Anita Andres was less than two years old when she came to a center for children with developmental disabilities in Mosbach (Germany). The little girl had not yet reached the cognitive and physical average of her age. It was 1941 and years before the Nazi regime had authorized the sterilization of people with disabilities and, if they became pregnant, forced abortion. But for children with a cognitive disorder or a physical disability, a ministerial decree in 1939 was sufficient. Anita was referred to the Heidelberg University Psychiatric Hospital along with 52 other children. The film was directed by Carl Schneider, one of the most renowned psychiatrists of his time. He led a study aimed at determining the differences between congenital developmental disorders and those acquired in the first months and years of life. Schneider was also responsible for Aktion T4, the state euthanasia program. According to her investigation, Anita and like her 10,000 other children with disabilities were murdered. The medical journal The Lancet has just published a report full of stories like Anita’s. One of the goals of the work, published 90 years after Hitler came to power, is to ensure that current and future doctors do not forget the horrors into which medical science and practice had degenerated.
Nazi-era medicine is now most notorious for the experiments that people like the doctor Josef Mengele carried out on the prisoners of the Auschwitz extermination camp. Mengele, who was initially assigned to the gypsy camp, eventually became head of the infirmary at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. His power over who died and who lived longer was absolute. At the foot of the ramps of the trains that brought Jews like cattle from all over Europe, Mengele decided with a gesture who went straight to the showers, i.e. the gas chambers, and who went to forced labor. His research, particularly with the twins, was notorious for lacking any respect for human nature.
“Perhaps the most damaging fallacy about medicine’s involvement in Nazism is the idea that the atrocities were the work of radicalized doctors.”
Excerpt from the report
However, dark characters like Mengele or Schneider prevent us from seeing the real drama. Professor Herwig Czech of the Medical University of Vienna, co-director of the commission that wrote the report, lamented in a note: “It is often surprising how little is known about the Nazi medical crimes, apart perhaps from a vague idea of Josef.” Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz. Far from this stereotypical image, the situation was much worse and went beyond a few doctors. The report’s introduction states: “Perhaps the most damaging misconception about medicine’s involvement in Nazism and the Holocaust is the idea that medical atrocities were the work of individual, radicalized doctors.”
This idea of bad apples is contradicted by the data compiled by the report: among the freelance professions, apart from civil servants, it was primarily doctors who joined the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in large numbers. According to the report, up to 65% of German doctors were affiliated by the end of the war. Many probably did it out of pure opportunism, but, say the authors of the work, they also put a strain on the majority of authoritarian thinking among doctors and their personal conviction that Jews were polluting the German people.
Visitors to the Auschwitz Memorial look at a photo of some of the children who carried out Dr. Josef Mengele suffered. Beata Zawrzel (NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Another myth that this work attempts to debunk is the view that it was not German science, but a kind of pseudoscience, that found favor with the Nazis. This denigration or justification may be due, at least in part, to the medical profession’s desire to distance itself and its investigations from those who committed the crimes. However, the report recalls that much of the research carried out during the Nazi regime was published in scientific journals (the usual mechanism for validating results). Some of their findings were read and applied around the world for decades and eventually integrated into mainstream medical knowledge, often without even mentioning their unclear origins.
During the Nuremberg Trials, in which the Nazi leaders and their accomplices stood trial as prominent doctors, a series of altitude and hypothermia experiments by the Dachau camp doctor Sigmund Rascher came to light. Although the tests were almost always fatal, American aviation had no qualms about exploiting their results. Additionally, according to the Lancet report, several of the scientists involved in this research, such as Siegfried Ruff and Hubertus Strughold, were recruited by the United States Army Air Force immediately after the war. Strughold had a distinguished career in the American space program and was considered the father of space medicine. Forgetfulness has found its way into the name of diseases that, like Asperger’s syndrome or Reiter’s syndrome, bear the surnames of Nazi doctors or those who sent their own patients to their deaths.
It is the responsibility of all doctors and healthcare professionals to ensure that the memory of the events of the Nazi era does not fade.”
Shmuel Pinchas Reis, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Throughout the report there is an insistence not to particularly demonize German science and medicine of the time. There have been other cases of complicity with the authorities in committing genocide, but the case in Germany is a special case. On the one hand, the authors emphasize that it is the best-documented horror story, although they tried to destroy much of the evidence when deciding the fate of the war. What is more important, according to the members of this commission, is that Europe and its science represented the pinnacle of human progress at the time, and German science was at the forefront. In addition, bioethics was born there: when a series of syphilis experiments on women and children caused a scandal in 1900, experiments on humans were regulated decades earlier than in any other country. In other cases, the Nazi regime and its doctors simply copied what was being done elsewhere: the first compulsory sterilization laws were passed in Switzerland and Denmark five years before Hitler came to power. And the German law itself, passed in 1933, was inspired by a draft by an American senator. In the United States, thousands of Latinas were sterilized in the first half of the 20th century, and disabled people continued to be sterilized until the 1970s.
From this horror and his trial in Nuremberg emerged the first international standards for the treatment of patients and, in particular, for informed consent in human studies. Shmuel Pinchas Reis, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author, recalled in a note: “Our report exposes some of the most horrific distortions of medical practice and policy in history, and it is up to everyone in the medical and health community. “May the memory of the events of the Nazi era fade. We must study this history of humanity’s worst to recognize and counteract similar patterns in the present, with the goal of promoting the best.”
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