“In the Name of Humanity”: Nazi Doctors and Human Experiments in German Concentration Camps

During the Second World War over two hundred and fifty German doctors conducted medical experiments on human beings. Jurists and scholars have pondered ever since how doctors educated to heal could harm and even kill. Robert Jay Lifton has argued that psychological “doubling” could explain their crimes: their Faustian bargain with Nazism outweighed their Hippocratic Oath. Here the author argues, however, that Lifton’s theory does not apply to these Nazi doctors because there is no indication that they recognized ethical constraints against human experimentation. To explain how “healers became killers,” the author focuses on the broader historical aspects of their behavior.

Visiting Holocaust: Related Sites in Germany with Medical Students as an Aid to Teaching Medical Ethics and Human Rights

Some doctors and nurses played a key role in Nazism. They were responsible for the sterilization and murder of people with disabilities. Nazi doctors used concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs in medical experiments that had military or racial objectives. What we have learnt about the behaviour of doctors and nurses during the Nazi period enables us to reflect on several issues in present-day medicine (research limitations, decision making at the beginning and the end of a life and the relationship between physicians and the State). In some authors' opinions, the teaching of the medical aspects of the Holocaust could be a new model for education relating to professionalism, Human Rights, Bioethics and the respect of diversity. Teaching Medicine and the Holocaust could be a way of informing doctors and nurses of violations of Ethics in the past. Moreover, a Study Trip to Holocaust and Medicine related sites has a strong pedagogical value. Visiting Holocaust related sites, T4 centres and the places where medical experiments were carried out, has a special meaning for medical students. Additionally, tolerance, anti-discrimination, and the value of human life can be both taught and learned through this curriculum. The following article recounts our experiences of organizing and supervising a study trip with a group of medical students to some Holocaust and medicine-related sites in Berlin and Hadamar (Germany). The study tour included lectures at universities in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

The soul in Time’s Arrow: A post-Enlightenment presence

The consensus among critics is that the narrator of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is the suppressed moral consciousness of the protagonist, the Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben. This critical opinion takes its cue from the notion of ‘doubling’ in Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors which Amis cites as the spur to writing the novella. Although this reading is persuasive, it does not quite account for the full characterization of the narrator, namely his ‘soul-like’ qualities. This article makes the case for the narrator as a ‘familiar compound ghost’ of Western philosophical and cultural accounts of the soul. Such a reading has wide implications for the novella’s account of the work of the Nazi doctors and Nazism more generally, and positions the novella within an anti-positivist line of post-Enlightenment thought.

Doing Special Things to Special People in Special Places: Psychologists in the CIA Torture Program

Since 2014, detailed correspondence between the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reveal the extent to which operational psychologists coordinated with the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. Key revelations expose the ethical maneuvering intended to defend the participation of certain psychologists in interrogation, abuse, and torture, including waterboarding. This critique takes aim at the controversy over the psychological planning and subsequent practice of torture during the Bush administration. Analysis is informed by Robert Jay Lifton and his book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.

Rethinking research ethics committees in low- and medium-income countries

Key historical landmark research malpractice scandals that shocked the international community (Nazi doctors’ experiments, Tuskegee study, Jewish chronic disease experiments, Krugman’s Willowbrook hepatitis study) were the origin of the institution of ethics review prior to carrying out research involving humans. Nonetheless, it is plausible that unethical research is ongoing or may have been conducted in recent times that has escaped public notice, especially in the vulnerable low- and middle-income country contexts. The basic constitution of these committees at some point has not been clearly defined, with most scientists declaring political maneuvers at times. These committees today are characterized by bureaucratic bottlenecks, financial interests, inadequate training in research ethics, and lack of control and coordination of their functions. Compulsory and adequate research ethics training for researchers and ethical committee members could guarantee trust, and appreciation of the utmost importance of the latter. The independence of protocol review should be guaranteed as much as possible so that the process attains its set goals. It might be too simplistic, and hypocritical, to allow ethics committees to continue to function on an ‘altruistic’ basis. Governments must strengthen the roles of national ethics committees – their independence, oversight roles, and as monitoring and evaluation bodies for smaller research ethics committees. Funding and objective constitution of board members is critical. Only then would research ethics committees be metamorphosed from the ‘bad guys’ to the trusted friends. The fear is preventing the research ethics committee from being seen and thus becoming an ethical oxymoron.

THE NUREMBERG TRIALS AND THEIR LEGACY FOR THE RIGHTS OF PATIENTS AND RESEARCH SUBJECTS

When does clinical research designed to save lives and advance medicine become assault and murder? In the twentieth century the line between legitimate research on human subjects and criminal assault has been variously drawn. The demands of the researcher and the voice of the research subject and patient have received varying recognition. With the upswing of clinical research in the early twentieth century and some dramatic breakthroughs in medicine there was a tendency to heroise the researcher in the ‘fight’ against disease. In Nazi Germany, there were strong pressures to conduct research on lives deemed worthless in the hope of producing valuable breakthroughs in medical research to benefit the nation and race. After all, if the mentally ill and racially inferior Jews and Gypsies were going to be killed, their bodies might still serve a useful purpose. After WW2 the Nuremberg Trials were conducted on the basis of ‘crimes against humanity’, and by documenting wartime atrocities did much to safeguard human rights and dignity. After the four-power International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg came the trial against 20 Nazi doctors and three SS administrators: this concluded with a declaration on the conduct of research based on the autonomy and consent of the research subject.