The International Campaign for Real History

Posted Monday, June 28, 2004

[] Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech
[] Alphabetical index (text)
AR-Online

Quick navigation


London, Monday, June 28, 2004

 

German doctors urged to shake off Nazi horrors

By Mark Henderson
in Berlin

Embryologists told that taboo past is holding back modern research and treatment

GERMANY'S doctors must confront their profession's Nazi past if they are to exploit advances in 21st-century medicine, one of the country's leading medical historians told an international conference yesterday.

click for origin

David Irving comments:

FIRST a clue: researchers on this subject should visit Howard Gotlieb's manuscript division in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University (Massachusetts); there is a large holding of documents on the criminal Nazi medical experiments, most of them from the papers of US investigator Major Leo Alexander.
   Now a comment: We seldom hear of such inhibitions as those referred to in the Times article among post-war American researchers, even though their own wartime government conducted extensive cruel medical experiments on the (predominantly Black) prison population of the United States.
   Before WW2 there were also extensive medical experiments on captive victims in the USA.

Supina

American Professor Philip Supina (above) will lecture on Nazi Germany's non-criminal pioneering medical research at our 2004 Labor Day Cincinnati weekend convention on Real History.

The horrific experiments of figures such as Josef Mengele have become a taboo subject that continues to hold back German science 60 years on, according to Rolf Winau, Professor of the History of Medicine at the Free University of Berlin.

A reluctance to examine and understand the Nazi doctors' crimes has paralysed debate over the ethics of modern medicine, he said, particularly in the field of fertility treatment.

The result has been a climate of suspicion that is immensely damaging to patients: many new therapies that are routine and uncontroversial elsewhere in Europe have been rejected because of misplaced concern about the potential for abuse.

Procedures such as embryo freezing and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a means of screening for inherited diseases, are banned, and IVF doctors must transfer every embryo they create to their patients' wombs. This has generated one of the highest multiple birth rates in Europe, with serious consequences for the health of mothers and their babies.

German sensitivities also have implications beyond the country's borders: its politicians have given strong support to efforts to prohibit therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research through the European Union and the United Nations.

Professor Winau said the backlash against modern reproductive therapies was an overreaction based on a misunderstanding of the medical outrages of the Third Reich.

By breaking the taboo and confronting these crimes, today's doctors could convince public opinion that these technologies can be adopted without being abused for eugenic purposes, he told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference.

Analysis of the Auschwitz experiments of Mengele and his colleague Carl Clauberg could illuminate the rigorous ethical safeguards that surround modern research, yet few universities and hospitals have "faced up to their history" in this way.

"We have to erase the taboo," Professor Winau said. "Today there are still a great number of doctors who do not wish to be disturbed by remembering the dark times of German medicine. We have to study the history of medicine in the Nazi era in order that we understand the roots and mechanisms of an inhuman medicine, and why over 45 per cent of all German physicians were Nazis and why some of them worked as researchers in the concentration camps.

"We need to study the Rassenhygiene, the German version of eugenics, in order to show how far eugenic and racial thinking can go, so that we can have it in mind when we discuss ethical questions on reproduction and fertility. If we do not, we face uncertainty, lack of information and confusion when considering ethical questions in the future."

Professor Winau has particularly examined the crimes of two Nazi doctors who were highly respected in their fields before the Second World War: Clauberg, an endocrinologist, and Hermann Stieve, an anatomist.

Clauberg was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women in Block 10 at Auschwitz, whom he used as human guinea pigs to develop a method of mass sterilisation that did not require surgery. His correspondence with Heinrich Himmler shows that the Nazis intended to use Clauberg's technique in occupied Ukraine and Russia. Clauberg experimented with X-rays and substances such as formalin, which would be injected into his victims' wombs to cause inflammation and scarring that left them infertile. Those that survived were later sent to the gas chambers.

Stieve, a professor at Berlin University, was granted access to women held at Plötzensee prison for his research on ovarian function and the menstrual cycle. In one particularly grim study, he charted the effect on menstruation of what he termed "highly agitating news" -- the passing of a death sentence on these inmates -- and dissected their bodies after they had been executed.

Professor Winau said there was a vast gulf between the outrages committed by Clauberg and Stieve and the procedures that fertility doctors would like to be allowed to use today.

Techniques such as PGD embryo-screening, to prevent the birth of children with cystic fibrosis, are intended to help patients, rather than to advance pseudoscientific racial theories, and are conducted with firm ethical safeguards in place.

Germany's embryo protection law, he suggested, should be revised to take this into account.

"It is a very hard law and you cannot do very good research with it. It's an overreaction to our past."

CARL CLAUBERG
Leading endocrinologist who identified female hormone progesterone and worked to restore fertility of sterile women. Enthusiastic Nazi. Moved to Auschwitz in 1942 to develop method of non-surgical sterilisation for use on huge scale. Sentenced to 25 years' jail in Soviet Union but freed in 1955. Rearrested on return to Germany but died in 1957 before he could be tried.
 
HERMANN STIEVE
Professor of Anatomy at Berlin University who researched function of the ovary. Studied link between menstruation and stress at Plötzensee prison in Berlin from 1942-1944. After the war, became one of East Germany's most respected academic physicians.
 
JOSEF MENGELE
Most notorious of the Nazi doctors known as Auschwitz's "Angel of Death". Conducted vivisection experiments and was obsessed with proving Nazi racial theories through study of twins. Little of his work proved to have any lasting medical value. Escaped after the war and thought to have died in South America.
 
HORST SCHUMANN
Conducted many female sterilisation and male castration experiments at Auschwitz and invented gruesome machines with which to do the job. He deliberately infected prisoners with typhus by injecting them with infected blood to test prospective cures.
 
CARL VAERNET
SS doctor at Buchenwald; tried to "cure" homosexuality by castration, killing 15 men, and by injecting hormones. Died in Argentina in 1965.
 
SIGMUND RASCHER
Immersed prisoners at Dachau in freezing water for hours to study hypothermia, killing at least 300.

The above item is reproduced without editing other than typographical

 Register your name and address to go on the Mailing List to receive

David Irving's ACTION REPORT

or to hear when and where he will next speak near you

© Focal Point 2004 F Irving write to David Irving