By Richard Evans
We all have an image in our minds of the role of scientists in Nazi Germany: sinister, lab-coated figures who spent half their time conducting gruesome – and largely pointless – experiments on concentration‑camp inmates to gratify their own cruel impulses, and the other half devising futuristic weapons of mass destruction for Hitler to hurl at the advancing Allies in a last attempt to stave off defeat.
Yet once you dig a little deeper, what is so disturbing is how prosaic the reality was, how similar in form, if not content, their work was to the research of today. As I discovered when researching a history of the Nazis at war, much of what scientists did under the Third Reich was regarded as "normal science", subject to standard protocols of peer review in conferences and journals. The infamous Dr Josef Mengele regarded himself as a normal scientist, held seminars to discuss his experiments, got research funds from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and reported regularly to his teacher, the eminent scientist Otmar von Verschuer, on his progress.
Mengele's research at Auschwitz, in particular, shows how the system worked. His experiments there were intended to be a contribution to his second doctorate, the Habilitation, which all German academics needed to qualify for a university professorship. Under Verschuer's guidance, he selected twins from the trainloads of Jews who arrived and injected them with chemicals to see if they reacted differently from one another. He collected prisoners with physical abnormalities, such as heterochromia – having a different colour in each eye – to investigate if their condition was hereditary. He treated gipsy and other children for starvation-related diseases, using vitamins and sulphonamides, to see if there were hereditary differences in their response to the therapy.
Mengele's work was pure research, without any obvious practical application. He gained his notoriety from his willingness to kill his subjects under certain circumstances – such as settling an argument about a diagnosis by executing patients and performing an autopsy. However, most survivors remembered him not for his experiments but for his ruthless and brutal behaviour on the selection ramp, or in the camp hospital, where he frequently consigned sick inmates to the gas chamber on the slightest of whims.
But Mengele was only one of a number of scientists in Nazi Germany who carried out research on involuntary human subjects. Karl Gebhardt and Fritz Fischer had women prisoners in the Ravensbrück concentration camp injected with harmful microbes. They then tested new drugs on the prisoners, presenting the results to a scientific conference.
Many such projects were directly conceived as practical contributions to the German war effort. In a variety of camps, SS doctors used inmates to test treatments for injuries sustained in battle, cutting open their calves and sewing bits of glass or wood or gauze impregnated with bacteria into the wounds, sometimes even smashing the prisoners' bones with hammers to create a more realistic effect; again, the results were presented to scientific conferences without anyone offering any criticism of the methods employed.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic user of human guinea pigs was the ambitious young SS doctor Sigmund Rascher, who employed camp inmates at Dachau to test the human body's reactions to rapid decompression and lack of oxygen, in an attempt to help pilots forced to parachute out of their planes at high altitudes. He called some of his research sessions "terminal experiments". He measured the time it took his subjects to die as their air supply was gradually thinned out. He showed his work, which led to the deaths of between 70 and 80 prisoners, to a conference of Luftwaffe medical experts in September 1942.
The following month, Rascher presented the results of another experiment to a conference of 95 medical scientists in Nuremberg. This time, he showed how long inmates dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms and life jackets could survive in cold water, simulating conditions in the North Sea. The average time that elapsed before death, he reported, was 70 minutes. None of those listening to him raised any ethical objections.
How can we explain such obvious violations of basic medical ethics? How, indeed, did the doctors justify such work? The answer springs from the fact that medicine was both dominant in the world of science under the Third Reich, and closely allied to the Nazi project. By 1939, almost half of all students at German universities were studying medicine; the others were spread across the whole range of other subjects. The Nazis poured resources into medicine, increasing doctors' pay, setting up new health care facilities for "Aryan" citizens, creating large numbers of new jobs in the rapidly expanding armed forces and opening new institutes for "racial hygiene" at many universities. By 1939, around two thirds of all German doctors had some connection or other with the Nazi Party.
From 1933 to 1939, German doctors implemented the forcible sterilisation of some 360,000 Germans suffering from a variety of ailments thought to be inherited, including alcoholism and "feeble-mindedness". Similar operations were carried out in other countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland, but this was by far the largest.
And no other country took the next crucial step, which German medical scientists began as soon as the war broke out, of killing these unfortunates. Some 70,000 people were put to death in specially constructed gas chambers in German mental hospitals, with at least as many more being killed by starvation or lethal injection.
What underpinned this behaviour was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy – or their race. For German doctors, a camp inmate was either a racially inferior subhuman, a vicious criminal, a traitor to the German cause, or more than one of the above. Such beings had no right to life or wellbeing – indeed, it was logical that they should be sacrificed in the interests of the survival and triumph of the German race, just as that race had to be strengthened by the elimination of the inferior, degenerate elements within it. After all, German medical science had uncovered the causes of several major diseases and contributed massively to improving the health of the population over the previous decades. Surely, therefore, it was justified in eliminating negative influences as well?
The doctors were strong German nationalists, dismayed by the international humiliation suffered by the Weimar Republic after 1918, and cheered by the Third Reich's restoration of Germany's status in the world. In medicine, and other areas of science, too, Jews, liberals, democrats and socialists had been booted out in 1933. Also, as in other countries, it seemed to be science's duty to help the war effort.
German physicists and engineers built solid- and liquid-fuel rockets, worked on developing an atomic bomb, invented nerve gases such as sarin, produced a cruise missile (the V-1), and much more besides. Claims made by some of them after the war that they deliberately delayed or sabotaged such research are not very convincing. They pushed ahead as far and as fast as they could, like scientists in other belligerent countries.
There were, however, too many such projects for Germany's resources to sustain, and the regime was not capable of deciding which one to prioritise. Key raw materials, from uranium and plutonium to petroleum and steel, were never available in sufficient quantities, and factories and laboratories were increasingly made unviable by Allied air attacks. These scientists were not necessarily Nazis, but enthusiasm for, or at least loyalty to, the national cause of Germany sustained many of them in their research and development work. But fortunately for us, all their efforts came to nothing.
Richard J Evans is Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. His new book, 'The Third Reich at War' (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press), is available from Telegraph Books for £26 + £1.25 p&p. To order, call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
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