. The massive use of brain tissues for research from “euthanasia” victims during and after the war has – despite pioneering research by the historian and political scientist Götz Aly – been largely overlooked.⁶

Why then should medical experiments under National Socialism be reinstated in the narrative of Nazism, racial war, and the Holocaust, and their aftermath? Beyond compassion for the victims is that the experiments were specially resourced and administered, and that specialist knowledge was involved. The survival of the German Volk and National Socialist Reich was deemed to be at stake. Who initiated the experiments? Hitler, only once for “N-Stoff”, and Hitler’s Chancellery once – for X-ray sterilisation in Auschwitz; Himmler on multiple occasions but he did not have a controlling monopoly; often the scientists themselves took the initiative of requesting resources for concentration camp experiments.⁷ Most experiments were commissioned by industry, or were initiated by the scientists themselves. The victims – long underestimated in terms of numbers, and largely unknown in terms of their identities – reflect the wider phases of the unfolding of racial war and the Holocaust. Often isolated in special compounds, victims responded to the exercise of medical power in ways that were distinctive. Yes, the victims faced manifold forms of brutality widespread in any concentration camp; but additionally they were subjected to violence, which was delivered in specially calibrated scientific doses and forms.⁸ Confidentiality restrictions have further compounded the marginalisation of the experiments and their victims.

The coerced experiments can be seen in a wider context of clinical medical research, which was strong in the German tradition of rigorously scientised medicine: it was necessary to produce a thesis to gain the title of “Dr med”. Advanced research for a higher thesis, known as a Habilitation was required to make an academic career. The experiments were linked to the harnessing of science and technology for National Socialist racial and military aims, as well as providing an opportunity to resource scientists’ gargantuan appetites for “research-material”. Experimenting on racial “undesirables” was to advance strategic issues such as survival in extremes of cold, or the toxicity of explosives and poison gas. The problem thereby changes from one of the experiments as “pseudo-science” (a concept now redundant) to how did Nazi ideology and the Nazi elite form strategic alliances with the experimentally oriented experts, intent on driving forward military and ultimately racial aims.

“Medical experiments” occurred in a variety of clinics and other medical locations in addition to large-scale concentration camp experiments and the plethora of small-scale experiments in camps and clinics. The shorthand label of “Nazi medical experiments” covers research on the living – at times to the point of death – and research on the dead, often stockpiled on an immense scale. The “experiments” span taking anthropological and physiological measurements, and dissecting the brains and bodies of those who were killed, some selected when living as of scientific interest, and many channelled from execution chambers to the dissection slab. We find instances of dietary experiments, the testing of vaccines, deliberate infection, the taking of brains and other internal organs for dissection, and the stripping away of flesh to obtain skeletal bones. In short, German scientists mobilised to conduct a wide variety of scientific procedures in specially segregated spaces such as compounds within camps, and in special wards and clinics.

The experiments were variously driven by economic exploitation, racial policy, total war and the Holocaust. Similarly, the responsible scientists varied to the extent that they were members of the NSDAP (if at all), SA or SS, and of university medical faculties. The coerced experiments indicate the importance of science in sustaining Nazi power. Just as research institutes, field stations and clinics functioned on the basis of forced and slave labour, the coerced research drew on stockpiles of Nazi victims. Resources came from special military and racial measures, and the experiments channelled human “material” into a realm of holding compounds. The research subjects did not know whether a temporary reprieve from forced labour and improved diet available in an experimental compound would enhance their chances of survival or lead to their maiming (often permanently) or death. The transfers and holding of bodies and brains means that a disjunction and displacement has occurred from the place of killing to where and when (often decades later) body parts were finally disposed of. To the life history of the victim, there needs to be a “death history” of documenting their body parts on into post-war Germany, Austria and former occupied territories.

Medical researchers sustained the momentum of research through and beyond the death throes of the Third Reich: even when the war was clearly lost, German scientists frenetically continued their endeavours. Long running experiments by Claus Schilling on malaria in Dachau concentration camp continued right up to liberation (he asked the American military whether the experiments could continue on a voluntary basis), as did the shoe testing track (where high performance amphetamines were sporadically used) in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Remarkably, several new sets of experiments began in early 1945 raising questions about the mind-set of the involved scientists. Scientists saw a unique opportunity to lay foundations for their post-war careers. From June 1944 (a year after Mengele visited the racial geneticist Otmar von Verschuer, who then mentioned Mengele in a research report to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) the Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele surveyed streams of arrivals, mainly from Hungary, with a genetically trained eye to select twins and dwarves to conduct measurements and tests: his intention was to use his copious “material” for a Habilitation thesis. Others saw the experiments as staging posts towards establishing new research installations – here the ambitious orthopaedic surgeon Karl Gebhardt supported human subject research in the concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Neuengamme. Gebhardt at his tuberculosis and orthopaedic sanatoria at Hohenlychen (a rambling neo-Gothic complex) absorbed laboratory installations evacuated from nearby Berlin, such as the pathology laboratories from the Virchow Hospital where body parts from Wittenau psychiatric hospital were being processed.⁹ (Indeed, the decanting of scientific institutes from Berlin presaged the decentralised structures of research in the Federal Republic.) Another instance is that the SS sponsored research by the gynaecologist Carl Clauberg holding victims in a special Block 10 in the Auschwitz main camp: Clauberg envisaged his Auschwitz research as a prelude for a new City of Mothers at Bad Königsdorff established late in the war for infertility treatment. Clauberg secured the services of the Polish prisoner surgeon, Władysław Dering from Auschwitz for his clinic at Königshütte (Chorzów) as well as for launching his ill-fated venture.¹⁰

The experiments gain further importance once one moves away from overly schematised historical conceptualisations of Germany under National Socialism as consisting of the Führer and Volk. It is necessary to recognise the importance of science-based professions, which aligned themselves with Nazi aims and purged their memberships, and of knowledge-production for the German economy, military and medicine in the cataclysmic twelve-year Reich. Science-based expertise had a key role in delivering on strategically important issues such as health, race and population policies, as well as in formulating racial ideology and imposing the categorisation of who belonged in what racial group. The Nazi state clung to its racial priorities through its colossal expansion as scientific energies were expended in exploiting and exterminating Jews, Sinti and Roma, and the mentally ill and disabled. Nazi Germany as a “Racial State” (or in its original more culturally-oriented conceptualisation of the French political scientist Henri Lichtenberger of an état raciale) involved not just imposition of racial policy and an immense sifting of the population by multiple and competing agencies, but also a research dynamic, encompassing bodies, body fluids, bones and organs.¹¹ While “race” provided over-arching social cohesion, defining race was contested by a plurality of scientists and agencies. Researching race and arising issues of human growth and variation required substantial resources. Once this is recognised, the coerced experiments move from the margins of history towards the mainstream of historical concerns with the defining of the racial community or Volksgemeinschaft, and become an essential component of the war economy. At the same time the research endeavours reveal the efforts to sustain the power and drive forward policy of key groups – notably within the SS, but other interests were also involved – in crucial sectors of the Nazi system of power. While the research was carried out by specialist experts, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler saw the potential for the SS in gaining power over the academic sphere by means of a radicalised form of medical research, which involved ruthless exploitation of persons demonised as racial enemies, criminals and social parasites. Himmler’s backing of the young air force doctor Sigmund Rascher represented the hope of pioneering a Nazified form of medical science oriented to homoeopathy and deadly experiments.¹²

Towards historical accountability

Historiographically, the new wave of historians of German eugenics since the mid-1980s raised the issue of technocratic elites in Nazi society, and of transitions in health and population structures.¹³ Smaller families, lengthening life expectancy and female education and participation i...