To the prisoners of the Nazis, death came dressed in black and with insignia of the SS. But some came dressed in a white coat. The doctors of the Third Reich crossed all bioethical limits by placing themselves at the service of the Nazi criminal ideology. They began by preventing the reproduction of those considered “unfit”, they continued to eliminate those “unfit” and ended up using the prisoners as human guinea pigs to carry out their experiments.
The Nazis considered that they were fighting a biological battle, a true Darwinian fight for the survival of their race. Both from within, due to miscegenation, the infiltration of polluting elements, the procreation of people with hereditary diseases, the unproductive…, and from the outside, due to the lack of living space, the demographic pressure of inferior races… .
For this, they considered it necessary to take hygienic measures – prophylactic, surgical, eugenic – and encourage medical research. As a result, the Nazis launched an ambitious program of “racial hygiene” in which doctors were to play a central role.
In the 1930s, scientific racism, though increasingly discredited, still had a considerable reputation in academia. Relying on these “scientific” ideas, the Nazi regime began to implement various measures of social surgery to stop the degeneration of the Aryan race.
In July 1933, just five months after Hitler came to power, the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases was passed. With the complicity of the health institutions, it is estimated that between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand people were sterilized until the end of the war. Of these, about two thousand died on the operating table.
The next step in this eugenic policy was forced euthanasia. In August 1939, at Hitler’s request, a committee was set up to draw up a program to provide a “mercy death” for the incurably ill, people with “lives not worth living” in Nazi slang. Although the program was secret, Hitler intended to make it law once German society was ripe to accept it.
The first victims of this program, disguised under the euphemistic name of the Scientific Registry of Inherited and Congenital Diseases, were children under three years of age born with physical or mental disabilities. The committee drew up a census with the little ones that had to be eliminated and transferred them to the centers where euthanasias were practiced, normally through the administration of barbiturates, after separating them from their parents through deception or intimidation. Later, in order not to leave traces, the corpses were cremated, and the parents were informed of the death of their son due to an infectious disease.
Little by little, the program was expanded. In October 1939 an ambitious operation was launched with the aim of extending the euthanasia plan to the entire population. The Aktion T-4 program was created to exterminate all the disabled and incurably mentally ill in the Reich. Its main purpose was to alleviate the burden that these sick people, unable to work, placed on the state coffers and free up hospital beds to care for soldiers.
A different method of murder was used in this program, a procedure that would serve as a test run for mass crimes in the death camps. The patients were taken secretly to one of the six centers authorized to carry out euthanasia, they were placed in gas chambers disguised as showers and they were killed by poisoning them with carbon monoxide.
Other times, the crimes were carried out directly inside some trucks that went from hospital to hospital picking up the patients. Then, as with children, the bodies were cremated, and a letter was sent to the next of kin reporting the death.
Although the T-4 program was officially discontinued in 1941, following protests by German Catholic bishops (rumors of the murders were an outcry in the towns adjacent to the sanatoriums), the euthanasia centers continued to operate clandestinely until the end of the war. All of them were managed by doctors.
None of these doctors seemed overly concerned that these practices conflicted with Hippocratic principles. Why did they do it? In many cases, the reasons were ideological. Most were convinced Nazis, medics who had been educated in eugenic theories and who naturally adopted Hitler’s ideas of racial hygiene. In fact, doctors were the professional group that joined the Nazi party more quickly and in greater numbers.
Antisemitism was another important factor. Medicine was one of the most common professions for European Jews since the Middle Ages, because it was one of the few that they were allowed to practice. In 1933, 13% of doctors in Germany were Jewish, with Berlin being the city with the largest number. The various economic crises that occurred during the Weimar Republic caused many German doctors to adopt the anti-Semitic discourse of the Nazis.
After the expulsion of the Jews from German public life with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, many German doctors were happy to fill the positions that had become vacant. Grateful to the regime, most were willing to collaborate in euthanasia programs. In particular, the younger ones, who had been educated in Nazi eugenic thought and had fewer conscience problems.
The war had a liberating effect on Nazi consciousness. The warlike atmosphere allowed Hitler to advance his genocidal plans with more impunity and support than in peacetime. With the excuse of improving the health of German soldiers who gave their lives at the front, the Nazi regime encouraged the use of prisoners for medical experimentation.
Sigmund Rascher, a doctor at the Dachau concentration camp –very servile and close to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler–, was the one who first started these types of trials. In collaboration with the German air force, he conducted experiments to measure human resistance to the effects of altitude and hypothermia. To do this, he subjected the prisoners to all kinds of extreme tests in low-pressure chambers and frozen water tanks, which entailed excruciating suffering and an agonizing death by suffocation or freezing.
After Rascher’s experiments came many more. Each concentration camp had its own “Doctor Death”. At the same Dachau, other doctors did experiments with salt water. Prisoners were forced to drink experimentally purified seawater, causing very serious organic damage and enormous suffering, as a result of dehydration due to excess salt.
In Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald or Mauthausen, doctors used prisoners to test drugs and treatments for infectious diseases such as typhus or malaria.
In Ravensbrück, dozens of prisoners were used to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides, an antibiotic that was used in Germany instead of penicillin. The women were given infections in open wounds, simulating those produced on the battlefields (with pieces of wood, glass, rusty nails), to see how they responded to the treatments. Fragments of muscle, bone or nerves were also removed to study their regeneration.
As in many other aspects, the Auschwitz death camp was the most terrible in terms of medical experimentation. The culprit was the ruthless doctor Josef Mengele. During the two years that he worked in the camp, “the angel of death” carried out all kinds of experiments on prisoners (many of them children). The objective was not to contribute to the improvement of the health of the German soldiers who fought at the front, but of the entire Aryan race.
Mengele’s favorite guinea pigs were the twins. Locked up in Hall 10, he spent long hours experimenting with them – inoculating them with diseases, amputating limbs, performing comparative autopsies – in order to elucidate their genesis and to increase the rate of multiple births among German women.
Other experiments included the artificial insemination of prisoners with a family history of twins to see if they had more than one baby, the injection of various chemicals into the children’s eyes to change the pigmentation of the iris and turn it blue (which caused infections and blindness) and carrying out painful tests on prisoners with dwarfism.
Furthermore, according to the testimony of Vera Alexander, a Jewish recluse who worked as a babysitter for Mengele, the doctor also tried to create conjoined twins by stitching together two twins from behind, one of them hunchbacked.
As is well known, Mengele managed to flee to South America, where, despite being insistently searched for, he managed to remain hidden until his death in 1979. Aribert Heim, “Doctor Death” from Mauthausen, also managed to avoid justice; it is suspected that he after spending time in hiding in Spain. Other Nazi doctors could be captured and prosecuted for war crimes in the so-called Nuremberg doctors’ trial.
This text is part of an article published in number 653 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
