Anita Andres was not yet two years old when she entered a center that cared for children with developmental problems in Mosbach (Germany). Little she had not yet reached the cognitive and physical average for her age. It was 1941 and the Nazi regime had approved years ago the sterilization of people with disabilities and, if they became pregnant, forced abortion. But for children with a cognitive disorder or physical disability, a ministerial order was enough in 1939. Anita was referred, along with 52 other children, to the Heidelberg Psychiatric University Hospital. It was directed by Carl Schneider, one of the most renowned psychiatrists of his time. She was leading a study that sought to establish the differences between congenital developmental disabilities and those acquired in the first months and years of life. Schneider was also responsible for Aktion T4, the state euthanasia program. After being studied, Anita was murdered and, like her, 10,000 other children with disabilities. The medical journal The Lancet just published a report full of stories like Anita’s. One of the objectives of the work, published 90 years after Hitler’s rise to power, is that current and future doctors do not forget the horror into which medical science and practice degenerated.
The medicine of the Nazi period is probably infamous today especially for the experiments carried out by people like the doctor Josef Mengele on the prisoners of the Auschwitz death camp. Mengele, first assigned to the gypsy camp, ended up being head of the infirmary at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. His power over who died and who lived a little 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 directly to the showers, that is, the gas chambers, and who went to forced labor. His research, especially with the twins, was infamous, without any respect for the human condition.
“Perhaps the most damaging fallacy about the involvement of medicine in Nazism is the idea that the atrocities were the work of radicalized doctors.”
Extract from the report
However, sinister characters like Mengele or Schneider prevent us from seeing the true drama. Professor Herwig Czech of the Medical University of Vienna, co-director of the commission that authored the report, laments in a note that “it is often surprising how little is known about the medical crimes of the Nazis, beyond perhaps a vague idea of Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. Far from that stereotypical image, the situation was much worse and beyond a few doctors. The introduction to the report reads: “Perhaps the most damaging fallacy 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 that the report has gathered: Among the liberal professions, and leaving civil servants aside, it was doctors who most en masse joined the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Up to 65% of German doctors were affiliated by the end of the war, the report cited. Probably, many did it out of simple opportunism, but they also weighed, say the authors of the work, on the majority authoritarian thinking among doctors and their personal conviction that Jews contaminated the German people.
Another myth that this work attempts to dismantle is the view that it was not German science, but a kind of pseudoscience that found favor with the Nazis. This minimization or justification could come, at least in part, from the medical community’s desire to distance itself and its investigation from those who committed the crimes. However, as the report recalls, much of the research carried out during the Nazi regime was published in scientific journals (the usual mechanism for validating its results). Some of their findings were read and applied around the world for many decades and have ended up integrated into general medical knowledge, often without even mentioning their obscure origin.
During the Nuremberg trials, in which the Nazi leaders and their accomplices, as prominent doctors, were tried, a series of altitude and hypothermia experiments carried out by the Dachau camp doctor Sigmund Rascher came to light. Although the tests were almost always fatal, American aviation had no qualms about taking advantage of their results. Furthermore, as stated in the report of The Lancet, several of the scientists involved in this research, such as Siegfried Ruff and Hubertus Strughold, were recruited immediately after the war by the United States Army Air Force. Strughold had a distinguished career in the American space program, being considered the father of space medicine. Forgetfulness has reached the very name of the diseases that, as is the case with Asperger’s syndrome or Reiter’s syndrome, bear the surname of Nazi doctors or those who sent their own patients to their deaths.
It is up to everyone in the medical and healthcare community to prevent the memory of the events of the Nazi era from fading.”
Shmuel Pinchas Reis, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Throughout the report it is insisted not to especially demonize German science and medicine of the time. There have been other cases of complicity with the authorities to commit genocides, but the German case is special. The authors highlight, on the one hand, that it is the best-documented horror story, despite the fact that they tried to eliminate much evidence when the fate of the war was decided. More important is, according to the members of this commission, that, at that time, Europe and its science represented the summit of human progress and at the top was German science. Furthermore, bioethics had been born there: in 1900, when a series of experiments with syphilis on women and children caused a scandal, experimentation on human beings was regulated decades before any other country did so. In other cases, the Nazi regime and its doctors only copied what was done elsewhere: the first forced 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 70s.
From that horror and his trial in Nuremberg were born the first international standards on the treatment of patients and, in particular, informed consent for human trials. Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author, Shmuel Pinchas Reis, recalls 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 healthcare community to avoid May the memory of the events of the Nazi era fade. We must study this history of the worst of humanity, to recognize and work against similar patterns in the present, with the goal of promoting the best.”
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