The Nazi Human Experiments and Post-War Legacies
Paul Weindling, Oxford Brookes University (27 October 2015)
At the close of the 1980s controversy arose concerning the continued use for research of slides, brains and other body parts from the Nazi era. A professor of anatomy commented that it was a new insight that to him that a specimen could be considered also to have been a person.
Indeed, there was never a full evidence-based identification of the victims of coerced research under Nazism in terms of the numbers and identities of experimental victims and other types of forced research. Such a reconstruction should cover not only concentration camp experiments, but also the full range of research locations: ghettoes, prisoner of war and forced labour camps, clinics and prisons. By linking the vast array of records, it is possible to reconstruct victim biographies and to provide a structural analysis of the experiments and other types of coerced research.
Paul Weingling provides an overview of the overall numbers and identities of victims, and show the intensification of coerced research during the war. Some of the coerced research is well documented, but other research involves reconstructing the research subjects person by person on the basis of fragmented records and survivor testimony. This evidence-based approach provides new light on Auschwitz X-ray sterilisation and on Mengele’s twin research, as well as on the experiments and coerced research as a whole.
The devastation wreaked by the Nazi experiments makes them a reference point in modern bioethics as a worst-case scenario of medical scientists exploiting for research vulnerable patients and populations, often to the point of death. Any understanding has to be grounded in the abundant but until now neglected sources. Finally, there is the question of post-war medical support for the victims and compensation? Paul reviews how effectively the survivors of the experiments were never adequately compensated, and how victims whose body parts remained in collections after the war have rarely been adequately commemorated.
Established in 1998, the principal aim of the Science and Society initiative at EMBL is to promote a better and broader understanding of the growing social and cultural relevance of the life sciences. We invite speakers – experts within various disciplines of science and the humanities – on a regular basis to the EMBL to give public lectures on topics of interest.
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