Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps (review)

Much has been written and published about inhuman aspects of the medical experiments in German concentration camps. Yet this book is unique. Its author, Alfred Pasternak, was 13 years old when he was sent to the concentration camp of Auschwitz. He lost most of his family there. Later he studied medicine and became a medical professor. As he grew older, he felt a moral necessity to collect documents about the medical experiments and to present this material in a book.

Inhuman Research differs from most other books on the subject, in that it consists mainly of documents, many of which were found in the records of the Nuremberg medical trial. They are reports by witnesses and victims of the experiments and statements by those who committed the crimes.

Among the cases that Pasternak documents in detail are Eugen Haagen’s experiments with typhus. Haagen was a virologist, interested in antibodies. At the time when he was active, typhus was killing many people in the concentration camps. Many of the people infected with typhus and treated with Haagen’s antibodies survived, while many of the untreated controls died. A similar result was found by Claus Schilling with malaria. The untreated people had a lesser chance of survival than the treated.

Some of the worst experiments were those organized by Sigmund Rascher. Rascher analyzed the deaths of prisoners in the presence of little oxygen and in ice-cold water. These experiments were of interest to the German air force. How could pilots survive under such conditions? Rascher also tested “polygala,” a drug that was supposed to have a good influence on wounds, by binding prisoners and having them shot in their arms or legs. Rascher was an ambitious post-doc, but the experiments he had presented for his M.D. could not be repeated. This was apparently outside Pasternak’s interest, so it is not mentioned.

The material in Inhuman Research ends around 1950, so the reader is often not informed about the careers of the doctors after the Nuremberg trial. I mention just one example. The life of the bacteriologist Haagen did not end with the death sentence he received in France 1950. In 1965, he received a position in the West German institute for viral disease of animals (Bundesforschungsanstalt für Virus-Krankheiten der Tiere) in Tübingen.

What made these murders possible? Many non-Jewish German medical doctors felt that they had been robbed by their Jewish colleagues. In the medical clinics in Berlin, more than 80% of the M.D. s were Jewish, while in Tübingen there were none. So it paid to rob the Jewish M.D. s in Berlin. Additionally, in those years German medical doctors commonly used language that dehumanized patients. For example, it was a general practice to call psychiatric patients objects of low value (“minderwertig”) or empty shells (“leere Hülsen”). For those who used this language, killing of patients became a good act.

The book is perfect for teaching medical students both the facts about these experiments and the relevant ethical problems that they entail. The questions that arise have no easy answers. For example, should the data or the material from such murderous studies be used for further studies? The author and this reviewer favor a general “no.” But the reviewer thinks that there is one further aspect of this subject that has been overlooked: murderous experiments have to be kept secret, and secrecy invites fraud. So Rascher committed fraud in the experiments on which his thesis were based. And Emil Abderhalden’s defense enzymes, which were central to Josef Mengele’s and Otmar von Verschuer’s experiments, were also based on fraud. There seems to be a mutual attraction between fraud and crime.

Inhuman Research ends with 24 photographs of those who committed such crimes. Haagen, Schilling, and Rascher are not among those pictured. Whether all 24 persons are mentioned in the text cannot be checked, as the book has no name index...