There have been two major recent developments which will form the major part of this Newsletter:
1. The Nuremberg Declaration- 2012 of the General Medical Council of the Federal Chamber of
Physicians of Germany
2. The special issue of the journal Annals of Anatomy on the history of anatomy in the Third Reich.
I have also invited a review by Prof. Claude Romney of an important new book by Dr. Hans-Joachim
Lang on medical research on women in Block 10 of Auschwitz. Prof. Romney is presently completing
a book on physician-prisoners of Auschwitz one of whom was her father, the French physician
Dr. Jacques Lewin.
Finally, there are links to two important resources on the subject of medicine in the 3rd Reich and the
Holocaust.
A number of contacts have been added to the list of recipients of the Newsletter. If you wish to be
removed from the contact list please respond by return e-mail
to projectmedicineholocaust@gmail.com with the subject "unsubscribe".
Any questions or comments on the content of the Newsletter may be sent to me directly
atbillseidelman@gmail.com .
“NUREMBERG DECLARATION OF 2012”
On May 23, 2012 at the 115th meeting of the German Medical Assembly in Nuremberg, the
Bundesärztekammer (BAK), also known as the Federal Chamber of Physicians of Germany issued
The Nuremberg Declaration of 2012 in which the medical profession of Germany publicly
acknowledges and apologizes for the role played by German physicians during the Third Reich. The
Declaration was a response to a petition from approximately 50 leading physicians and scholars, most
from Germany. The declaration is named after the city which was the site of the momentous
Nuremberg Medical Trial.
The Nuremberg Declaration of 2012 of the Federal Chamber declares that:
“…the initiative for the most serious human rights violations did not originate from the political
authorities, but rather from physicians themselves.”
“The crimes were simply not the acts of individual doctors, but rather took place with the substantial
involvement of leading representatives of the medical association and medical specialist bodies, as
well as with the considerable participation of eminent representatives of university medicine and
renowned biomedical research facilities."
Furthermore the Declaration asserts:
“- We acknowledge the substantial responsibility of doctors for the medical crimes committed under the
Nazi regime and regard these events as a warning for the present and the future.
- We express our deepest regrets that physicians have acted contrary to their medical obligations by
committing various human rights violations. We pay our respects to all the victims, those still alive
today and those who have already died, as well as their descendants and request their forgiveness.
- We commit ourselves as the German Medical Assembly to work towards actively promoting further
historical research and the reappraisal of the past through the committees of the German Medical
Association and through direct financial aid, as well as through institutional support, such as unlimited
access to archives.”
67 years after the end of European War and almost 65 years after the Nuremberg Medical Trial, and
after almost 7 decades the large and powerful organization representing the physicians of Germany
has finally acknowledged the role played by German doctors in what was to become the largest
program of organized human destruction in the history of humankind. Physicians played a critical role
in the implementation and exploitation of the Nazi programs including; state-enforced eugenic
sterilization; the murder of patients under the guise of ‘euthanasia’ mercy killing; the design,
development and implementation of the means of genocidal mass murder by the use of poison gas;
the abuse of prisoners for cruel and often fatal experiments; and the exploitation of the remains of
victims of Nazi terror. The experiments were not ‘pseudoscience’ carried out by marginal doctors but
carefully planned projects led by leading professors and scientists employed by some of the foremost
academic and scientific institutions. Some of the scientists and institutes had been funded by leading
research organizations including, for a time, the Rockefeller Foundation as well as branches of the
German military. Human specimens from victims of Nazi terror remained in the collections of esteemed
universities and research organizations, and at least one museum, for decades after the war. Some
may still be held in collections until this day. Professors and scientists associated with the criminal
activities of the Hitler period went on to influential positions after the war including the leadership of the
BAK.
The sincerity of the Declaration will be tested in the coming years by the ability of the BAK to account
for its own role in suppressing the truth and the degree to which it supports“…further historical
research and the reappraisal of the past..." It is imperative that such support for research and
reappraisal be undertaken by credible scholars who are independent of the BAK. Furthermore the
BAK must be transparent in terms of access to archives and records under its jurisdiction.
The Nuremberg Declaration challenges the leaders of academic medicine in Germany and Austria to
undertake a proper examination of the role played by universities and research institutes during the
Hitler period. While there has been research and documentation by some universities and
organizations such as the Max Planck Society, there must be a proper and sustained collective and
individual exploration of the path taken by those institutions which had, at an earlier time, provided the
model for science-based medical education that has been emulated throughout the world. Academic
medicine has a moral obligation to examine and document how those institutions that provided such
an important and influential model to the world became partners to evil and engaged and promoted the
professors as well as educating and training the students and physicians who were ultimately
responsible for horrific crimes. An important example of such an exploration was recently undertaken
by the Anatomische Gesellschaft to study and document the history of anatomy during the Third Reich.
The aforesaid criticism notwithstanding, the Bundesärztekammer and the General Medical Council
must be commended for this achievement. The leaders and signatories of the petition of appeal that
resulted in the momentous Declaration of Nuremberg 2012 must be congratulated for their
determination, wisdom, and courage that brought about such a momentous result.
The English-language translation of the petition and the Declaration is attached. We are indebted to
Prof. Volker Roelcke for the translation.
SPECIAL ISSUE OF ANNALS OF ANATOMY ON THE HISTORY OF
ANATOMY IN THE THIRD REICH
As was reported in earlier issues of the Newsletter, the organization of German and European
anatomists, Anatomische Gesellschaft, has taken the lead in documenting the history of anatomy
during the Third Reich. The Gesellschaft organized a special symposium on the subject which was
held at the University of Wuerzburg in October, 2010. Papers presented at the symposium have been
published in a special issue of the Annals of Anatomy which was recently published on-line. We are
grateful to the publisher, Elsevier, for making the papers from the special issue available at no charge
for a period of one year. The journal may be found
at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09409602
The editors of this special issue are Professor Christoph Redies, the Director of the Institute of
Anatomy of the University of Jena and Dr.Sabine Hildebrandt, presently of the Division of Anatomical
Sciences of the University of Michigan. A background statement issued by the University of Jena can
be found at:http://idw-online.de/de/news479597
.
Review of Hans-Joachim Lang. Die Frauen von Block 10.
Medizinische Versuche in Auschwitz. ("The Women of Block 10.
Medical Research in Auschwitz") Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe,
2011.
Hans-Joachim Lang , a journalist from Tübingen , was already the author of a remarkable book, Die
Namen der Nummern ("The Names of the Numbers") (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 2004), in which
he explains how he discovered the identity of the 86 Jewish victims of the Nazi Professor of Anatomy
August Hirt at the Reichsuniversität Strassburg. Hirt had them transferred from Auschwitz to the
Natzweiler-Struthof camp, in Alsace, where they were gassed. Their bodies were subsequently meant
to be prepared to become part of Hirt's intended collection of Jewish skeletons. Lang's new book is
devoted to Block 10 in Auschwitz I (the main camp) where Nazi doctors used Jewish women as
subjects for cruel, barbaric experiments, mostly, but not exclusively, with a view to finding fast and
inexpensive sterilization methods which would enable the Nazis to use Jews for slave labor while
preventing them from having children.
Using a wealth of archival documents from Germany, Israel, the United States, Poland, the
Netherlands and Belgium, Lang has meticulously researched his topic. The result is in large part an
extraordinary collage of testimonies of women who survived the experiments (many did not), but who
were marked for life, both physically as a large number were unable to bear children, and
psychologically.
Because some of his readers may not be that familiar with the events that took place in Auschwitz,
Lang provides the necessary background information about the camp, its history and layout. In his
presentation of the Nazi physicians who were involved in experiments carried out in Block 10, he
alternates between the two main ones, Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann. Clauberg was a
gynecologist who had enjoyed an international reputation in scientific circles before the war for his
research on fertility, while Schumann had been the director of the Grafeneck institution where disabled
patients, either psychologically or physically, who were deemed by the Nazis "unworthy of life," had
been murdered. Schumann had later held the same position at another large scale Nazi killing center,
Sonnenstein, where thousands of patients were also euthanized. Both were fanatical Nazis who had
joined Hitler's party early in their careers.
While the experiments carried out in Block 10 have been reported before in a number of publications,
Lang adds another dimension by following some of the young women, all Jewish, from their arrival at
the ramp where they were chosen to become the subjects of sterilization experiments in Block 10.
Most of them had been deported from Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. They were at
first bewildered at being brought to a building which looked inside somewhat like a hospital since they
were young and healthy. Several mentioned that they thought it was a madhouse. Their confusion
soon turned to terror as they realized that they were there to be tortured by brutal, inhumane
procedures.
Lang also paints a moral portrait of the nurses and prisoner-doctors in Block 10, using again survivors'
testimonies. There were four female prisoner-doctors who were forced to assist the SS physicians and
did whatever they could to alleviate the sufferings of the victims of experiments. One of the four,
Adélaïde Hautval, was a French Protestant woman born in Alsace when it was part of Germany (and
therefore fluent in German), who had the courage to refuse to continue to take part in the experiments.
The other three were Jewish and had no choice but to obey orders, at the same time doing whatever
they could to help the unfortunate women who had been chosen as subjects for the experiments. Most
of the nurses had no medical training. Some were completely unsympathetic and would even hit the
women who screamed with pain.
The perpetrators, of course, are referred to at length and their monstrous deeds described in detail.
First Clauberg, who gave his victims intrauterine injections of a whitish opaque substance, probably
formalin, at repeated intervals. The injections produced excruciating suffering and when called again to
be submitted to the same procedure, the women would try to hide wherever they could. After the
injections, they were X-rayed to check on the effects of the injections.
Schumann's subjects were taken in groups from Block 10 to Birkenau where their reproductive organs
were irradiated and they subsequently underwent ovariectomies. Some of them died either from the
effects of the irradiation and surgery or from typhus.
Other experiments were carried out in Block 10 by the garrison SS doctor Eduard Wirths with his
brother Helmut, a gynecologist from Hamburg, allegedly to detect early cellular modifications in uterine
cancer. To this effect, parts of the women's cervix were excised, albeit under anesthesia. Most women
then suffered from hemorrhages which lasted several days.
One prisoner-doctor who collaborated zealously with the Nazi physicians in Block 10 was Maximilian
Samuel, an older Jewish gynecologist from Cologne. Lang has collected many testimonies from
women who were examined and experimented on by Samuel on orders from Wirths. Some of them
testified that he had helped them by preventing them from being subjected to more harmful actions by
the SS doctors, while others saw him just as another perpetrator. It was rumored that his compliance
was due to the fact that he was hoping his daughter's life would then be spared. His colleagues in the
block despised him. It is not clear whether he was eventually shot or sent to the gas chamber.
Block 10 was also the scene of blood agglutination experiments: on orders from the director of the
Hygiene Institute in Rajsko, Dr. Bruno Weber, women of specific blood groups were injected with blood
from another group. Prisoners also had to give various quantities of blood which they believed were to
be used for transfusions to Wehrmacht soldiers on the Russian front. As Lang points out, the research
on blood performed in Block 10 needs to be studied more systematically. Maybe the many documents
from the Hygiene Institute kept in the Auschwitz Museum archives and which have yet to be explored
will shed light on this aspect of the Nazi experiments in Block 10 (as well as other activities of the Nazi
physicians in Auschwitz).
One striking example of how the prisoner-doctors endeavored to shield the women in Block 10 from
cruel experiments was the creation of the Spuckkommando ("spitting kommando"), a group of inmates
who had to spit every morning into test tubes. The goal was to find a method to determine blood
groups using saliva. The creation of this kommando was apparently due to my father, Jacques Lewin,
a prisoner-doctor from France who had first worked in a small laboratory in Block 10 and later in
Rajsko. Of course, the women who benefited from this initiative were unaware that it was due to one of
the prisoner-doctors and not to their Nazi tormentors.
The exact number of women who were experimented on in Block 10 on remains unknown. It is
probably around 800. Similarly, the number of deaths due to the experiments carried out there cannot
be determined. Many survivors who had been experimented on by Clauberg and Schumann were later
unable to have children.
Lang's book is a very important piece of research which deals with a particularly dark and revolting
aspect of the Auschwitz history. Moreover, in light of the recent apology issued by the German Medical
Association (Bundesärtzekammer) to the victims of the crimes perpetrated by Nazi doctors as well as
to their families, the book deserves to be widely read. Hopefully it will be translated into English and
other languages before too long.
Claude Romney, Ph.D.
Emerita Professor
University of Calgary
New Resources of Note:
1. The Center for Medicine after the Holocaust, Houston,
Texas: http://www.medicineaftertheholocaust.org/
"The mission of the Center for Medicine after the Holocaust is to challenge doctors,
nurses, and bioscientists to personally confront the medical ethics of the Holocaust and
to apply that knowledge to contemporary practice and research." The website includes a
comprehensive curriculum for teaching students in the health professions.
2. The War against the Weak (Der Krieg Gegen "Minderwertigen", Vienna
Austria. http://neu.gedenkstaettesteinhof.at/en
This is a revised and updated resource on the child killing program at the Steinhof psychiatric hospital
in Vienna which saw approximately 800 children murdered as part of the child 'euthanasia' killing
operation. The website provides not only a detailed description of the killing program at Steinhof but
also background information and documentation on 'euthanasia' in Vienna, the victims and survivors.
William E. Seidelman MD.
Emeritus Professor
Dept. of Family and Community Medicine
University of Toronto.
Adjunct Professor
Faculty of Health Sciences
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev,
Beer-Sheva, Israel.
PROJECT ON MEDICINE AND THE HOLOCAUST
http://www.projectmedholo.org/about/
Director Michael Grodin, M.D.
Professor of Bioethics, Human Rights, Psychiatry, and Family Medicine
Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health
Associate Director William Seidelman, M.D.
All publication attachments are intended for individual research and scholarly purposes.