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Nazi Doctors?

• Message 1. 

  Posted by colour_pink (U1808093) on Wednesday, 17th August 2005

  Did they experiment on the jews and other prisoners for their own pleasure and to make a statment? or was it for Scientific research?
  
  People say different things regaurding this terrible happening.
  
  It isnt widely talked about as it was so monsterous but anyone with any information?

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• Message 2

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  Posted by Lindau (U709807) on Wednesday, 17th August 2005

  When the Russians liberated Danzig in East Prussia, they found a research lab with around 50 decapitated bodies in. It was a laboratory which was experimenting in making soap out of skin and bones of Jews. I think you'll agree this is not a scientific purpose.

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• Message 3

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  Posted by Dirk Marinus (U1648073) on Wednesday, 17th August 2005

  
  Suggest you go to search engine Google and type in ;
  
  
  Josef Mengele and Auschwitz
  
  
  and you will be able to read a lot about German scientists and doctors involved in experiments on prisoners and not only Jews but also many other nationalities.
  
  Many experiments were carried out in different places like hospitals and institutions which included experiments on mentally retarded.

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• Message 4

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  Posted by Trident_MKII (U1823460) on Wednesday, 17th August 2005

  hi all,
  i have read about mengele in the past and this was, i believe one of the worlds most evil men
  
  he tried to make siamese twins, what the hell is that about, some of the things this man did had no scientific purpose whatsoever, although there was some amazing information gained through some of his other experimants. we had a bit of a dilema at the end of the war of whether to actually use this info or not
  
  using the information - good or bad ??
  i think good

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• Message 5

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  Posted by Jozef (U1330965) on Wednesday, 17th August 2005

  Hi Colour_Pink,
  
  An excellent topic; and it’s vast! Josef Mengele might be the best known, but there were thousands more. Too many to mention here, so I strongly advise you just Google words such as ‘Nazi Doctors’, ‘SS doctors’ or ‘the Nazi Doctors Trial’ (that’s the common name of the other less well known Nuremberg trial). Hopefully there you’ll find how many after the war got off scot-free, especially the ones who had some genuine scientific talent. Some went on to have very successful scientific careers after the war and their works are academically respected to this day.
  
  Unlike Trident-III, I wouldn’t hazard to say who was the most evil. Thousands of people, not only doctors, not only Nazi fanatics, treated other people as if they weren’t human, as if they were disposable objects that you can play with and then discard. How more evil can you get? How much colder can it get below Absolute Zero?
  
  Of course, only some of these doctors carried out 'research' (sometimes for pretty well known pharmaceutical companies), many more were involved in another criminal activity: ‘selections’. According to Nazi concentration camp philosophy, prisoners fit for work were to be exploited as slaves, and those who were in anyway unfit, were to be killed. Therefore SS-doctors played a vital role in carrying out cursory medical examinations called ‘selections’ – i.e. they selected those whom they consider to be only fit for the gas chamber. They conducted such ‘selections’ on the notorious Birkenau railway platform, in the camp hospitals and during roll calls. The shocking thing is, contrary to what many claimed after the war, they could have refused to do it and they would not have suffered serious consequences. Hans Munch was an SS doctor at Auschwitz who fell in love with a Jewess. Apparently for this reason he refused to carry out selections and was simply given other duties to do.
  
  According to most recent historical research, the story of human soap being experimentally produced in Danzig is probably a myth. It’s a complicated story and I’d have to check my facts. But it isn’t really that important because my main point is that it doesn’t take much for an ordinary, well educated person to become a war criminal.
  
  Cheers, Jozef
  

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• Message 6

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  Posted by Dirk Marinus (U1648073) on Wednesday, 17th August 2005

  <quote>Hi Colour_Pink,
  
  An excellent topic; and it’s vast! Josef Mengele might be the best known, but there were thousands more. Too many to mention here, so I strongly advise you just Google words such as ‘Nazi Doctors’, ‘SS doctors’ or ‘the Nazi Doctors Trial’ (that’s the common name of the other less well known Nuremberg trial). Hopefully there you’ll find how many after the war got off scot-free, especially the ones who had some genuine scientific talent. Some went on to have very successful scientific careers after the war and their works are academically respected to this day.
  
  Jozef ,
  
  I did delete some of your message , but of course you are spot on when you mention that;<<<<>>>>
  
  
  I was doing some reading the other dayon Unit 731 , you know the one about the Japanese tests on prisoners in their camps and also here the U.S actually allowed some of the doctors ,scientists etc to get of scotfree in exchange for their records.
  
  
  By the way when you have the time visit Google and type in :
  Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial
  
  
  This is the trial of the Japanese doctors who did tests on Russian POW's and were prosecuted.
  
  Cheers.
  

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• Message 7

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  Posted by OldKingCole72 (U1815644) on Thursday, 18th August 2005

  There was a section of the SS called "Ahnenerbe" which translates as something like "Ancestral Heritage" which was involved in a wide range of pseudo-scientific research programmes. Experiments were carried out on Jews such as freezing and oxygen deprivation (to supposedly recreate the effects of high-altitude flying). For another experiment, a Nazi anthropologist wanted to compare Jewish and Non-Jewish skulls; it was decided that only 'fresh' skulls would do and so 100 Jews were killed. Josef Mengele was especially interested in twins, and poisoned and butchered many children for his 'research'. If - and this is s big 'if' - any medical benefits came about as a result of 'experiments' or 'research' carried-out by Nazi doctors, they must be infinitely outweighed by the unbearable human cost. The primary point of the Hippocratic oath is "Do no harm".

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• Message 8

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  Posted by DL (U1683040) on Thursday, 18th August 2005

  Hi All,
  
  One of the darkest chapters in human history and no mistake! OldKingCole, you are spot on with the info on the Ahnenerbe, they actually went on expeditions before the war to research the history of the "Aryan Race". One of the weirder characters in this lot was a guy by the name of Wolfram Sievers (Spelling?), and I may be incorrect in this but I think he was executed after the war- he was responsible for the skull studies mentioned, and actually sent physical descriptions of the type of skull he wanted. The unfortunate who matched this profile was then killed by injection, their head removed and sent to Sievers (in a nice specially designed tin would you believe). I think he was executed in Poland but may be wrong.
  
  The other instance mentioned, regarding research into high altitude flying for the Luftwaffe involved placing people into decompression chambers, then sucking the air out, to see what happened to the poor subject, and freezing them by putting them in iced water until hypothermia set in, then attempting to re-warm them (they used all sorts of methods, including placing the frozen man between naked women).
  
  The US was pretty disgraceful after the war in its handling of some of the doctors responsible, since the one of them (sorry I can't remember his name) was taken, complete with his research, to the US (google Operation Paper Clip), and is now credited as the founder of Space Medicine. No charges were made, and the man worked for the US Space Programme (again, apologies I can't remember details at the minute!). You could also question Wernher von Braun and his design of the V2 as well. Not only did he design an indiscriminate weapon for targetting civilians, the weapon was built by slave labour in horrific conditions in underground factories. Yet all this is conveniently forgotten as he was a major asset to the US space program, the Saturn 5 rocket being his most famous product (after the V2 of course).
  
  There are lots of double standards, the Nazi doctors were totally evil, unethical and they betrayed everything a doctor should believe in, yet the allies were more than willing to use the results of these barbaric experiments in later years, which IMO was the wrong thing to do, the doctors responsible should have been locked up, or worse, yet some of them not only got away with their actions, they got to make use of the information their crimes obtained, I suppose in a way they were allowed to carry on with their research, just without the victims to work on.
  
  Cheery stuff
  DL

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• Message 9

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  Posted by Gilgamesh of Uruk (U211168) on Thursday, 18th August 2005

  There's a story that von Braun's slogan "We aim at the stars" was capped ".. but sometimes we hit London". Anyone know who first added that cynical (but accurate) rider? I can't trace the author's name.
  Another puzzle - more on topic this 0ne - who was the Polish Doctor whose libel action acted as the catalyst for Uris' book QB VII. Was his name Dehring?

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• Message 10

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  Posted by Dirk Marinus (U1648073) on Thursday, 18th August 2005

  There's a story that von Braun's slogan "We aim at the stars" was capped ".. but sometimes we hit London". Anyone know who first added that cynical (but accurate) rider? I can't trace the author's name.
  Another puzzle - more on topic this 0ne - who was the Polish Doctor whose libel action acted as the catalyst for Uris' book QB VII. Was his name Dehring? 
  
  Augray the Sorn,
  
  Are you perhaps thinking about Dr Wladislav Dehring?
  
  Well like so many of the war Criminals this is what happened to him.
  
  "After the war, Dehring went back to Poland, soon fled to England out of fear of Polish legal proceedings, and was held for nineteen months in a British prison until it was finally decided not to extradite or deport him. He worked in Africa for ten years as a physician with the British Colonial Medical Service and then returned to London where he practiced under the National Health Service."
  
  
  Actually if you type in his name on search engine Google you will find more information.
  

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• Message 11

  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by Jozef (U1330965) on Friday, 19th August 2005

  Hi everyone, When the Russians liberated Danzig in East Prussia, they found a research lab with around 50 decapitated bodies in. It was a laboratory which was experimenting in making soap out of skin and bones of Jews. I think you'll agree this is not a scientific purpose.  I’d be the first person to encourage people to take a closer look at WWII atrocities, not out of any morbid fascination or hatred, but because unappealing as the truth is, it’s beneficial to all of us. And for this reason I’d like to caution you about a certain myths regarding gruesome subject that persist to this day, not doubt to a general lack of interest.
  
  The first is the manufacture of human soap in Danzig story. Yes, many of its elements are totally true, but I’m 99% sure that in this case it wasn’t a war crime. True, there were decapitated bodies ordered by a Nazi called Dr Spanner. Indeed, he had these corpses boiled in large tubs and in all probability soap was produced as a by-product. That much is certainly true and the macabre process is brilliantly described in a book by Zofia Nalkowska (a Polish writer and poetess who was also a member of a special commission examining Nazi crimes against the Polish nation) entitled ‘Medaliony’. I think it’s still a set book in Polish secondary schools to this day.
  
  So what isn’t true? Firstly the corpses weren’t those of Jews. They were usually the bodies of Poles, sometimes Russians and occasionally even Germans, all convicts executed with a guillotine in Danzig Prison. By 1945 there would have hardly been a single Jew in Danzig – most had in fact emigrated long before the war. (The Nazi Albert Forster won the local elections in the Free City of Danzig the same time as Hitler became Chancellor and the local Jews were quick to read the writing on the wall.) So why did the Nazi Dr Spanner boil the bodies of these sentenced convicts? To separate the flesh from the bones, because he wanted just their skeletons, which were necessary for anatomical classes. Gruesome as that might seem, it was standard practice everywhere. If soap was produced from the scum that floated up onto the surface, it was probably only used to clean the lab after the messy process was other – well there were shortages and soap was probably also hard to come by. Unpleasant as it is, it can’t really be interpreted as war crime.
  
  The case of the Polish prisoner of Auschwitz Dr Wladyslaw Dering is less certain. Let’s put it this way: if you’re selected to become an assistant of one of the worst Nazi war criminals, Dr Clauberg (who castrated Jewish and Gypsy men and sterilized women in the cruellest of ways most usually resulting in there deaths), and then are released from the camp in order to help Dr Clauberg continue his ‘scientific research’ in a clinic outside KL Auschwitz, you’ve no chance of proving your innocence beyond all reasonable doubt. This is not to say that all assistants of criminal Nazi doctors were themselves criminals. I don’t think any such claims have been made against the Romanian/Hungarian Jew Miklos Nyisli, who was Dr Mengele’s assistant. Like Nyisli, Dering would have been selected purely on account of his specialist skills (he was a gynaecologist). However, in Dering’s case there has been plenty of seemingly damning evidence against him, originating largely from the Soviet Union. The controversy lies in the fact that there also seems to be plenty of positive evidence in his favour. He was in fact a member of the Polish underground resistance within the camp. Many former prisoners claim that they owe their lives to Dering. So who are we to believe?
  
  The Soviets were notorious for their mendacity, especially with regard to historical matters. And if Dering was a member of the independent Polish resistance, that was all the more reason to blacken his name. Then again some of the accusations came from witnesses living outside the Soviet bloc. My mind is still open, and I’ve probably studied this matter more closely than most other members of this message board. I’ll just say one thing: Dering’s case was much publicised in the 1960s. They even made a movie out of ‘QB VII’ staring Anthony Hopkins as Dr Dering. That Polish prisoner became far more well known as an Auschwitz doctor than Clauberg – perhaps only Mengele had comparable notoriety. Yet at the same time Nazi doctors whose guilt was far more obvious and easier to prove were still enjoying wonderfully successful medical careers. Only now, when almost all of them are dead, is something like the truth seeping out.
  
  Cheers, Jozef
  

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• Message 12

  , in reply to message 7.

  Posted by Giselle-Leah (U1725276) on Sunday, 28th August 2005

  "The primary point of the Hippocratic oath is "Do no harm".
  
  Please correct me if I am wrong, but somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory I recollect that during the 12-year Nazi period, doctors did not swear the Hippocratic oath, ie., allegiance to the patient above all, but their oath was changed to swear allegiance to the Nazi party, thereby making it much easier for them to carry out their mind-numbing atrocities.
  
  DaughterLeah

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• Message 13

  , in reply to message 11.

  Posted by Giselle-Leah (U1725276) on Sunday, 28th August 2005

  Jozef - "The first is the manufacture of human soap in Danzig story. Yes, many of its elements are totally true, but I’m 99% sure that in this case it wasn’t a war crime."
  
  Are you of the opinion :
  
  1) that no human soap was made anywhere else?
  2) why do you say that 'it wasn't a war crime' (implying that it MIGHT be true')
  
  If I have misunderstood you, please clarify. If I have not misunderstood you, please clarify.
  
  DaughterLeah

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• Message 14

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  Posted by Jozef (U1330965) on Sunday, 28th August 2005

  Jozef - "The first is the manufacture of human soap in Danzig story. Yes, many of its elements are totally true, but I’m 99% sure that in this case it wasn’t a war crime."
  
  Are you of the opinion :
  
  1) that no human soap was made anywhere else?
  2) why do you say that 'it wasn't a war crime' (implying that it MIGHT be true')
  
  If I have misunderstood you, please clarify. If I have not misunderstood you, please clarify.
  
  ¶Ù²¹³Ü²µ³ó³Ù±ð°ù³¢±ð²¹³óÌý DaughterLeah,
  
  Regarding question 1. No, I cannot say whether or not the Nazis deliberately produced human soap. I know they were capable of the very worst acts of bestaility. For instance, the fact that at KL Buchenwald the commandant's wife designed human skin lampshades is undeniably true. All I'm saying is that Dr Spanner most probably did not boil human bodies primarily to produce soap.
  
  Re: question two. For me the whole Nazi philosophy was criminal. The point is that real human skeletons are used in anatomy classes to this day and boiling bodies to produce such skeletons is no more a barbaric method than any other. I doubt using the bodies of condemned criminals is acceptable nowadays but in wartime it does not constitute a major crime, at least compared to all the other things Nazi doctors and professors were up to. For instance specially ordering specimens from concentration camp victims' bodies, which many academics did, is IMHO a far more serious crime.
  
  Cheers, Jozef

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• Message 15

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Sunday, 28th August 2005

  Jo, odd that, given that medical researh and warfare have always gone hand in hand. I suppose it is little different to Aristotle requesting Alexander send him specimins from the battlefields of Asia. There again that was from Hippocrates so I'm not sure whether the change in emphasis on the oath under Nazi Germany was that important. Not sure the people of Tyre would have been too happy about this.
  
  I was under the impression this was more an urban myth the Germans used during the war as supplies grew increasingly hard to come by and the quality of soap deteriorated. Mind you the British had their own fat shortages although the Ground nut fiasco is a little less harrowing. Other than suggesting a general acknowledgement of the actions in the concentration camps I'm not sure they went so far as to produce soap for general consumption.

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