In German concentration camps, Nazi doctors put aside all their ethical and professional objections to perform the most horrific experiments on prisoners. It was a good way to make a career, or to achieve scientific breakthroughs. Daan de Leeuw sheds light on this lurid subject in his graduation thesis. He was awarded the Volkskrant-IISH Thesis Prize for History.
It goes against every medical-ethical professional code:doctors who carry out medical experiments – often with fatal consequences – on prisoners in concentration camps. After all, doctors are trained to make people better, not to kill people. Historian Daan de Leeuw, until recently a history student at the University of Amsterdam, became fascinated by the motives of these doctors.
“Since I was about twelve years old, I have been interested in the Holocaust and other genocides,” De Leeuw e-mails from South America. “During my studies I specialized in this. For my internship at the NIOD I came across a book Dr. med. Erwin Ding-Schuler, who conducted medical experiments in Buchenwald concentration camp. I knew the experiments of Dr. Mengele from Auschwitz did, but when I read this I realized that there must have been dozens and maybe hundreds of other doctors who did these kinds of experiments. The subject immediately intrigued me, and I realized that a good explanation for this behavior of doctors did not yet exist.”
Sick bodies
Conducting medical experiments is certainly not unique to the Nazi period, writes De Leeuw in his thesis In the Name of Humanity. Nazi Doctors and Human Experiments in German Concentration Camps, 1939-1945. New scientific developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as bacteriology and pharmacology, made human experiments necessary for progress.
Experiments were carried out almost everywhere in Europe, often without permission on the impoverished people in hospitals, the mentally ill or colonials. This was often done in secret. But when experiments leaked out, there was ethical discussion about it. During the interwar period, especially in Germany but also elsewhere, the idea emerged that a society as a whole could be a 'sick body'. Doctors were going to determine who was 'useful' and 'useless' for the health of the state.
The rise of Hitler's Third Reich with its racial laws put an end to the discussions. The war with the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Holocaust filled the concentration camps with useless Untermenschen:Jews, Russian prisoners of war and other groups that were doomed to die anyway. In order to give them a function, Nazi doctors started using them on a large scale for medical experiments. With the aim of developing new medicines, 'curing' homosexuals or finding survival techniques for the army; all things to improve humanity as a whole on a scientific basis.
One of the experiments Nazi doctors conducted for the German army was testing a special suit for pilots to survive longer in icy water. A victim was given the suit and the effect of the cold water on the body was examined. If the victim did not die prematurely, the best way was then sought to warm up again.
“Thanks to the Third Reich, a young group of doctors was able to make a career very quickly, much more easily than was previously possible,” says De Leeuw. “Older doctors hoped the study would give them a scientific breakthrough.” But most of the experiments were organized from above, mostly by the SS. “The SS only recruited doctors or gave permission for experiments to doctors who adhered to National Socialism and who were 100 percent reliable. When in doubt, doctors were not called in.”
Useless and inferior
After the war, not a single doctor involved, with few exceptions, felt remorse for the horrific experiments they carried out on behalf of the SS. They all insisted that they were scientific and only doing what was right. They did not feel any medical-ethical objection, because they saw their victims as otherwise useless and inferior. They were so convinced of National Socialism that they effortlessly put aside their doctor's oath (Hippocratic Oath).
According to the jury of the Volkskrant-IISH thesis prize, De Leeuw wrote 'A convincing, hair-raising and nuanced MA thesis in which the theory is discussed clearly and critically'. Daan de Leeuw is currently traveling the world. “At the beginning of 2015 I will be back in the Netherlands. Then I want to write a PhD proposal. Not on this subject, because there is little new to be gained from it, but in any case a subject in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, because that is still where my great interest lies.”