July 7: Nazi Medical Experimentation Begins

Heinrich Himmler inaugurated a program of medical experimentation upon Jewish internees at Auschwitz on this date in 1942, to obtain a fast and cheap method of sterilization “not only to defeat the [Jewish] enemy,” the SS Reich Leader wrote, “but also to exterminate him.” The sterilization campaign used both experimental drugs and x-ray radiation to sterilize several thousand women and several hundred men, many of whom were rendered unfit for slave labor by the process and killed. Among the Nazi leaders, Himmler was most obsessed with racial “science” and founded the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi think tank created in 1935 to research the anthropological and cultural history of the “Aryan race.” The Ahnenerbe became headquarters for the Institute for Military Scientific Research, managed by Wolfram Sievers with the S.S.‘s financial backing, which conducted air pressure, freezing, drowning, and blood coagulant experiments upon prisoners at Dachau, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz. Other experiments were conducted at Natzweiler-Stutthof (gassing), the only extermination camp in France, Buchenwald (poisoning), and Ravensbruck (surgical transplantation); in all, there were about 70 such programs at concentration camps involving some 200 physicians, who maintained close contact with leading German medical institutions and universities. In October, 1946, over twenty Nazi doctors captured by Allied forces were put on trial. However, the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted wide-ranging “racial” experiments on children, particularly twins, dwarfs and other unusual “specimens” at Auschwitz, evaded capture and lived until 1979 in South America. To view a video about Nazi eugenics, click here.
“Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” —Adolf Hitler