The Anatomy of Murder

Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich

Sabine Hildebrandt

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785330681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the "future dead."

Chapter 1

HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON MEDICINE AND ANATOMY IN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

I realized … that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told, and what was true.

Kevin Powers¹

The history of research on medicine and anatomy in National Socialism resembles in some ways the progress of investigations into the overall history of the Third Reich, which after early general studies have shown new and varied scholarly approaches since the 1970s and thereafter.² These developments moved in parallel with “specific stages of postwar German society.”³

When, in 1987, Canadian historian Michael H. Kater reviewed the status of research on the role of physicians in National Socialism, he commented on the scarcity of such studies up to that date.⁴ This was all the more remarkable as directly after the war, the newly reconstituted Ärztekammern (regional professional associations of physicians) of West Germany were actively involved in understanding the participation of German physicians in NS atrocities. The Ärztekammern (West) declared an interest in the publication of a report on the 1946–47 Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial from a physician’s point of view, and commissioned neurologist Alexander Mitscherlich and physician Fred Mielke among others for this task. They produced a preliminary report in 1947,⁵ which initiated acerbic controversies among the authors and some prominent physicians who were named as collaborators of the NS regime. Among those named in the report was surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, who, along with other physicians, saw Mitscherlich and Mielke’s frank report as undermining the newly re-growing trust between patients and doctors in Germany.⁶ Nevertheless, the Ärztekammern (West) released a declaration in 1947 stating German physicians’ sympathy for “the victims of the NS tyranny, which employed science as a means for its deeds,” and their “sorrow about the fact that men out of our own ranks, have committed crimes that elicited revulsion in the whole world.”⁷ Apparently Mielke himself was of the opinion, voiced in a speech delivered at the 51. Deutsche Ärztetag, the first postwar meeting of the Ärztekammern in 1948, that among the 90,000 doctors practicing in NS Germany, only three to four hundred had been involved in NS crimes.⁸ Most German physicians adopted this assessment at the time, as it conveniently allowed them to declare themselves not responsible for NS medical atrocities committed by only a few perverted psychopaths, and to detach themselves completely from these deeds.

The explanation of the culpable few and the innocent majority also seems to have been accepted by the World Medical Association, which initiated the admission of the German physicians’ association into this international body in 1950. For many German and international physicians the question of medicine’s involvement in the NS policies was satisfactorily resolved with the report.⁹ Mitscherlich and Mielke’s final account of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, as well as Alice Platen-Hallermund’s report on the murder of the mentally ill and other writings on the subject like Werner Leibbrand’s in 1946,¹⁰ were largely ignored by the German medical establishment. No further investigations were pursued and a long-lasting silence on the topic followed.¹¹

Apart from the generally prevalent German apathy concerning its NS history,¹² this silence had its root in the widespread denial of any personal responsibility that existed in all parts of the population, not only among physicians. The latter felt that they had labored under a regime of injustice which had fatefully and forcefully overtaken an otherwise rational medicine.¹³ In addition, doctors had become “doubly homogenized”,¹⁴ starting with the beginning of the Third Reich, when they were silent about the expulsion of their Jewish and dissident colleagues and the usurpation of the universities by the NS regime. The second homogenization occurred later, after the collapse of the NS regime, when they passed through denazification and reclaimed their positions in postwar Germany, often adhering to the ideological thinking from their past.¹⁵ This homogenization led to a silence of mutual solidarity, which was only broken with the advent of a new generation of physicians who felt the need to inquire more deeply into the history of medicine in the Third Reich.¹⁶ The silence reigning in German historical research on the topic of NS doctors, or in any publications in which the authors distanced themselves from NS perpetrators and their science,¹⁷ was all the more notable as very public trials of war criminals, including physicians, were pursued in the 1950s and 1960s. Among those being prosecuted were the gynecologist Carl Clauberg, accused of medical experiments on women in Auschwitz in 1956, and the anatomist Johann Paul Kremer in 1960, who was charged with assistance in the death of prisoners in Auschwitz.¹⁸ In 1956 the BÄK (Bundesärztekammer, a later name for Ärztekammern West) refused to retract Clauberg’s membership for formal reasons pending the outcome of the trial, but issued a preliminary withdrawal of Clauberg’s professional privileges when he was charged with several war crimes in 1957.¹⁹ In 1958 the BÄK officially distanced itself from individual doctors who had committed crimes in concentration camps and recommended the preliminary removal of BÄK membership in all such cases.²⁰

The extent to which active denial, a possible lack of intrapersonal insight, or a persistence of ideological thinking patterns existed in German academic physicians of the first postwar decades is well illustrated by the person of August Mayer, emeritus chair of gynecology at the University of Tübingen. He was one of the very few leaders of the medical establishment who published reflections on medical ethics in the 1960s, including ethical failures of medicine in the Third Reich.²¹ While he named “euthanasia,” forced abortions, and infanticide as crimes of the NS regime, he distanced himself from such activities in a clear manner. Mayer seemed to have overlooked the fact that he himself had taken part in such crimes. He had joined the NSDAP and SA, was an early defender of forced sterilization, and, in his clinic, 740 forced sterilizations were carried out, as well as abortions on two forced-laborer women. Interestingly, Tübingen was one of the first universities to offer a lecture series on the involvement of German academia in National Socialism in 1964–65. While sterilizations and “euthanasia” were mentioned, the involvement of Mayer was not.²²

Other sporadic German publications in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s focused on medical atrocities and the ideological roots of medicine during National Socialism.²³ Some international authors approached questions of the involvement of doctors in NS crimes in various publications. Directly after the war, occupying military forces gathered information on German science, e.g. in the FIAT reports.²⁴ In 1946 Czech internist Josef Charvát published a compilation of his own and colleagues’ testimonies of abuses of medical science during the NS regime. These included some of the earliest firsthand descriptions of medical experiments in concentration camps,²⁵ and other autobiographical reports by former prisoners like Eugen Kogon and Miklos Nyiszli in 1946.²⁶ In 1949 neurologist Leo Alexander reported on “medical science under dictatorship” in a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as in a three-part series of psychological reflections, following his work as advisor during the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial.²⁷ Alexander drew lessons for American medicine from his experiences, reminding his colleagues of the dangers of a technicalized medicine and concluding his essay with the reminder, “Yes, we are our brothers’ keepers”.²⁸ In 1950 Francois Bayle published a detailed account of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in French, Carlos C. Blacker condemned the NS human experiments in the Eugenics Review in 1952, and in 1959 the Museum of the Memorial Site at Auschwitz started a journal series called “Zeszyty Ośięcimskie” (“Papers from Auschwitz”), which was also translated into German. One of the first issues contained Polish lawyer Jan Sehn’s detailed account of Carl Clauberg’s medical experiments on women in Auschwitz.²⁹ A first sign of the changes to come may have been a 1976 conference organized by the Hastings Center, which explored the “proper use of the Nazi analogy in ethical debate” under the title “Biomedical ethics in the shadow of Nazism”.³⁰ Medical crimes and the interrelationship between the medical community and the NS government, as well as the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, were discussed in order to highlight lessons for modern bioethics. Overall, however, there were only very few public discussions or serious research efforts on the subject in Germany and internationally, so that Kater found a “deplorable dearth of sources” concerning the history of medicine in the Third Reich in 198...