by Forced medical research and human experiments are among the darkest chapters of the Nazis -era. Disease pathogens, toxins and drugs were mainly tested on Jews, prisoners of war, Sinti and Roma, disabled people and other persecuted groups. Their organs were removed, they had to freeze to death under controlled conditions, they were sterilized and they were killed.
The extent of the atrocities is almost unimaginable with tens of thousands of victims. Detailed profiles of 16,000 of these people are now available in a new online database. For the first time, there is systematic access to the names and personal details of victims, individual experiments and the institutions involved. It also contains more than 13,000 profiles of people whose fates have not yet been finally researched.
The database was published by the Leopoldina Academy of Sciences and Max Planck Society. The scientist of his predecessor, the Emperor Wilhelm Society, researched human specimens during the Nazis -era, who undoubtedly came from mass murders.
Only a few for account
Over 200 institutions in Germany and Europe were associated with medical crimes during the NS era. The full extent of the atrocities was announced in a report by the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazimis and The Holocaust in 2023.
The detailed report has shown that medical specialists founded their actions in different roles by on “racist” Concerned and forced sterilizations, euthanasia programs and selection carried out to a large extent. Only a few of the perpetrators were held accountable for their actions after the Second World War.
This street in Augsburg, named in honor of an NS doctorUlf Vogler/dpa/image alliance
Some scientists and institutions even put their work relatively undisputed after the war. Prominent representatives of NS medicine, for example with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, were able to continue working in Germany after 1945.
According to the medical historian Dr. Herwig Czech from the Medical University of Vienna, which was decisive for the initiation of the Lancet Commission, was used by the specialist knowledge of people who gained their knowledge from concentration camp experiments in the aviation and the development of the SASA Space Medicine program.
Research that has been used for decades afterwards
In the post -war period, some of the data collected as part of the Nazi regime were adopted without reflection, partly because the circumstances of the experiments were rarely discussed or the origin of the data was hidden. Data on cold tolerance, sulfonamide antibiotics or the effects of phosgengas that came from human experiments, for example, were even published and repeatedly cited in medical magazines.
Phosgene is a breath poison that was used as a chemical weapon in the First World War. The results of National Socialist research on chemical weapons were visited again in the 1980s, as the science historian Florian Schmaltz discovered.
“As Late As 1988, Scientists at the Us Environmental Protection Agency Proposed Using The Results of Otto Bickenbach’s Phosgene Experiments on Prisoners at the Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp As the Basic Animal Experiments in Connection with Regulation on Phosgene Exposure After protests from a group of their Colleagues with the Agency,” Said Sabine Hildebrandt, A Lecturer about social medicine at the Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“Scientific value” Is now limited by inhuman studies
Parts of human genetics, psychiatry and medical anthropology also use methodologically for practices that have been developed and applied under the Nazis.
“There was a relatively high degree of continuity in the areas of anatomy and neuropathology, since great neuropathological collections were generated during the Nazis -era, which the researchers continued to refer to the war long after the war”said Czech from the Medical University of Vienna.
The “scientific value” This inhuman studies is limited and given the progress that has been made since then, he is now practically irrelevant, he added.
Nevertheless, copies from the Nazis era such as tissue samples, organ preparations and brain sections of victims were continued in German-speaking research institutes and for decades after 1945 for teaching purposes.
In many cases, systematic revision and burial only took place in the 1980s and 190s after political and social pressure. A well-known example is the reassessment of the collections in various locations of the Max Planck Society, which only began in 1997.
Apply a more conscious approach to the past
According to Hildebrandt, most techniques and data from the Nazis era are no longer relevant and therefore not actively used.
“However, this does not mean that the results of this research have not been included in general medical knowledge with persistent effects, for example in textbooks on individual medical disciplines”she told DW.
Although the critical reflection and the ethical debate about how to deal with these knowledge in medicine and research are the standard practice today, Hildebrandt said that there must be even more awareness of the context in which the data and knowledge in individual scientific publications have arisen.
“The labeling and contextualization alone are not sufficient; They have to be supplemented by naming the victims, their biographies and their suffering”added.
A global problem
Forced medical research and human experiments were not invented as part of the NS regime. Such practices also took place worldwide before and after this time, especially in colonial contexts. In many cases, however, there was little or no critical examination of these practices.
“This is one of the reasons why the Lancet Commission was founded: Medicine in the context of National Socialism represents the best researched and so far most extreme examples of medical violations under unjust regimes”said Hildebrandt.
Individual countries, especially those with colonial history, face this responsibility. Other countries such as Japan, who have also committed medical atrocities and human experiments on prisoners of war and the civilian population in China, Korea and other occupied areas, have not yet done so.
“Other countries and times have different stories that often have to be researched thoroughly to clarify their influence on the present”said Hildebrandt. “Here in the USA, more research on the history of medicine and slavery is finally being carried out, although our current government is now trying to reverse it.”
This article was originally written in German.
