Authors: Edwin Black
Correspondence bounced back and forth between the two until Popenoe finally sent a brief letter of endorsement, limited to the prewar years. Verschuer then asked if he could be invited to join the faculty of an American university. “I have inquired from some leaders in American genetics,” Popenoe replied, “and they all feel that it will be a long time before any university here is ready to offer a position to any German scientist who occupied an important position in Germany during the war years. As you perhaps know, our army brought over a number of physicists and other specialists, and their presence in this country has led to many protests and recriminations. I think it is out of the question, therefore, for you to look forward to any scientific activity here in the next few years-much as I myself should like to have a visit from you.”
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Throughout late 1947 and 1948, Verschuer continued corresponding with leading eugenicists and geneticists at American institutions, seeking to reestablish academic exchanges and professional standing. He submitted one of his older books for a new review by the American Eugenics Society. Popenoe promptly assured he would review it in a new eugenic publication called
Family Life,
and then bemoaned the loss of German eugenic publications. “It is sad to think,” Popenoe wrote, “that the scientific journals, and even the publishing houses that produced them no longer exist!” Verschuer also began exchanges with scientists at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota. These were received with goodwill and even enthusiasm. When Nazi agitator C. M. Goethe of California received Verschuer’s letter, he replied that he was “thrilled.”
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While Verschuer was busy reestablishing his support in America, he was rehabilitating himself in occupied Germany as well. After making his accusations public, Havemann organized a committee of Kaiser WIlhelm Institute scientists to examine the evidence against Verschuer. They ruled that Verschuer indeed had engaged in despicable acts in concert with Mengele at Auschwitz, but their report was kept secret for fifteen years. In 1949, while the first report remained under lock and key, a second board of inquiry was urged to reexamine the issue. This second board unanimously ruled that he had committed no transgressions involving Auschwitz, and indeed that “Verschuer has all the qualities which qualify him to be a researcher and teacher of academic youth.” Virtually comparing Verschuer to Christ being crucified, the esteemed panel of German scientists declared they could not sit in judgment of him as “Pharisees”
(Pharisiierhaft).
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Soon, Verschuer once again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists. Hermann Joseph Muller of Texas, a Rockefeller fellow who had worked at the Kaiser WIlhelm Institute for Brain Research during 1932, served as the first president of the American Society of Human Genetics.
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In the fall of 1950, the University of Munster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. At about that time he helped found the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, which later published his books, including one on cancer. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.
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A later president of the American Society of Human Genetics, Kurt Hirschhorn, remembered his own encounter with Verschuer in about 1958. An Austrian Jew, Hirschhorn had come to the United States as a refugee during the Hitler era. Hirschhorn became a genetic researcher and, while on a fellowship to Europe, he had visited Verschuer at the University of Munster. “Verschuer was partly responsible for the whole extermination,” Hirschhorn related emphatically during a February 2003 interview. “He was the one that gave the Nazis the pseudo-genetic rationale to destroy the Jews and Gypsies. He was part of the organization [American Society of Human Genetics] in 1949 because in those days … it was all covered up. No one really knew. But I’ll never forget. I was sitting in his university office in Münster as a young man, and he asked a lot of personal questions about my background, and so forth, until he found out I was Jewish. I knew who he was by that time. I took a great deal of pleasure in telling him that I came to the United States from Austria, and when I turned eighteen, I enlisted in the army and went over there and fought the Nazis-and went right through Münster. He was taken aback.”
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In the 1960s, Frankfurt prosecutors were obliged by international pressure to continue their hunt for Nazis. The same prosecutors who investigated Mengele examined his relationship to Verschuer but concluded there was no connection between the two. Benno Muller-Hill, a German geneticist, later investigated Verschuer’s activities. Muller-Hill reviewed Verschuer’s many written defenses, including the one in which Verschuer claimed that while in Auschwitz, Mengele “tried to be a physician and help the sick.” Writing in the journal
History and Philosophy of Science,
Muller-Hill described Verschuer’s account as “Lies, lies, lies.”
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Verschuer was never prosecuted. In 1969, he was killed in an automobile accident. But the legacy of his torturous medicine, twisted eugenics and conscious war crimes lives on.
* * *
As the ashes of Jews and Gypsies wafted into the air of Europe and were dumped into the Vistula River coursing through the heart of Europe, so their victimization flowed into the mainstream of modern medical literature. Medical literature evolves from decade to decade. As American eugenic pseudoscience thoroughly infused the scientific journals of the first three decades of the twentieth century, Nazi-era eugenics placed its unmistakable stamp on the medical literature of the twenties, thirties and forties.
The writings of Nazi doctors not only permeated the spectrum of German medical journals, they also appeared prominently in American medical literature. These writings included the results of war crime experimentation at concentration camps. Verschuer’s own bibliographies, circa 1939, enumerated a long list of Nazi scientific discoveries, authored by him, his colleagues and assistants, including Mengele. Such scientific publication continued right through the last days of the Third Reich. The topics included everything from rheumatism, heart disease, eye pathology, blood studies, brain function, tuberculosis, and the gastric system to endless permutations of hereditary pathology.
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Much of it was sham science. Some of it was astute. Both types found their way into the medical literature of the fifties and sixties. Hence, Nazi victimization contributed significantly to many of the modem medical advances of the postwar period.
For example, the Nazis at Dachau, using ice water tests, were the first to experimentally lower human body temperature to 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit-this to discover the best means of reviving
Luftwaffe
pilots downed over the North Sea. Nazi scientists learned that the most effective method was rapid rewarming in hot water. Nuremberg testimony revealed that Dr. Sigmund Rascher, who oversaw these heinous hypothermia tests, prominently reported his breakthroughs at a 1942 medical symposium with a paper entitled “Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter.”
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After the war, Rascher’s conclusions were gleaned from Nazi reports and reluctantly adopted by British and American air-sea rescue services. A Nuremberg war crimes report on Nazi medicine summed up the extreme discomfort of Allied military doctors: “Dr. Rascher, although he wallowed in blood … and in obscenity … nevertheless appears to have settled the question of what to do for people in shock from exposure to cold…. The method of rapid and intensive rewarming in hot water … should be immediately adopted as the treatment of choice by the Air-Sea Rescue Services of the United States Armed Forces.”
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Rascher reported to Hubertus Strughold, director of the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine. Strughold attended the Berlin medical conference that reviewed Rascher’s revelations. A Nazi scientist wrote at the time that there were no “objections whatsoever to the experiments requested by the Chief of the Medical Service of the Luftwaffe to be conducted at the Rascher experimental station in the Dachau concentration camp. If possible, Jews or prisoners held in quarantine are to be used.”
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After the war, Strughold was smuggled into the United States under the infamous Operation Paperclip project, which offered Nazi scientists refuge and immunity in exchange for their scientific expertise. Once in the U.S., Strughold became the leader in American aviation medicine. His work was directly and indirectly responsible for numerous aeromedical advances, including the ability to walk effortlessly in a pressurized air cabin-now taken for granted-but which was also developed as a result of Dachau experiments. He was called “the father of U.S. Space Medicine,” and Brooks Air Force Base in Texas named its Aeromedical Library in his honor. A celebratory mural picturing Strughold was commissioned by Ohio State University. When Jewish and Holocaust-survivor groups, led by the Anti-Defamation League, discovered the honors extended to Strughold, they objected. Ohio State University removed its mural in 1993. The U.S. Air Force changed its library’s name in 1995.
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In 2003, the state of New Mexico still listed Strughold as a member of its International Space Hall of Fame. But on February 13,2003, when this reporter asked about their honoree’s Nazi connection, a startled museum official declared, “If he was doing experiments at Dachau, it would give one pause why anyone would ever nominate him in the first place.” Museum officials added they would immediately look into removing his name.
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Another case involved Nazi doctors Hallervorden and Spatz. In 1922, the two had successfully identified a rare and devastating brain disease caused by a genetic mutation. The disease came to be known as Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome in their honor. During the Hitler era, while working at the Kaiser WIlhelm Institute for Brain Research, Hallervorden and Spatz furthered their research by utilizing hundreds of brains harvested from T-4 victims. Right through the 1960s, Hallervorden authored numerous influential scientific papers on the subject. For decades, the name Hallervorden-Spatz has been used by the leading medical institutions in the world, honoring the two Nazis who discovered the disorder. Thousands of articles and presentations have been made on the topic, using the name Hallervorden-Spatz. Medical investigators created an “International Registry of Patients with Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome and Related Disorders.”
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Leading family support groups involved with the disorder have also taken their organizational names from the two Nazi doctors. But the news about Hallervorden and Spatz’s Nazi past recently became known to many in the field. In 1993, two doctors expressed the view of many in a letter to the editor of the journal
Neurology.
“It is also time to stop using the term, ‘Hallervorden-Spatz disease’ whose only purpose is to honor Hallervorden by using his name.” Another journal,
Lancet,
expressed a similar view in 1996, describing the continued honorary use of the name “Hallervorden-Spatz” as “indefensible” because “both Hallervorden and Spatz were closely associated with the Nazi extermination policies.”
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In January of 2003, the Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome Association renamed itself the NBIA Disorders Association; the acronym was derived from “neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation.” Just after the announcement, the newly-renamed association’s president, Patricia Wood, told this reporter that the name change was certainly due to the legacy of Nazi experiments attached to Hallervorden and Spatz. The association’s website confirmed that the name change was driven by “concerns about the unethical activities of Dr. Hallervorden (and perhaps also Dr. Spatz) involving euthanasia of mentally ill patients during World War II.”
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The National Institutes of Health also adopted the Hallervorden-Spatz appellation for its research into the disease. NIH convened a two-day workshop on the disorder in May of 2000. As of March 2003, the National Institutes of Health continues to maintain a Hallervorden-Spatz Disease Information web page. On February 13, 2003, an NIH spokesman said that the institute was becoming aware of the Hallervorden-Spatz Nazi legacy and monitoring name changes in the field. “It is unfortunate that the two people who have discovered and researched this disease have undergone political scrutiny,” the spokesman said, “but I don’t see any name change at this time.” The spokesman stressed that the problem was mere “political scrutiny.” The spokesman did confirm that the institute would adjust its website’s search engine to permit the term “NBIA” to reach its Hallervorden-Spatz information sites.
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Nazi medical victims suffered torture to substantially advance Reich scientific knowledge and modern medicine. Then the murdered specimens were delivered to the likes of Verschuer and Hallervorden and their eugenic institutions. But then what? After the war, victims’ remains were transferred to or maintained by some of Germany’s leading medical research facilities. Hence the exterminated continued to provide organic service to German medicine. In 1989, the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, the successor to Hallervorden’s center, admitted that it still possessed thirty tissue samples in its files. That same year, tissue samples and skeletons were also found in universities in Tübingen and Heidelberg. In 1997, investigators confirmed that the University of Vienna’s Institute of Neurobiology still housed four hundred Holocaust victims’ brains. The University of Vienna had functioned as part of the Reich after Austria’s union with Germany in 1938. Similar discoveries have been made elsewhere in former Nazi-occupied Europe.
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