Part VII
A second group of perpetrators consisted of professionals and experts, who were not involved in politics. One was physicians. Half of the German physicians were members of the Nazi party, and 26 percent were storm troopers with more than seven percent in the SS—a much higher percentage than those in any other academic profession, according to historian Michael H. Kater.
“Licensed Killer and Public Employed Torturer”
German historian Götz Aly said that after the Nazis seized power in 1933, the physicians had the opportunity to finally implement their theory of racial hygiene. The quest for “truth in medicine turned into destruction when medicine abandoned both the Hippocratic nil nocere [“first, do no harm”] and its true purpose to of healing the sick individual….” German physicians exploited the opportunity to use the huge amount of accessible human guinea pigs branded as subhuman and inferior for their own scientific research.”
When conducting medical experiments, Raul Hilberg said that, as a rule, the physicians asked for consent to exploit “habitual criminals” or inmates “condemned to death.” In this way, the doctors made “a compromise with their conscience.” They rationalized that criminals or those sentenced to death should not be accorded more advantageous treatment than German soldiers exposing themselves on the front lines. The SS added its own ideas of what constituted criminality, resulting in the decision either choosing between “race-defiling Jewish habitual criminals” or “Jewish criminals of the Polish resistance movement who have been condemned to death.”
Hilberg said Reichsführer-SS, Henrich Himmler, “the guardian angel of the doctors,” took great interest in their work, and was always prepared to accept “full responsibility” for their actions and ready to respond ruthlessly to their critics. The SS and those actively engaged in conducting these experiments were ever vigilant for any hint of disapproval from the medical community.
What precipitated these human medical experiments? According to Hilberg, the Nazis viewed anti-Jewish measures as a means to defend themselves against the ever-increasing assault of an “inferior racial mixture.”
Denial of Involvement
Christian Pross, a German medical director, said that for decades the German medical profession sought to deny their participation in medical crimes, through “a system of silence, lies, half-truths, excuses, angry denials,” by claiming that only “350 black sheep” were involved. Among those directly or indirectly implicated were “the cream of German medicine—university professors and outstanding scientists and researchers.”
Richard Toellner, medical historian at the university of Munster, stated, that “the whole spectrum of normal representatives of the medical profession was involved and they all knew what they were doing…. A medical profession, which accepts mass murder of sick people as normal, and to a large degree explicitly approves of it as a necessary, justified act for the sake of the community, has failed and betrayed its mission. Such a medical profession as a whole has become morally guilty, no matter how many members of the profession directly or indirectly participated in the killing of sick people in a legal sense.”
Abuses Exposed
Pross lamented that the disclosures about the medical abuses occurred only in May 1980, many years after most of the physicians had either retired or died. Justice for the victims and punishment of the murderers was no longer possible. From January 1940 to August 1941 approximately 80,000 patients from Austrian and German psychiatric institutions in the euthanasia killing centers were murdered according to historian Henry Friedlander.
German Doctors at Killing Centers
Friedlander said German doctors were at the euthanasia killing centers on Hitler’s orders in an effort to deceive the victims, process medical files, and because the medical leadership refused to cede authority to nonmedical supervisors. Physicians were “not an essential component” in the murdering process at Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibór and Treblinka. They were involved because they were available, and there was no surplus of SS officers at the camp. Practically any SS personnel could, and at times, did conduct selections, since as German biologist Benno Müller-Hill pointed out, it wasn’t essential to be an anthropologist “to select old people, mothers and children.”
Friedlander said that at Auschwitz, which was under control of the Inspectorate of the Concentration camps, was part of Oswald Pohl’s SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA). Pohl wanted to employ as many concentration camp inmates as possible for forced labor. To achieve this goal, the SS introduced “selections,” so SS doctors could be responsible for separating men and women who were still capable of working from those designed to the gas chambers. This was the main contribution of the SS physicians to the murdering process at Birkenau. “Their unethical anthropological and medical research was only a private sideline,” Friedlander said.
WVHA’s interest in slave labor stood in stark contrast to Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), whose main goal was to murder all Jews and Gypsies their staffs could locate.
Consent to Murder
Aly believes the willingness of many families to consent to the murder of their closest relatives without dissent,[in the Euthanasia Program] and “even with [their] approval…created the psychological conditions for the genocidal policies carried out in the years to come.” After all, “If people did not protest even when their own relatives were murdered, they could hardly be expected to object to the murder of Jews, Gypsies, Russians and Poles.”
Paralysis of Conscience
Elie Weisel noted that none of the physicians performed under duress—”neither those who presided over the nocturnal division of new arrivals, nor those who killed the prisoners in their laboratories. They could have slipped away,” or refused to become involved. Until the bitter end, they viewed themselves as public servants as “patriots, devoted researchers….Maybe even societal benefactors. Martyrs.”
With rare exceptions, he said, they calmly went back to their homes, resumed their medical practices and their ordinary daily lives. They were not disturbed or menaced by anyone. Pross notes they were even protected by colleagues who concealed their criminal activity with false medical diagnoses so they could evade going to trial, while they were reluctant to concede the severe illness of Nazi victims, for whom they were required to provide expert testimony in compensation trials.
They were even able to obtain respected academic and clinical positions in postwar Germany and abroad, including the U.S. After 1945, German medical schools were using medical articles and handbooks based on criminal research notes survivor Ezra BenGershôm.
Kurt Ploetner, SS doctor at Dachau concentration camp, was recruited by the CIA because his experiments provided them with important information about their “mind control experiments with cannabis, mescaline and LSD in the 50s and 60s.” At the same time, former Gestapo and SS intelligence officers became experts for American and British intelligence operations in the East.
Psychologist and Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim opined that “it is this pride in professional skill and knowledge, irrespective of moral implications, that is so dangerous…. As a feature of modern society oriented toward technological competence is still with us….Auschwitz has gone, but as long as this attitude remains with us, we shall not be safe from the criminal indifference to life at its core.”
BenGershôm commented that Nazi medicine played a fundamental part in implementing “the racial policy of a powerful, modern state and it enjoyed approval by wide parts of the whole nation.” He agreed with Bettelheim that to a considerable degree, the moral milieu that enabled “genocide medicine” has endured to this day. He, therefore, warned “One…should never expect ethical codes to safeguard ethical conduct unless the physicians and the whole society are firmly committed to abide by them.”
This group of professionals and experts later increased to incorporate engineers, architects, social scientists, economists, lawyers, theologians, accountants and an assorted group of academics including historians.
