Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust by Edwin Black

Author:Edwin Black [Black, Edwin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780914153092
Publisher: Dialog Press
Published: 2012-11-29T23:00:00+00:00

Mengele was not alone. Hitler’s doctors operated a vast network of laboratories in Nazi concentration camps, euthanasia mills and other places in the territories it occupied. Much of that experimentation was eugenic and genetic, such as the work of Mengele. Much of it was strictly medical, such as the testing at Buchenwald designed to find cures or treatments for well-known diseases. Much of it was simply strategic, such as the cruel ice water and high altitude tests at Dachau intended to benefit Luftwaffe pilots bailing out over the North Atlantic.

But even when strictly medical or military testing was inflicted on helpless subjects, it was most often imposed along eugenic lines. More specifically, many Aryans—such as habitual criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and socialists—were imprisoned in camps under beastly conditions. Mostly, it was the worthless and expendable— Jews, Gypsies, Russians and other “subhuman” prisoners—who were victimized as medical fodder. The exceptions were those Germans considered hereditary misfits, such as homosexuals and the feebleminded. All of it was in furtherance of Hitler’s biological revolution and his quest for a master race in a Thousand-Year Reich.

Hitler’s master race would be more than just chiseled blond and blue-eyed Nordics. Special breeding facilities were established to mass-produce perfect Aryan babies. They would all be closer to super men and women: taller, stronger and in many ways disease-resistant. Therefore Verschuer was the vanguard of a corps of Nazi medical men who saw the struggle against infirmity and sickness as consonant if not intrinsic to their struggle for eugenic perfection. Nazi Germany was indeed engaged in advanced medical genetics, now amply funded by the Reich’s plunder, and militarized and regimented by the fascist state.

Therefore, even as Verschuer and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics were supervising the eugenic murders at Auschwitz, they enjoyed military contracts and German Research Society funding to attack a gamut of dreaded inherited diseases. This research could be conducted best in concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Birkenau, or in Kaiser Wilhelm’s grandiose complex of centers for higher learning.

For example, Hans Nachtsheim, who also worked under Verschuer, investigated epilepsy and other illnesses under German Research Society aegis and military contract SS 4891-5376, filed under “Research into Heredity Pathology.” One typical status memo in October of 1943 reported that, “Experiments on the significance of a lack of oxygen for the triggering of epileptic seizures in epileptic rabbits, which were carried out jointly with Dr. Ruhenstroth-Bauer from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry… have essentially been concluded. A preliminary report of the research is currently being printed in the journal Klinische Wochenschrift [Clinical Weekly]; a comprehensive report is in the process of being drawn up to be published in the journal Zeitschrift für menschliche Vererbungs- und Konstitutionslehre [Journal for Science of Human Genetics and Constitution].”

The depth of Nachtsheim’s learning was evident. “Further experiments,” he continued, “are concerned with the effect of the epilepsy gene in association with other genes [Gengesellschaft]. It has been determined that a single dosage of the epilepsy gene may

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