Forced medical research and human experiments are among the darkest chapters of the Nazi era. Pathogens, toxins and drugs were tested primarily on Jews, prisoners of war, Sinti and Roma, disabled people and other persecuted groups. Their organs were removed, they were left to freeze to death in controlled conditions, they were forcibly sterilized, and they were killed.

Nazi human experiments still influence medicine today
Alexander Freund

A new database tells the stories of victims of forced medical research during the Nazi era. What role do the specimens and findings from that time play in modern medicine and research?

The extent of the atrocities is almost unimaginable, with tens of thousands of victims. Now, detailed profiles of 16,000 of these people are 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 conclusively researched.

The database was published by the Leopoldina Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Society. Scientists at its predecessor, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, conducted research on human specimens during the Nazi era that undoubtedly originated from mass killings.

Over 200 institutions in Germany and Europe were linked to medical crimes during the Nazi era. The full extent of the atrocities was revealed in a report published in 2023 by the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism and the Holocaust.

The detailed report proved that medical professionals in various roles justified their actions by referring to "racial" affiliation and carried out forced sterilizations, euthanasia programs and selections on a large scale. Only a few of the perpetrators were held accountable for their actions after World War II.

Some scientists and institutions even continued their work relatively unchallenged after the war. Prominent representatives of Nazi medicine, for example at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, were able to continue working in Germany after 1945.

According to medical historian Dr. Herwig Czech from the Medical University of Vienna, who was instrumental in initiating the Lancet commission, the expertise of individuals who gained their knowledge from concentration camp experiments was used in aviation and the development of NASA's space medicine program.

In the postwar period, some of the data collected under the Nazi regime was adopted without reflection, partly because the circumstances of the experiments were rarely discussed or the origin of the data was concealed. Data on cold tolerance, sulfonamide antibiotic treatments, or the effects of phosgene gas, for example, which came from human experiments, were even published in medical journals and cited repeatedly.

Phosgene is a respiratory poison that was used as a chemical weapon in World War I. The results of Nazi research into chemical weapons were revisited in the US in the 1980s, as 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 basis for new animal experiments in connection with regulations on phosgene exposure — a plan that was only abandoned after protests from a group of their colleagues within the agency," said Sabine Hildebrandt, a lecturer on social medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Parts of human genetics, psychiatry and medical anthropology also methodically resorted to practices that were developed and applied under the Nazis.

"There was a relatively high degree of continuity in the fields of anatomy and neuropathology because large neuropathological collections were created during the Nazi era, which researchers continued to refer to long after the war," said Czech from the Medical University of Vienna.

The "scientific value" of these inhumane studies is limited and, given the progress that has been made since then, is now virtually irrelevant, he added.

Nevertheless, specimens from the Nazi era, such as tissue samples, organ preparations and brain sections from victims continued to be used in German-speaking research institutes and for teaching purposes for decades after 1945.

In many cases, systematic revision and burial did not take place until the 1980s and '90s following political and social pressure. A well-known example is the reappraisal of the collections at various locations of the Max Planck Society, which did not begin until 1997.

According to Hildebrandt, most of the techniques and data from the Nazi era are no longer relevant and therefore not actively used.

"However, this does not mean that findings from this research have not been incorporated into general medical knowledge with continued impact, for example in textbooks about individual medical disciplines," she told DW.

Even though critical reflection and ethical debate about how to deal with these findings in medicine and research are standard practice today, Hildebrandt said there still needs to be more awareness of the context in which the data and findings in individual scientific publications originated.

"Labeling and contextualization alone are not enough; they must be supplemented by naming the victims, their biographies, and their suffering," she added.

Forced medical research and human experimentation were not invented under the Nazi regime. Such practices also took place around the world before and after that period, particularly in colonial contexts. However, in many cases there has been little or no critical examination of these practices.

"That is one of the reasons why the Lancet commission was established: medicine under National Socialism represents the best-researched and, to date, most extreme example of medical transgressions under unjust regimes," said Hildebrandt.

Individual countries, especially those with a colonial history, are facing up to this responsibility. Other countries, such as Japan, which also committed medical atrocities and human experiments on prisoners of war and the civilian population in China, Korea and other occupied territories, have not yet done so.

"Other countries and times have different histories, which often still need to be thoroughly researched to clarify their influence on the present," said Hildebrandt. "Here in the US, there is finally more research being done on the history of medicine and slavery, though our current government is now trying to reverse that."

This article was originally written in German.

https://www.dw.com/en/nazi-human-experiments-still-influence-medicine-today/a-73742634

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