Paul Weindling is a renowned expert on medicine in Nazi Germany. His new book is the third in “an informal trilogy on German medical atrocities.” The preceding two were Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 (published in 1989) and Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe (published in 2000).
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Paul Julian Weindling
Palgrave Macmillan, £60, pp 496 ISBN 1 4039 3911 X www.palgrave.com
Rating: ★★★⋆
The current book is in three parts. The first gives an outline of coercive experimentation in Nazi Germany, which Weindling divides into four overlapping phases.
The first phase (1939-41), which he calls the neurological, was linked to the euthanasia programme (code named T4) that provided a testing ground for the killing techniques that would later be used in the “final solution.” Hitler's decree authorising euthanasia coincided with Germany's invasion of Poland. The programme targeted the elimination of adult patients in mental institutions and resulted in the execution—chiefly by gassing—of more than 70 000 people.
The second phase, from 1939 to 1944, was the large scale experiments on sterilisation and human reproduction (a direct continuation of the 1933 Sterilisation Law, which was administered through the genetic health courts). About 400 000 people with presumably inheritable disorders were sterilised without their consent under the Nazi regime.
The third phase was military experimentation. About 30 projects are known, including efforts to study people's responses to high altitude, freezing temperatures, and exposure to incendiary bombs, mustard gas, and other poisons. In other experiments prisoners were deliberately infected with typhus, malaria, and epidemic jaundice to further the development of vaccines and effective treatments. In experiments in Dachau naked female prisoners were left outdoors and then forced to engage in sexual intercourse as a warming technique.
The fourth phase was experiments on children (such as Josef Mengele's study of the inheritance of racial characteristics). All human experimentation in the concentration camps needed to be approved by Heinrich Himmler. Interestingly enough, Himmler himself favoured homoeopathy.
The book's second part tells the story of the trial of 20 doctors and three associates that took place in Nuremberg from December 1946 to August 1947 (the “Nuremberg medical trial”) after the international military trial from November 1945 to October 1946. In November 1945 John Thompson (a neurophysiologist) introduced the concept of medical war crime. Leo Alexander, a Boston based neurologist, coined the terms thanatology (echoing Jung's concept of thanatos, a death wish) and ktenology (from the Greek word for murder) to demonstrate “a scientific technique of genocide.” Thompson and Alexander were sent to Germany on an intelligence mission to assess German medical research, and both later became key experts at the Nuremberg medical trial. Weindling says that Alexander “researched the pathology of Nazi medicine by constructing a topographical anatomy of the German scientific crimes and by localizing the functionaries.” He sees the Nuremberg trials as an ideal opportunity to analyse not just Nazi psychology but also the German mentality, which he describes as characterised by “aggression and servile obedience.” Such a view, is, of course a dangerous simplification.
During the medical trial the Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes conducted more than 15 000 interrogations of more than 2250 individuals. The defendants presented themselves as victims of Nazi oppression who were dedicated to the care of patients and blamed distant or dead researchers. For example, Karl Brandt argued that he was deeply religious, humane, and an admirer of Albert Schweitzer. Joachim Mrugowsky cited his edition of the ethics of the Romantic physician Hufeland. The defendants claimed that their views accorded with the Hippocratic Oath, but the text of the oath is so opaque as to admit a variety of interpretations, and anyway no German doctor ever took the oath. The defendants also cited sterilisation laws in many jurisdictions as well experiments on inmates in US prisons. The ethical discourse surrounding the trials resulted in the Nuremberg Code on the conduct of human experiments and its principle of informed consent of participants in experimentation. Talford Taylor, a chief prosecutor at the medical trial, said, “Curiously enough, we were educated in large part by our opponents.”
However, as Weindling notes in the book's third part, “The Medical Trial did not pave way for further Allied prosecutions of medical atrocities on any large scale.” The main reason was the start of the cold war. Prosecution for war crimes and the extradition of suspects were deemed a hindrance in the emergence of a coalition against communism. For example, the Japanese bacteriologists of Unit 731 responsible for killing 270 000 people in China were given immunity from prosecution by US authorities.
Another reason was the position of the British Committee on Medical War Crimes. This committee included Lord Moran, “who was blundering, vain, an inveterate intriguer, and ready to connive with establishment demands to suppress war crimes evidence,” and Sir Henry Dale, who “wished to bury the accusations of German medical criminality.”
The question of whether scientists can use information derived from concentration camps is still open. Weindling carefully says, “Rumours continue to circulate that military medical research establishments in Britain and the USA hold concentration camp data on topics like hypothermia and poison gas. It remains unclear whether research on pressure and cold exposure, and on poison and nerve gases found to be criminal at the Medical Trial, was specifically utilized by the Americans and British.”
Although the book impresses with its list of archives from nine countries that Weindling used and its almost 100 pages of endnotes, it is a pity that he did not use any of the rich data on Nazi medical experiments in Russian archives (such as the archive of the Military Medical Museum in St Petersburg). Like the Nuremberg medical trial, Weindling's book probes the core values of Western civilisation and will serve as an invaluable source of caution for everyone interested in medical ethics and the limits of human experimentation.
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