Tuberkulose und Menschenversuche im Nationalsozialismus: Das Netzwerk hinter den Tbc-Experimenten im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen by Christine Wolters (review)

Christine Wolters has written an informative study of Nazi experimentation on concentration camp inmates who suffered from tuberculosis. Her focus is less on the experiments per se than on the medical experimenters and the personal, professional, and political milieus from whence they came and in which they operated. She aims to refute a claim made by defenders of German academic (“school”) medicine during and after the Nuremberg “doctors’ trial” that SS medical experimenters were an isolated group of physicians who stood outside the mainstream of medical culture. Wolters convincingly demonstrates that SS doctors were, in fact, active members of multiple and intersecting educational, political, and medical-commercial “networks.” They were connected to medical professors, practicing “school” physicians, Heilpraktiker (alternative-medicine practitioners), pharmacists, and all manner of scientific and quack phony developers of medications. By reconstructing these networks and presenting material from the dissertations, treatises, and pamphlets written by their participants, Wolters exposes a web of beliefs and activities that tied SS doctors to a longer tradition of medical research and experimentation rooted in racist assumptions and implicated in inhumane practices.

Wolters makes clear that Nazi medical experimentation cannot be rationalized with the claim that it corresponded to the legal medical ethics of the era. In 1931, the Weimar Republic’s National Health Council introduced new “guidelines” for medical treatments and scientific experiments. This code was the “legal foundation” for experiments on human beings in the Third Reich (203). According to its stipulations, the experiments on TB patients and other inmates in the concentration camps were illegal.

The book opens with a survey of German tuberculosis research and human experimentation from the late nineteenth century through 1945. The first chapter discusses the rising influence of eugenic theory on social-hygienic and, above all, racial-hygienic explanations of the continuing high incidence of TB after World War I. In the Third Reich, welfare and care provisions for TB patients began to deteriorate seriously in the later 1930s and especially during the war. Uncooperative “actively sick” patients were subject to “forced institutionalization” (59–60), while “asocial” patients were isolated in a prison-like psychiatric ward, sterilized, and/or sent to a concentration camp (66). The core of the book examines the origins, personnel, and structure of Sachsenhausen’s infirmary and the experiments conducted there between 1941 and 1943 on camp prisoners suffering from pulmonary TB. These inmates were “treated” with an inhaled “preparation” that had absolutely no scientific foundation and was not only useless but also painful—and, for the most severely undernourished patients, lethal.

The “Preparat” was developed by a Dutch physician, Gualtherus Zahn. Zahn conducted the experiments in Sachsenhausen, although he was not a member of the SS. He had a checkered and colorful past—and future—that included long stints of study and work in China, Switzerland, Germany, and Brazil. Through diligent research in Dutch, German, French, and Swiss archives and with, as she notes, a few lucky breaks, Wolters was able to track Zahn’s circuitous route to medical experimentation in Nazi Germany. He exploited tenuous connections to various SS leaders, including Heinrich Himmler, to win permission and financial support for experimenting on KZ inmates. In 1943–45, while no longer at Sachsenhausen, Zahn teamed up to sell his “Preparat” with a family pharmacy run by father and son physicians who were well-connected within their community—both before and after 1945. These practitioners and many others like them tended to their ties to the Nazi party as they engaged in commercially driven, scientifically unproven, and politically unregulated efforts to develop and market new medications.

An example of Wolters’ reconstruction of a network behind Nazi medical experimentation is her discussion of the post–World War I legacies of experiments carried out in German colonies before 1918. Physician-researchers on tropical diseases conducted unethical tests of medications on indigenous people and justified their work in racist terms...