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.  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. 
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.
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