Setting the stage for mass murder and human experimentation

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-138
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Zeidman
Keyword(s):  
Mass Murder ◽  
Human Experimentation ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Racial Hygiene

With Hitler’s 1933 power seizure, the fate of roughly 9000 political and racial “enemy” neuroscientists was sealed. In the “Gleichschaltung,” or coordination of German neuroscience, step-wise legal and professional sanctions occurred against “non-Aryan” neuroscientists at every university neurology department in Germany. These were either dismissed within the first months of the Nazi takeover or by the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Sometimes the dismissed neuroscientists were forcibly removed by colleagues and sometimes they were arrested and imprisoned for trumped-up charges. Even private neurologists were forbidden from seeing insurance panel patients. Half of all German doctors joined the Nazi party, eager to take the positions vacated by their Jewish and communist comrades. The German neurology and psychiatry societies were merged to facilitate Gleichschaltung and Nazi influence on the specialties. And flourishing research and clinical programs were halted and then replaced by the racial hygiene agenda of the Nazi state.

scholarly journals Neuroscience in Nazi Europe Part I: Eugenics, Human Experimentation, and Mass Murder

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 696-703 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Zeidman
Keyword(s):  
Gene Pool ◽  
Dark Period ◽  
Psychiatric Patients ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Human Experimentation ◽  
Neurologic Disease ◽  
Racial Hygiene ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Mental Defectives ◽  
Patients With Epilepsy

ABSTRACT:The Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to 1945 waged a veritable war throughout Europe to eliminate neurologic disease from the gene pool. Fueled by eugenic policies on racial hygiene, the Nazis first undertook a sterilization campaign against “mental defectives,” which included neurologic patients with epilepsy and other disorders, as well as psychiatric patients. From 1939-41 the Nazis instead resorted to ”euthanasia” of many of the same patients. Some neuroscientists were collaborators in this program, using patients for research, or using extracted brains following their murder. Other reviews have focused on Hallervorden, Spatz, Schaltenbrand, Scherer, and Gross, but in this review the focus is on neuroscientists not well described in the neurology literature, including Scholz, Ostertag, Schneider, Nachtsheim, and von Weizsäcker. Only by understanding the actions of neuroscientists during this dark period can we learn from the slippery slope down which they traveled, and prevent history from repeating itself.

“Only the National Socialist”: Postwar US and West German Approaches to Nazi “Euthanasia” Crimes, 1946–1953

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 861-888
Author(s):  
Michael Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Mass Murder ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Mentally Disabled ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Anti Jewish

In Western historical consciousness, National Socialist mass murder has become permanently identified with the Jewish Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's maniacal project to annihilate European Jewry. From its earliest days, the Nazi Party sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and when the Nazis came to power in January 1933, their anti-Jewish animus became official policy. What followed was legal disemancipation of German Jews, physical attacks on their persons, ghettoization, deportation, and physical extermination in the East. The story of the Holocaust is well known and generally accepted. Yet two years before German Jewish policy swerved from persecution and harassment to genocide, the Nazis were already involved in state-organized killing of another disfavored minority. Unlike the destruction of European Jews, the murder of this group—the mentally disabled—occurred within the Reich's own borders. Launched with the signing of a “Hitler decree” in October 1939 (backdated to 1 September), the centrally organized program targeted so-called “incurable” patients, whose lives were to be ended by a doctor-administered “mercy death” (Gnadentod). The Nazis attached the term “euthanasia” to their program of destruction, bolstering their rationale for it with humanitarian arguments and cost-based justifications, the latter legitimizing euthanasia as a means to free up scarce resources for use by “valuable” Germans. Over time, the restrictive use of euthanasia just for incurable patients ended; thereafter, the Nazis extended the killing program to healthier patients, sick concentration camp inmates, Jewish patients, and a variety of “asocials” (juvenile delinquents, beggars, tramps, prostitutes). The technology of murder developed in the “euthanasia” program—carbon monoxide asphyxiation in gas chambers camouflaged as shower rooms—would become the model for the first death camps in Poland. Many of the “euthanasia” personnel were likewise transferred to the Polish extermination centers, where they applied the techniques of mass death—refined in murdering the disabled—to the murder of the European Jews.

Gleichschaltung and “de-Jewification” in German university neurology departments

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-230
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Zeidman
Keyword(s):  
Brain Tissue ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Racial Hygiene ◽  
Forced Sterilization ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
The University ◽  
German Cities

In at least 26 instances of “non-Aryan” neuroscientist dismissal, their replacements were involved in racial hygiene consequences such as aiding the vehement forced sterilization program, euthanasia of neuropsychiatric patients, or collection of brain tissue and research on these expendable victims. The hardest-hit departments were in the major German cities, especially Berlin, where both the university and multiple smaller hospitals and institutes were decapitated and where Jews had been directors prior to the Nazi power seizure. University neurology departments in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Bonn, Heidelberg, and Breslau were also heavily incapacitated by dismissals. Those who took over the positions of dismissed neuroscientists were often members of not only the Nazi party, but multiple subsidiary agencies, such as the SS, SA, and others, likely reflecting deeper commitment to Nazi ideology. Six known “Aryan” neuroscientists emigrated from Germany, reflecting the fact that support of the regime was neither mandatory, nor the only solution.

Knowledge of the Mass Murder of Jewish People Possessed by Ordinary German

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Yijing Liu
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Second World

In 1933, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, came to political power in Germany. As a direct result of the Nazi’s actions, approximately 6 million Jewish victims were killed. The Nazi Party members were undoubtedly responsible for these results, but were the non- party Germans? To answer this sensitive question, the extent of knowledge of these events must be investigated. To what extent did “ordinary” German civilians know about the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust in Berlin from 1942 to the end of the Second World War? The population must be categorized by those who knew about the Jewish deportations and murders, those who chose to know, those who chose not to know, and those who did not know. To investigate this idea, oral interviews were collected. They hold value as a first hand perspective, but have limitations of dishonesty and censorship of information. A large collection of survey information from 1985 was heavily considered, in addition to various secondary sources such as articles, videos, and books, and primary sources such as maps and photographs. After weighing probable statistics and popularity of Nazi ideology, evidence supports the idea that more Germans chose not to know about the extermination of Jews than any other extent, due to the high number of Nazi ideology supporters, high degree of terror propaganda, and indoctrinated youth. 

Preventing suicide preceded by mass murder

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
CARL C. BELL
Keyword(s):  
Mass Murder

Book Reviews and Review Essay

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-156
Author(s):  
Melissa Raphael ◽  
Dorothea Magonet ◽  
Frank Dabba Smith
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
The Real ◽  
Nazi Persecution ◽  
Union College

Tony Bayfield, Being Jewish Today: Confronting the Real Issues, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019, £18.99 Marika Henriques, The Hidden Girl: The Journey of a Soul, Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers Ltd., 2018, £25.00 Marc Saperstein, Agony in the Pulpit: Jewish Preaching in Response to Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder 1933–1945, Hebrew Union College Press, 2018, $95.00

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