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Nazi Doctors in Germany J Med Ethics: first published as 10.1136/jme.17.Suppl.13 on 1 December 1991. Downloaded from J7ournal ofmedical ethics, 1991, 17, Supplement 13-16 Breaking through the postwar coverup of Nazi doctors in Germany Christian Pross Berlin, Germany When a dictatorial regime collapses the former power Dachau. Yet the indictment was dropped in 1972. In elite, the perpetrators, helpers and collaborators ofthe fact he was never indicted for his mescalin experiments old regime do not vanish but, as history has repeatedly (5). In 1945, Karl Sperber, a Czechoslovakian doctor shown, manage to survive quite agreeably. This and survivor of Auschwitz, had the foresight to warn survival is made the more likely by the fact that many the world: 'There is a tradition that doctors do not of them are, or make themselves, irreplaceable and readily let each other down. But God forbid that, as the indispensable as professionals. Such was the situation concentration camps fade into oblivion and the world in Germany after the liberation from Nazism in 1945. meets again to exchange ideas and discoveries at In postwar Germany exposing the perpetrators was international conferences, any surgeon or doctor particularly difficult, because Germany was not should say of the German doctors of the concentration liberated by a strong internal anti-Hitler opposition camps: "After all these men are scientists, men like us,by copyright. but by the Allied forces. So there was hardly a powerful and we must sit next to them and exchange ideas with group within Germany willing or capable of depriving them if medical science is not to suffer or perish". To the perpetrators of their continuing power. those who forgive and forget too quickly I dedicate Denazification was not implemented by the Germans these lines' (6). but by the Allies, and although the Nuremberg Trials Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke, the were a great achievement, they hardly incited effective official observers from the West German Chambers of follow-up trials on the part of the German judiciary. Physicians at the Nuremberg doctors' trial, had the Furthermore, the change of the international political courage to break the esprit de corps of their own scene with the rupture of the anti-Hitler coalition and profession. They published trial documents which the outbreak of the Cold War between the Soviet charged Germany's top surgeon, Ferdinand http://jme.bmj.com/ Union and the Western Allies, paralysed the Sauerbruch, and Wolfgang Heubner, director of the denazification process in Germany. Former Gestapo Pharmacological Institute of Berlin University, of and SS intelligence officers became most welcome being accessories to medical crimes for participating in experts for American and British intelligence a conference on the extremely cruel and partly fatal operations in the East. Klaus Barbie is the best known sulfonamide experiments in Ravensbruck (7). example (1). The Soviet Union and communist Mitscherlich had to pay a high price for his regimes in Eastern Europe similarly recruited former resoluteness. Sauerbruch and Heubner sued him and on September 23, 2021 by guest. Protected Gestapo and SS officers for their own intelligence forced him to remove this paragraph from the trial services (2). report. At the same time the leading Gottingen Doctor perpetrators in Germany enjoyed particular physiologist and specialist of aviation medicine, protection. Kurt Ploetner, SS doctor at Dachau Freidrich Rein, accused Mitscherlich of irresponsibly concentration camp, in 1946 was requested by the attacking the pillars of scientific research and of French to be extradited to stand trial for having dishonouring the German medical profession (8). directed Mescalin experiments on French prisoners to In 1949 the final version of Mitscherlich's 'eliminate their will'. US intelligence reported to the documentation of the Nuremberg doctors' trial was French authorities that they could not get hold of him published (9). Ten thousand copies were printed because he was believed to be living in the Soviet zone exclusively for the members of the West German (3). His experiments provided important material for Chambers of Physicians. But the book did not become the CIA's mind control experiments with cannabis, known to the public. There were no reviews, no letters mescalin and LSD in the fifties and sixties (4). It is to the editor. 'It was as if the book had never been doubtful whether the American authorities ever made written', Mitscherlich recalled. One must assume that any effort to arrest Ploetner; he taught medicine at the the 10,000 copies disappeared into the archives of the University of Freiburg in the sixties and was West German Chambers ofPhysicians without a single interrogated by a Munich State attorney about his German doctor ever having read the book. However, involvement in the fatal malaria experiments at the World Medical Association received a copy and J Med Ethics: first published as 10.1136/jme.17.Suppl.13 on 1 December 1991. Downloaded from 14 Breaking through the postwar coverup ofNazi doctors in Germany accepted it as proof that the German medical the entire former T4 establishment. Some ofits former profession had distanced itselffrom the medical crimes members had been living underground, and some had committed under the Nazis and was thus qualified for fled to South America where they carried on their renewed membership (10). operations. They tried to free Heyde from prison. The In the three decades following the Nuremberg operation failed and a co-defendant ofHeyde, who was doctors' trial there was a very effective complicity of an important witness, died under mysterious silence and coverup in the German medical profession. circumstances. Finally Heyde himself evaded trial by This is partly due to the fact that the percentage of committing suicide. The Heyde story sounds as doctors in the Nazi party (45 per cent) and its elite though it were taken from a classical movie about the organisations, the SA [Sturm Abteilung: the mafia (15). Stormtroopers of the Nazi party, the Brownshirts] (26 In the historiography of Nazi medicine the tide was per cent) and SS (7 per cent), was the highest of all the turned during a national conference of doctors and professions (11). Hardly any of the antifascist refugee health workers called the Gesundheitstag, held in West doctors returned to Germany after 1945, so there was Berlin in May, 1980. It was a deliberate counter- virtually no antifascist voice within the profession. In conference held during the annual meeting of the the postwar doctors' chambers and panel practice Deutsche Arztetag, the conference of the West associations former Nazi doctors' leaders occupied key German Chambers of Physicians, whose host, the positions. Two postwar presidents ofthe West German president of the Berlin chamber, was a former SA Chambers of Physicians were former SS members. Dr member. As an attempt to reanimate disrupted Hans Joachim Sewering, the last president, was forced alternative models of health care established in the to resign but remained president of the Bavarian Weimar period, the organisers of the Gesundheitstag Chamber of Physicians (12). In the fifties, sixties and had invited five Jewish refugee doctors from abroad, seventies it was virtually impossible to break the some of whom were former members of the Socialist powerful phalanx of defence and denial. Doctors Association (Verein Sozialistischer Arzte). Medicine under National Socialism: Repressed Past - Of the fourteen doctors who are known to have by copyright. worked in the killing hospitals for the mentally ill and Unbroken Tradition? was the title of the conference, the handicapped under the euthanasia programme which presented the work ofa small group ofoutsiders with the code name Aktion T4, only one was sentenced for the first time (16). The Gesundheitstag inspired a in court after 1945. Four died during World War II, whole new generation of scholars, who studied the two committed suicide. The remaining eight either mass sterilisations (17), the killing of the mentally ill lived under false names and practised medicine for during the euthanasia Aktion T4 (18), research on the many years, protected by their colleagues who knew victims ofeuthanasia (19), the purge ofJewish doctors their identity, or evaded trial by fleeing abroad or by (20), and the role of anthropologists and geneticists in acquiring expert opinions from doctor colleagues who the racial classification and selection of Jews, gypsies declared them too sick to stand trial (13). It is striking and others who were classed as 'subhumans' (21). http://jme.bmj.com/ how willingly German doctors were prepared to cover In recent years German doctors have faced growing up for their criminal colleagues with false medical concern from abroad on the issue ofNazi medicine. At diagnoses and on the other hand how fussy and the 1986 meeting of the American College of reluctant they were in acknowledging the severe Neuropsychopharmacology a German scientist was illnesses ofNazi victims, for whom they had to provide questioned about the origin of the histological brain- expert opinions in compensation trials (14). specimen dating from the early forties, which he had A prominent example of the widespread coverup is used for his research and had presented at the meeting. provided by one of the directors of euthanasia Aktion It turned out that the specimens he had used originated on September 23, 2021 by guest. Protected T4 who was head ofthe psychiatric clinic ofWurzburg from victims of euthanasia (22). Doctors in Israel and University, Werner Heyde. After the war he practised the United States expressed concern about the use of medicine for fourteen years under the pseudonym Dr anatomical specimens from Nazi victims by German Sawade in the state of Schleswig Holstein in Northern medical schools for teaching purposes. The pressure Germany. His identity was concealed by the whole from abroad finally forced several universities and the local medical establishment, including well respected prestigious Max Planck Institute for Brain Research to university professors.
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