Experiments and animal care
For a full understanding of what is happening in the medical field of Nazi Germany, it is necessary to get acquainted with some preliminary facts that characterize the medical ethics of that time. Man as an object of medical research began to enter medical practice long before the practice of Hitler's doctors. One of the followers of smallpox inoculation (rubbing smallpox pustules into the skin, an analogue of vaccination), Mary Wortley Montegrew, tried the novelty on prisoners back in 1721. They survived and received a ticket to freedom, apparently also with immunity to the then lethal smallpox. Often, people sentenced to death were used to resolve medical issues, especially when a posthumous autopsy was required. The suicide bombers had nothing to lose, and they usually agreed to infect themselves in return for good conditions and an extension of life. Often, prisoners were not even informed that they were being tested for a short time. Thus, the Dresden parasitologist Friedrich Kuchenmeister in 1855 infected several pig tapeworms sentenced to death with cercariae in the city prison. At that time, their origin was not entirely clear, and the theory that these were pork tapeworm larvae required practical verification. The story goes that one day during lunch, Küchenmeister discovered in a plate cooked pieces of pork with several tapeworms. Modern man, of course, immediately fainted from such a find, but a seasoned medical researcher of the middle of the 19th century cannot get through with such a trifle. The scientist calmly finished his lunch and rushed to the butcher's, where he bought meat, teeming with worms, for future use.
In the first experiment, it was possible to feed a suicide bomber with food with cercariae from a butcher's shop just three days before his death. But even this was enough to confirm the theory: Küchenmeister opened the executed man and found young pork tapeworms in the intestines. It would seem that the evidence is more than sufficient. But five years later, the scientist repeats his experiment on several prisoners and the period of time before the execution chooses a longer one - four months. Here, after the autopsy, the doctor found one and a half meter pork tapeworm worms. The discovery remained with Küchenmeister and was included in all textbooks on medicine and biology. Several contemporaries of the scientist expressed their dissatisfaction with the methods of work and even branded him with a rhyme in which the words “ready to collect a herbarium on my mother’s grave” were written.
This is far from the only example of the use of humans as guinea pigs. Medical ethics in Europe has always been challenging. What can we say about the 30-40s, when the Nazis came to power!..
At the same time, one of the first bills passed in Germany in 1933 was the prohibition of animal vivisection. On August 16, 1933, Hermann Goering announced on the radio (a quote from Peter Talantov's book "0, 05. Evidence-based medicine from magic to the search for immortality"):
"An absolute and permanent ban on vivisection is a law that is needed not only to protect animals, but humanity itself … Until we determine the punishment, violators will go to concentration camps."
The Germans at the time were the first in the world to legally ban live-cutting for research purposes. It is fair to say that a few weeks later, at the very beginning of September 1933, Hitler, under pressure from doctors, nevertheless allowed the medical vivisection of animals under anesthesia and for strictly defined purposes. The "humanistic" initiatives of the Third Reich also include general anesthesia of fur-bearing animals before slaughter, new ways of painless shoeing of horses, a ban on boiling live lobsters, and even Himmler's recommendation for senior SS officers (cannibals from cannibals) to be faithful to a vegetarian diet.
The Nazis' attempts to improve the genetic portrait of the nation by destroying "subhumans" and mentally handicapped citizens are well known. As part of their health care, the Germans, by the way, were the first to discover the dependence of the incidence of lung cancer on smoking. Over time, such work of German doctors began to overflow and go beyond common sense.
USA vs Karl Brandt
At the end of the last century, the Germans decided to check the origin of the preparations of the anatomical departments of their medical universities - most of them were parts of the body of the deceased mentally ill. That is, they got rid of the famous collection of Jewish skeletons of August Hirt in Strasbourg, but on the rest of the "material" they taught anatomy to medical students for another half century. All this suggests that medicine in the Third Reich received a complete ethical carte blanche - it was possible at the expense of the state to test their theoretical views and satisfy sadistic inclinations. The only attempt to somehow pay tribute to the killers in white coats was the Nuremberg trial of the main Nazi doctors, which began on December 9, 1946. All this took place in the American zone of occupation for a year and, naturally, the only accusers were judges from the United States - none of the allies was allowed to the trial. In fact, the court itself was called "USA against Karl Brandt" - this is one of twelve small (and little-known) Nuremberg trials, which the Americans led alone and tried lawyers, SS men, German industrialists and senior Wehrmacht officers.
The main defendant in the doctors' case, as the name suggests, was Karl Brandt, the first physician of the Third Reich and Hitler's personal physician. Since 1939, he led the program for the euthanasia of the mentally disabled (program T4), within the framework of which he developed a system for the most effective killing. At first, Brandt suggested lethal injections of phenol with gasoline, but that was too troublesome in the case of massacres. Therefore, it was decided to switch to Cyclone B gas and gas vans. Brandt was hanged at the end of the trial. In total, 177 doctors passed before the judges, of whom, including Brandt, seven were executed. Among them was the doctor Wolfram Sievers, the leader of the Ahnenerbe, obsessed with the idea of collecting a collection of skeletons of racially inferior people. Viktor Brak, one of Karl Brandt's associates in the T4 program, was also hanged. Among other things, he proposed a conveyor method for castrating people with powerful sources of radiation - unfortunates of both sexes were taken into a room, where they sat on benches for several minutes, under which there were radioactive materials. The problem was not to overdo it with the dose rate and not leave characteristic burns - after all, the procedure was planned hidden. Brandt's namesake Rudolph had nothing to do with medicine (he was Himmler's personal assistant), but the Americans also sent him to the scaffold for complicity in experiments on people in concentration camps.
The next defendant to be executed at the end of the trial was the surgeon Karl Gebhardt, Himmler's personal physician, who is credited with the death of Reinhard Heydrich. After not the most dangerous injury, Gebhardt was engaged in the treatment of the official, and senior comrades advised him to inject the Nazi with the newly created antimicrobial sulfa drugs. Karl refused, and the SS Obergruppenführer died of blood poisoning. Himmler invited his personal physician to answer for his words and prove that sulfonamides are ineffective. For this, women from Ravensbück were singled out, who were inflicted with wounds similar to combat ones, and then treated with a new drug. I must say that Gebhardt tried to even give his research a scientific area and formed a control group of unfortunate women who suffered similar injuries, but were not treated with sulfonamides. But what would Himmler do if his doctor proved the effectiveness of new antimicrobial drugs? In fear of retaliation, Gebhardt did everything to make the sulfonamides a dummy - the control group lived in good conditions (for Ravensbrück, of course), and the experimental group lived in complete unsanitary conditions. As a result, the new tool, as expected, turned out to be useless, and Gebhardt was able to calmly do his favorite thing - amputation of the limbs of concentration camp prisoners. His inhuman experiences left people with disabilities, and most of them were subsequently killed.
Next on the list of hanged war criminals at Landsberg Prison was Joachim Mrugovsky, head of the SS Hygiene Institute and one of the organizers of medical experiments at Sachsenhausen. Waldemar Hoven, who worked as chief physician in Buchenwald during the war, became the last on the list of those executed. Actually, already for this position, Hoven was worthy of death, but he still managed to infect people with typhus for the purposes of "science", and then tested vaccines.
In addition to those executed above, five Nazi doctors were sentenced to life imprisonment, four to various prison terms (from 10 to 20 years), and seven were acquitted. As is often the case with German war criminals, some of them went ahead of the agreed terms. This happened with Gerta Oberheuser, Gebhardt's companion in the work on sulfonamide: she was released after only five out of twenty years. Probably, they took into account her acquittal at the trial concerning lethal injections to the victims of the experiments (she allegedly did this in Ravensbrück out of mercy).
Most likely, most of the accused could not fully understand what they were being tried for at all. The speech of Gerhard Rose, an infectious disease doctor, head of the department of tropical medicine at the Robert Koch Institute, who stained himself with the forced infection of people with typhus in the framework of Luftwaffe projects, was indicative:
"The subject of personal accusations against me lies in my attitude to experiments on humans, ordered by the state and carried out by German scientists in the field of typhoid and malaria. Works of this nature had nothing to do with politics or ideology, but served for the good of mankind, and these same problems and the needs can be universally understood independently of any political ideology, where the dangers of epidemics had to be dealt with as well."
Rose escaped the death penalty, and in 1977 received a medal for scientific merit in Germany.
