(Vienna) The medical profession played a “central role” in the crimes of the Nazis, according to a report presented Thursday which calls on today’s doctors to learn from this past and oppose directives if necessary.
“The crimes were not committed only by extremist doctors” or “under duress”, according to the results of this study published in the British scientific journal The Lancet, which sweeps away “misconceptions that have been circulating for a long time” to minimize the responsibility of the profession.
In 1945, 50 to 65% of non-Jewish German doctors had joined the Nazi party. A proportion “much higher than in any other academic profession”, according to this document of some 80 pages based on university sources, described as “the most comprehensive” produced to date “on the atrocities committed”.
In total, eugenics and euthanasia programs and “brutal human experiments” carried out in a medical context caused “at least 230,000 deaths”, among the disabled, Jewish patients and deportees, including 7,000 to 10,000 children. Around 300,000 forced sterilizations were carried out.
“Contrary to popular belief,” “medicine in Nazi Germany was not a pseudo-science” and “Nazi research” sometimes “became an integral part of the canon of medical knowledge,” the report notes.
For example, “current understanding of the effects of tobacco and alcohol on the body was fueled by research conducted during the Nazi era.”
Some criminals achieved lasting fame after the war without ever revealing the context of their research, such as the rector of the University of Vienna Eduard Pernkopf.
Its reference anatomical atlas, published in many countries and used without controversy until the 1990s, was produced from the corpses of murdered people.
A founder of child psychiatry, Elisabeth Hecker, was also celebrated for decades, with Germany awarding her the Order of Merit in 1979, when she sent numerous minors, placed under her authority, to their deaths.
Furthermore, “the methods developed” between 1939 and 1941 to kill patients with gas were then reused on a very large scale “in the extermination camps in Poland”, recalls the study.
The authors recommend that these historical facts be integrated into training curricula for health professionals, because it is “often surprising to see how limited their knowledge” is today, apart from perhaps a vague notion of Josef’s experiences Mengele at Auschwitz.
But they also go further, affirming that this duty of memory must allow doctors to learn to oppose directives posing ethical dilemmas.
The report cites caregivers supervising the interrogations of terrorists, those practicing triage in hospitals during massive influxes of patients or supervising the end of life.
This research was carried out as part of a Lancet commission which brought together for the first time around twenty international experts to address the history of medicine.