Were The Nazi Medical Experiments Useful? – Mythbusting Berlin

“[T]his story has to be told and retold to honor those who were victims. Their heroic deeds should not be lost in history but must be irremovably secured in it”
Edzard Ernst MD, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Exeter University

War expedites many things. First and foremost, the premature arrival of death. In many instances not only premature, but randomly assigned.

Of all the things that make the Second World War exceptional, that many of those deaths would be scripted, ordered directly from above, and directly named, stands out. The genocides carried out by the Nazi regime were bureaucratic exercises in documentation – birthing the term ‘Desktop Murderers’ (Schreibtischtäter).

To that describable mass, we must also include those individuals who were chosen and subjected to medical experimentation. Thousands of prisoners and patients, whose only destination was death, used as test subjects in what were often bizarre and highly suspect practices.

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”
Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), often called the “Father of Modern Pathology”

The German medical profession of the 1800s was a landscape populated by giants: Rudolf Virchow, the father of modern pathology; Robert Koch, who identified the agents of tuberculosis and cholera; Paul Ehrlich, the pioneer of chemotherapy. German universities were magnets for the brightest minds, their laboratories crucibles of innovation. Medicine was a source of immense national pride, a symbol of German intellect and its contribution to human progress.

For instance, more than half of all German Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine worked at Berlin’s Charite hospital.

But this noble edifice was built on foundations that proved unnervingly susceptible to corruption. The language of late 19th and early 20th-century medicine was one of public health, of hygiene, and of the collective well-being of the population.