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The Nazis main goal, after they took power in 1933, was the creation of an “utopian

world” composed only of “healthy organisms of vibrant Aryans” (Michalczyk, 1997).

Therefore, the totalitarian dictatorship wanted the elimination of those members of

society considered genetically inferior in order to create a “stronger society.” Nazi

Germans viewed people with handicaps, homosexuals, Jews, and gypsies as

“undesirable” members of their nation that were contaminating the “Aryan” race, and for

that reason, they had to be eliminated from the German society (Michalczyk, 1997). The

Nazis regarded doctors as essential tools to purify the gene pool of the Germans. The

Nazi ideology needed the support of thousands of physicians, psychologists, biologists,

and “racial hygienists” to carry out their master plan of purifying Germany from its

impure ethnic and unfit members of society (Weiss, 1997). According to historian John

Weiss, when the Nazis got to power they immediately appointed prominent eugenicists,

such as Eugene Fischer, acknowledged “expert on the Jews,” to key positions in

universities to train “SS medical personnel and thousands of physicians and “racial

experts” as SS consultants (1997). Weiss concludes, “physicians played an active role

both in theory and practice of each phase of the Nazi program of racial hygiene and racial

destruction” (Weiss, 1997). However, it is important to highlight that the Nazi racial

theories of purifying race did not originate from German physicians, but by scientists in

the United States and other parts of Western Europe.

Many Nazi doctors were not out step with the 1930s doctrines about racial hygiene of

other Western societies. Many scientists in Europe and the United States during the late

nineteenth century and early twentieth century used theories such as social Darwinism

that asserted that the weak would perish and stronger would survive (Lagnado & Dekel,

1991). These theories endorsed the concept that White-Anglo-Saxons were innately

superior over non-white groups. In the United States, social Darwinism justified racist

social policies towards the Natives Americans and the segregation of blacks. Also, the

belief that whites were a superior race allowed the Europeans and Americans to adopt

devastating socioeconomic and political policies such as imperialism and colonialism in

Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the last two centuries. In the US domestic arena

the belief that one race was superior to others created a new science of eugenics, the goal

of which was to “improve the human race by controlling hereditary factors” (Michalczyk,

1997). Eugenicists “believed that violence, crime, feeble mindedness, and mental

illness, could be removed from society by cleansing the population of inferior racial traits

by artificial selection especially through sterilization” (Michalczyk, 1997). In 1912,

London hosted the “First International Congress for Eugenics” (All Things Considered

NPR, 1994).

Charles Darwin's son presided. Winston Churchill led the British

delegation. Among the Americans present were the presidents of Harvard

and Stanford universities and the inventor Alexander Graham Bell. The

Germans present included advocates of racial hygiene, later to be adopted

as national policy by the Nazis. It was the pseudo-scientific rationale for

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what eventually became the mass extermination of the infirm, the Jews,

gays, and the Romani gypsies (All Things Considered NPR, 1994).

Thus, before the German plans for euthanasia and sterilization were carried out in

Germany, American eugenicists such as Charles Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin,

superintendent of the Eugenics Records Office, were well respected by German

authorities such as Fritz Lenz, professor of racial hygiene at the University of Munich

(Allen, 1998). Harry Laughlin “was one of the most important eugenicists in the United

States” and was “involved in supporting the Nazi race policy” (All Things Considered

NPR, 1994). He effectively proposed sterilization policies to the US Congress. “Around

half of all states in the United States had a sterilization law” in order to purify the race

(All Things Considered NPR, 1994).

Indeed, in 1928 Lenz requested permission from Laughlin to reprint his

article "Eugenical Sterilization" in the Archiv fur Rassen und

Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archive for Race and Social Biology). Laughlin

responded enthusiastically: "I should feel highly honored to have this

paper appear in the Archiv. Your many American friends trust that some

time in the near future you will be able to visit the centers of eugenical

interest in this country (Allen, 1998).

Many other racist scientists in Western societies were looking to the Nazi experiment

with the hope to apply similar “racial hygiene” policies to their own societies (Michalcyk,

1997).

In 1933, Hitler seized power and German doctors seized upon eugenics, which

included the use of procedures such as sterilization and euthanasia, as the way to create a

master race. In the same year, the Nazis gave legal status to such unethical medical

procedures by passing “The Law on Preventing Hereditary Diseased Progeny” that

“called for the involuntary sterilization of all those identified as bearers of hereditary

disease” (Allen, 1996). These hereditary diseases included Huntington disease, hereditary

blindness, deafness, epilepsy, but also social and behavioral traits were included such as

“feeblemindedness,” “pauperism,” and alcoholism (Allen, 1996). According to Weiss,

German physicians sterilized 375,000 Germans in 1933, which was a prelude step to

euthanasia, “mercy killings” (1997). The attack in Poland in 1939, which sparked World

War II, also gave way for a new order by Hitler to kill members of society that were

“racially undesirable” (Weiss, 1997). The main objective of euthanasia was to “purify the

race of undesirable “blood” regardless of the disease of will of the victims” (Weiss,

1997). According to Weiss,

To facilitate matters, in October 1939 physicians filled out forms

describing the mental and physical disabilities of each of their patients

residing in long-term care facilities. Most significant the form asked the

patient’s race as well. The way was open for killing Jews regardless of

their mental and physical health. By the summer of 1940 Jewish

psychiatric patients were being gassed; in early 1941 the ministry of the

Interior ordered all hospitalized Jews to be killed,” not because they met

the criteria for euthanasia but because they were Jews” (1997).

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Nazi physicians also ordered mentally retarded infants to be killed. However, many of

those killed were not disabled or retarded but the children of Jewish couples (Weiss,

1997). Approximately five thousand children by 1939 were selected by doctors and

midwives to be killed (Weiss, 1997). In 1939, the Nazis established six euthanasia-

killing centers and doctors and nurses killed from 70,000 to 80,000 “undesirable”

Germans by using starvation, lethal injections, gassing, and carbon monoxide

(Michalczyk, 1997). This killing operation was called T-4, but when members of the

German Catholic and Lutheran churches became aware of the murders Hitler decided to

halt the euthanasia program on August 24, 1941 (Weber, 2000). In 1942 at the Wannsee

conference, Nazis decided to carry out the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” by

planning the genocide of all Jews from Europe by creating extermination camps that

would use a technological industrial killing machine that could effectively kill thousand

of Jews daily (Weiss, 1997). Many of the Nazi doctors and nurses that participated in

Operation T-4 played key roles in the “Final Solution” (Weber, 2000). The information

gathered by these physicians in the euthanasia programs was of great help for carrying

out the extermination of millions of Jews in the death camps.

In the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Bikernau doctors also engaged in unethical

medical experimentations on human beings to find “scientific” answers to such questions

as the limits of the human body in high altitude and the resistance of a human in frozen

waters (Michalczyk, 1997). These experiments performed by Nazi doctors on

concentration camp prisoners provided research data for military purposes. In

Auschwitz-Bikernau, from thousands of Jews that arrived, candidates were selected to

serve as guinea pigs for perverted Nazis like Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as the

“Angel of Death” or (Arad, 1990). Among the candidates the Nazis selected for

experimentation were “children, twins, hunchbacks” who suffered indescribable

degradation as human guinea pigs (Arad, 1990). According to Louis Weber, in these

experiments doctors violated their ethics and moral principles by conducting inhumane

and repugnant experiments on their victims.

German physicians mutilated and murdered more than 7,000 men, women,

and children. Nazi scientists were curious about the limits of human

endurance as well as bodily reaction to a whole catalogue of remorseless

physical insult. At Auschwitz, Dr. Horst Schumann removed the testicles

of young men after subjecting the organs to burning X-rays. At the same

camp, Dr. Edward Wirths studied women’s wombs following injections of

toxic chemicals…Dr. Karl Gebhart inflicted leg fractures on healthy,

young Polish women, and freely transplanted amputated limps from

prisoner victims to patients at the SS hospital… Dr. Arnold Dohmen

infected Sachsenhausen parishioners with hepatitis; deadly gangrene

bacilli came courtesy of Dr. Ernst Grawitz, head of SS health services. At

Buchenwald, Dr. Karl Genzken infected patients with typhus. Other

physicians throughout the camp system induced yellow fever, smallpox,

cholera, diphtheria, influenza, and tuberculosis.

In addition, Nazi doctors dissected the brain from their victims and sent them to “research

institutes, where scientists tried to determine the physical causes of mental illness”

(Newman, 2001). One of the worst violators of human rights and a war criminal was Dr.

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Josef Megele who subjected 3,000 twins to despicable inhumane experiments. Mengele, a

fervent believer of social Darwinism and eugenics, was obsessed by the notion of

creating a master race. According to Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel, in

their book Children of the Flames: Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of

Auschwitz, Mengele asked the SS guard to look for twins for experimentations (1991).

The main goal of Mengele’s experimentation of twins was

to test various genetic theories in support of Hitler’s racial dogmas.

Mengele hoped to prove that most human characteristics from the shape of

the nose to the color of the eye to obesity to left-handedness were

inherited. In addition, it is believed Mengele was searching for ways to

induce multiple births, so as to repopulate the depleted German Army.

The ultimate goal was to produce an ideal race of Aryan men and women

endowed with the only the finest genetic traits, who would rapidly

multiply and rule the world (Lagnado & Dekel, 1991).

Sympathizers with Nazism considered the experiments performed by Mengele as valid

medical experiments performed in the name of “scientific truth” and that followed

scientific principles (Lagnado & Dekel, 1991). However, historical research and a few

twin survivors’ testimonies deny that scientific principles were applied to the

experiments. Children “endured unspeakable pain and humiliation” such as being put in

rooms naked for six to eight hours and having every single part of their bodies measured

and photographed (Michalczyk, 1997). One of the worst examples of unethical behavior

by Nazi doctors were the “eye studies,” which tried to change the coloration of the eyes

of twins from brown to blue or green (Lagnado & Dekel, 1991). “Mengele’s assistants

used eye-drops to insert chemicals into the children’s eyes; other times they used

needles” (Lagnado & Dekel, 1991). In addition, Mengele “injected the children with

lethal germs, including typhus and tuberculosis, to see how quickly they succumbed to

the diseases…and also attempted to change the sex of some twins. Female twins were

sterilized; males were castrated…what was the point of these experiments? No one,

neither the child-victims nor their adult witnesses, ever really knew” (Lagnado & Dekel,

1991).

In sum, Nazi doctors were an essential part of the Nazi regime to carry out their

utopian plans of racial purification and the “Final Solution” for millions of Jews, gypsies,

homosexuals, and unfits in their temporary empire in Europe. The irony is that after

WWII ended, few of the thousands of doctors that carried out such crimes against

humanity were prosecuted for their role in the Holocaust. On December 9, 1946 at the

second trial at Nuremberg the military tribunal judged forty-three scientists (Michalczyk,

1997). Of the forty-three doctors only sixteenth were found guilty (Michalczyk, 1997).

“The majority of physicians, health care workers, and scientists in racial purification

programs were never tried” (Weiss, 1997). Many German courts declared that German

physicians acted under the German law regardless of their killings and dehumanizing

experimentations. Thus, justice never was given to those members of the intelligentsia

that committed such acts of barbarity. Instead, many of them “remained in their posts

and some still taught until the 1970s…many went to on to important positions in

genetics” or became prominent professors in German universities (Weiss, 1997).

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