Human Experiments and Nazi Medical Professional Culpability. The front cover of Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes

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1 Becker 1 Gretchen Becker HIS 320: Race, Gender, and Medicine Professor Dolores Peters December 8, 2011 Human Experiments and Nazi Medical Professional Culpability The front cover of Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent by Paul J. Weindling depicts an image of defendant Herta Oberheuser during her sentencing of 20 years in prison by the Military Tribunal of the Nuremberg Trials. 1 This picture sends a chilling message of the gravity of the ethical violations under consideration, with both the somber mood of the photograph and its female subject. Weindling describes how these German medical professionals were indeed war criminals, not merely pawns of the powerful Nazi regime, since they played an important role in constructing and executing Nazi racial policy. This historian s perspective from 2004 follows and complements another: that of Robert N. Proctor in Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis published in In Racial Hygiene, Proctor analyzes the development of Nazi ideology grounded in medical advancements which led to the justification of brutal experiments, sterilization, and euthanasia on Jews and others deemed genetically impure. Weindling offers an original analysis of the doctors culpability in forced human experimentation retrospectively, through the witnessing victims at the trial. Their stories, mutilated legs, and gaunt faces marked them as victims of horrific crimes against humanity and added meaning to the statistics. Each author recognizes the Trial s significance; however, Proctor focuses on the medical ideology behind the 1 Paul J. Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 2 Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

2 Becker 2 experiments in question while Weindling demonstrates their lasting impact in medical ethics. The following comparative book report surveys these two perspectives and describes their implicit conversation about the role of medicine in Nazi Germany s coerced human experiments. Professor Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford University and once coined the term agnotology as the cultural production of ignorance. 3 While the term does not specifically apply to Nazi medical experiments, it seems likely many historians were hesitant to place blame on medical professionals and the scientific community as providing political and ideological tools for genocide. Before Proctor wrote Racial Hygiene, the prevailing historiography on Nazi medicine reflected claims of the defendants at the Trial: medical professionals merely followed orders to perform human experiments from the Nazi political hierarchy out of fear for their lives and their careers. In fact, Proctor demonstrates that some scientific fields such as human genetics, anthropology, and racial hygiene flourished under the Nazi regime, suggesting that scientists intellectual freedom persisted as their political power grew. 4 Hence, Nazism could be understood as simply biology applied to racial policy. 5 Proctor argues that the physicians accused in the Nuremberg trial performed human experiments to gain knowledge improving a soldier s military conditions at high elevation, in extreme cold, or stranded at sea with only sea water to drink. Another priority was to test vaccines to combat spotted fever which infected German troops across the globe. 6 These research questions had political and contextual significance with the end of World War I, the beginning of the Second, and improved aviation technologies. Some argued experiments on less valuable 3 Stanford University: Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Robert N. Proctor. Stanford University, (accessed December 7, 2011). 4 Proctor, 5. 5 Proctor, 7. 6 Proctor, 217.

3 Becker 3 lives were justified to save the lives of German soldiers. Proctor describes that Physicians were never ordered to participate in the experiments; those who participated did so because they were given the opportunity and volunteered. 7 Furthermore, these physicians were the elite participating in cutting-edge research to benefit medicine. Undeniably, their methods were horrific and repulsive on a basic level since they undermined and exploited the doctor-patient fiduciary relationship. The medical goal was to achieve racial hygiene, and this became embedded in racial policy of Nazi Germany. Individual lives not worth living could be sacrificed to benefit the Volk, and Proctor recognizes how this potent idea resonated among physicians to justify the use of humans in experiments. I believe Proctor realistically catalogues events at Dachau and Auschwitz as criminal and unethical, yet he treats it quickly in the chapter on euthanasia. In doing so, he pays little attention to the significance of Nazi medical professionals as both scientists and medical doctors. As scientists, their goal was not for racial hygiene or even the health of the German people as a group. Instead, their science was funded for and applied to problems encountered on the battlefield. 8 It was euthanasia and the use of prisoners in the first place that depended upon the medical goal. And, as scientists in any field, part of the implicit aim is merely to seek knowledge freely and independent of possible misapplications or political utility. The question of criminality, then, is located in the intersection between medical and scientifically questionable goals which violated human subject autonomy and informed consent. Instead of reinterpreting history, Paul Weindling in Nazi Medicine seeks to create knowledge in a detailed account of the careers of the German perpetrators and the events leading up to the Nuremberg Trials. Then, during his analysis of the Nuremberg court documents and 7 Proctor, Proctor, 218.

4 Becker 4 through interviews with Allied prosecutors, Weindling retraces the discussion of Nazi human experiments as war crimes with the additional goal to create an ethical code that might prevent such atrocities from reoccurring. He deplores the unscrupulous callousness of the German physicians that were once world leaders in medicine. 9 Writing as a eugenics historian after Proctor, Weindling describes in depth the experiences of the doctors during the Trials in their accounts of human experiments. Some chose to face suicide over a life sentencing, while others denied any involvement in human experiments, or that they occurred only on orders from Nazi government officials. Of the rest, many argued that they followed past precedent in human experiments by undergoing the same conditions as the prisoners in pursuit of what they deemed as important knowledge and appropriate scientific techniques. The Allies were also questioned on human experiments on war criminals in their own countries, and the Nuremberg Code extended above and beyond most contemporary medical practices. It became the first international document to advocate voluntary and informed consent in human experiments. However, the exploitation of a group deemed genetically problematic for the German racial solution raised the issue of identifying physician culpability. Allied officials presented evidence such as careful scientific notes on the conditions of the prisoners, and the recounted stories of survivors provided powerful insight into the coerced experiments. These accounts helped condemn the human experiments as the unethical exploitation of war prisoners. Perhaps the most useful application of Nazi Medicine is to locate the Nuremberg Code and a newfound respect for patient autonomy and informed consent in its historical context. This book documents the evolution of the code alongside the investigation of physician criminality. The actual scientific careers of the physicians and their political power in the Nazi hierarchy are 9 Weindling, 2.

5 Becker 5 demonstrated throughout, leading up to the Nuremberg Trial, and the detailed evidence corroborates Proctor s historical reinterpretation. However, the focus on the role of the victim in the Trial and the sentencing according to the Allied analysis of physician culpability separates the scientific and medical practices and goals leading up to these medical atrocities. Weindling helped document the events from the international perspective immediately following the war, however the task of analysis of the trends in ideology required years of reflection that is largely unacknowledged. Weindling places very little emphasis on interpreting the human experiments from the motives of the physicians as Proctor does, leaving much of this work up to the reader. However, Nazi Medicine is the third book in a trilogy on Nazi Medical history. Weindling s purpose in writing the book is to document the events at the Nuremberg Trials, and can therefore be used to accompany Proctor s Racial Hygiene which instead provides a historiographical interpretation on the scientific and medical ideology. Unfortunately, due to Nazi Medicine s length and detail the book is very unapproachable for the student. Weindling was able gain access to the UN s Nuremberg Trial documents and the Sebring papers, among other important sources, but the chapters seem loosely organized and the detail very difficult to comprehend. This difficulty is perhaps due to the large scope of the topic and the quantity of resources available to Weindling. One positive aspect of his attention to detail is the addition of a nuanced perspective of the medical professional hierarchy and its connection to Hitler and other political authorities. Weindling mentioned Proctor s book only once, citing his estimate that around 1,000 people died because of the human experiments. 10 Weindling and Proctor, while both historians in Nazi Medicine, ultimately took different approaches to the question of Nazi medical professional culpability in human experiments. 10 Weindling, 189.

6 Becker 6 Robert Proctor relies on his precedential reevaluation of the medical experiments to suggest that the physicians justified human experiments on the basis of a genetic understanding of lives not worth living and a goal to medicalize the question of racial hygiene. Sixteen years later, Paul Weindling compiles a vast amount of historical evidence from the Nuremberg Trial, analyzing the human experiments as medical war atrocities and the defendants as criminals. A comparison between these helps to demarcate their varied audience and purpose. Bibliography Proctor, Robert N. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Stanford University: Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Robert N. Proctor. Stanford University. (accessed December 7, 2011). Weindling, Paul J. Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.