The Dangers of White Supremacy: Nazi Sterilization and Its Mixed-Race Adolescent Victims.

Mixed-race African German and Vietnamese German children were born around 1921, when troops drawn from the French colonial empire occupied the Rhineland. These children were forcibly sterilized in 1937. Racial anthropologists had denounced them as "Rhineland Bastards," collected details on them, and persuaded the Nazi public health authorities to sterilize 385 of them. One of the adolescents later gave public interviews about his experiences. Apart from Hans Hauck, very few are known by name, and little is known about how their sterilization affected their lives. None of the 385 received compensation from the German state, either as victims of coerced sterilization or as victims of Nazi medical research. The concerned human geneticists went unprosecuted. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(2):248-254. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306593).

Painful and sometimes deadly experiments which Nazi doctors carried out on children.

Coerced human experiments are among the most disturbing forms of ethical violations and criminality in medicine under National Socialism. Until 2016, there was no evidence-based analysis concerning numbers of victims and the type of experiments. A reference resource on Victims of Biomedical Research under NS. Collaborative Database of Medical Victims currently covers 28 655 victims who were subjected to 359 different experiments by the Nazis during World War Two. Drawing on this resource, this paper focuses on research on children. Finally, the narrow focus on the experiments, highlighting scientific methodology but disregarding the killing procedures of the Holocaust, is critically analysed.

"All emigrants are up to the physical, mental, and moral standards required": A tale of two child rescue schemes.

The current paper critically assesses and reflects on the ideals and realities of two major (British) child migration schemes, namely the British Home Child scheme (1869-1930) and the Kindertransport scheme (1938-1940), to add to current understandings of their place within wider international histories of child migration, moral reforms, eugenics, settlement, and identity. Specifically, we focus on constructions of "mentally and physically deficient" children/young people, informed by eugenic viewpoints and biological determinism, and how this guided inclusion and exclusion decisions in both schemes. Both schemes made judgements regarding which children should be included/excluded in the schemes or returned to their country of origin (as was the case with children in the Canadian child migration scheme) fueled by a type of eugenics oriented to transplanting strong physical and psychologically resilient specimens. By viewing the realities of the child migration schemes, including the varied experiences and narratives in relation to child migrants, in light of eugenicist narratives of difference, pathology, victimhood, and contamination, we shed a light on uneven practices, formations of power, and expectations of the times.

From scientific exploitation to individual memorialization: Evolving attitudes towards research on Nazi victims' bodies.

During the Third Reich, state-sponsored violence was linked to scientific research on many levels. Prisoners were used as involuntary subjects for medical experiments, and body parts from victims were used in anatomy and neuropathology on a massive scale. In many cases, such specimens remained in scientific collections and were used until long after the war. International bioethics, for a long time, had little to say on the issue. Since the late 1980s, with a renewed interest in the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, a consensus has increasingly taken hold that research on human tissues and body parts from the Nazi era is inadmissible, and that such specimens should be removed from scientific collections and buried. The question of what to do with scientific data obtained from these sources has not received adequate attention, however, and remains unsolved. This paper traces the history of debates about the ethical implications of using human tissue or body parts from the Nazi period for scientific purposes, primarily in the fields of anatomy and neuropathology. It also examines how this issue, from after the war until today, influenced the establishment of legal and bioethical norms on the use of human remains from morally tainted sources, with a particular emphasis on Germany and Austria. It is argued that the use of such specimens and of data derived from them is unethical not only because of potential harms to posthumous rights of the victims, but also because such use constitutes a moral harm to society at large.

Electroconvulsive Therapy in the Shadow of the Gas Chambers: Medical Innovation and Human Experimentation in Auschwitz.

Six years after it was first introduced into psychiatry in 1938, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) became the subject of criminal human experiments in Nazi Germany. In 1944, at the Auschwitz III / Monowitz camp hospital, the Polish Jewish prisoner psychiatrist Zenon Drohocki started experimental treatments on prisoners with an ECT device that he had constructed himself. According to eyewitnesses, Drohocki's intention to treat mentally unstable prisoners was soon turned into something much more nefarious by SS doctors (including Josef Mengele), who used the device for deadly experiments. This article provides an account of this important and little-known aspect of the early history of ECT, drawing on an extensive array of historical literature, testimonies, and newly accessible documents. The adoption of ECT in Auschwitz is a prime example of the "grey zone" in which prisoner doctors had to operate-they could only survive as long as the SS considered their work useful for their own destructive purposes.

Nazi Medical Research in Neuroscience: Medical Procedures, Victims, and Perpetrators.

Issues relating to the euthanasia killings of the mentally ill, the medical research conducted on collected body parts, and the clinical investigations on living victims under National Socialism are among the best-known abuses in medical history. But to date, there have been no statistics compiled regarding the extent and number of the victims and perpetrators, or regarding their identities in terms of age, nationality, and gender. "Victims of Unethical Human Experiments and Coerced Research under National Socialism," a research project based at Oxford Brookes University, has established an evidence-based documentation of the overall numbers of victims and perpetrators through specific record linkages of the evidence from the period of National Socialism, as well as from post-WWII trials and other records. This article examines the level and extent of these unethical medical procedures as they relate to the field of neuroscience. It presents statistical information regarding the victims, as well as detailing the involvement of the perpetrators and Nazi physicians with respect to their post-war activities and subsequent court trials.

U.S. responses to Japanese wartime inhuman experimentation after World War II.

In 1945-46, representatives of the U.S. government made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that could be viewed as war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the United States, influenced by the Canadian physician John Thompson, played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the United States played an equally key role in concealing information about the biological warfare experiments and in securing immunity from prosecution for the perpetrators. The greater force of appeals to national security and wartime exigency help to explain these different outcomes.

The problematic legacy of victim specimens from the Nazi era: Identifying the persons behind the specimens at the Max Planck Institutes for Brain Research and of Psychiatry.

Although 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck Gesellschaft, MPG), successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), still must grapple with how two of its foremost institutes-the KWI of Psychiatry in Munich and the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch-amassed collections of brains from victims of Nazi crimes, and how these human remains were retained for postwar research. Initial efforts to deal with victim specimens during the 1980s met with denial and, subsequently, rapid disposal in 1989/1990. Despite the decision of the MPG's president to retain documentation for historical purposes, there are gaps in the available sources. This article provides preliminary results of a research program initiated in 2017 (to be completed by October 2023) to provide victim identifications and the circumstances of deaths.

Women's experiences of infertility after the Holocaust.

Nuremburg trial evidence demonstrated that Nazis sought methods of mass sterilization of Jewish women. Immediately upon arrival at the concentration camps, over 98% of women stopped menstruating. There has been minimal investigation as to the cause(s) of amenorrhea, beyond malnutrition and trauma. The major objectives of this article are to 1) provide an alternate hypothesis to explain women's amenorrhea, i.e., surreptitious administration of exogenous hormones to women; 2) detail survivors' reproductive histories so as to demonstrate long-term sequellae, especially pregnancy losses; 3) provide women's subjective narratives of the short- and long-term experience of reproductive losses; 4) link women's amenorrhea, subsequent primary and secondary infertility and the evidence for the hypothesized causal mechanism, i.e., the administration of sex steroids which might have led to both immediate and long-term reproductive impacts. We conducted telephone interviews from 2018 to 2021 with Holocaust survivors internationally in 4 languages. We collected 93 testimonies from female Holocaust survivors (average age 92.5) or offspring who could provide complete reproductive histories for survivors. The interviews focused on reproductive histories, including amenorrhea beginning in 1942-45, subsequent attempts to conceive, numbers of pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths. Ninety-eight percent of women interviewed were unable to conceive or carry to term their desired number of children. Of 197 confirmed pregnancies, at least 48 (24.4%) ended in miscarriages, 13 (6.6%) in stillbirths and 136 (69.0%) in live births. The true number of pregnancy losses is likely much higher. Only 15/93 (16.1%) of women were able to carry more than two babies to term, despite most wanting more children desperately. Amenorrhea among Jewish women arriving at concentration camps was too uniform and sudden to be effected only by trauma and/or malnutrition. Survivors' narratives and historical evidence suggest the role of exogenous hormones, administered without women's knowledge to induce amenorrhea as well as subsequent primary and secondary infertility.

The Holocaust, medicine and becoming a physician: the crucial role of education.

Learning about the abandonment of moral principles of healthcare professionals and scientists, their societies and academic institutions, to a murderous ideology yields fundamental concerns and global implications for present and future healthcare professionals' education and practice. Medicine's worst-case scenario raises deeply disturbing yet essential questions in the here and now: Could the Holocaust, one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated on humankind, have occurred without the complicity of physicians, their societies, and the scientific profession community? How did healers become killers? Can it happen again?We reflect here on those queries through the lens of the Second International Scholars Workshop on Medicine during the Holocaust and Beyond held in the Galilee, Israel on May 7-11, 2017 and derive contemporary global lessons for the healthcare professions. Following a brief historical background, implications of the history of medicine in the Holocaust are drawn including 1) awareness that the combination of hierarchy, obedience, and power constitutes a risk factor for abuse of power in medicine and 2) learning and teaching about medicine in the Holocaust and beyond is a powerful platform for supporting professional identity formation. As such, this history ideally can help "equip" learners with a moral compass for navigating the future of medical practice and inherent ethical challenges such as prejudice, assisted reproduction, resource allocation, obtaining valid informed consent, end of life care, and challenges of genomics and technology expansion. Curriculum modules are available and studies on impact on students' attitudes and behavior are emerging.The conference culminated with the launch of the Galilee Declaration, composed and signed by an international, inter-professional community of historians, healthcare professions educators, and ethicists. The Declaration included herein ( http://english.wgalil.ac.il/category/Declaration ) calls for curricula on history of healthcare professions in the Holocaust and its implications to be included in all healthcare professions education.

Facing the Guilt and Commemorating the Victims: German Radiology and Radiation Oncology During National Socialism.

Whereas the scientific community is aware of atrocities committed by medical doctors like Mengele, the specifics of radiology and radiation oncology during National Socialism remain largely unknown. Starting in 2010, the German Radiology Association and the German Association of Radiation Oncology coordinated a national project looking into original archival material. A national committee convened in 2013 to discuss the project's findings, which were also the subject of a symposium at the University of Tuebingen in 2016 on radiology under National Socialism. The project identified approximately 160 radiologists who were victimized because of their Jewish descent, among them Gustav Bucky (known for the Bucky factor in x-ray diagnostics). Radiologists throughout Germany took part in forced sterilizations. The "Schutzstaffel," commonly known as SS, had a special radiology unit that was established for tuberculosis screening. Radiation was also used for sterilization experiments in the Auschwitz concentration camp with subsequent surgical procedures to enable histological analysis of the irradiated tissue. Reflection on medicine during the Holocaust will be strengthened by specific facts related to the respective medical field. Radiologists were involved in atrocious medical experiments as well as in supporting Nazi policies in Germany. These facts provoke ethical considerations about marginalized patient groups and doctor-patient communication. They also raise questions about "evidence-based" medicine as sole justification for medical procedures. In summary, historical studies will be able to help in the professional identity formation of radiologists gaining awareness to ethical issues of today.

[The League of Nations Health Organization and the rise of Latin American participation, 1920-40]. / As origens da participação da América Latina na Organização de Saúde de Liga das Nações, 1920 a 1940.

The League of Nations Health Organization collaborated with Latin American specialists in public health and infectious diseases from the early 1920s to the outbreak of the Second World War. The League developed studies of infant health and nutrition, and leprosy. The approach was expert-oriented, and designed to develop public health on a scientific basis. There were conferences, tours and reports in Latin America. This paper demonstrates that the Latin American collaboration with the Health Organization was extensive and multi-faceted.

The victims of unethical human experiments and coerced research under National Socialism.

There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. This paper gives the first results of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. Human experiments were more extensive than often assumed with a minimum of 15,754 documented victims. Experiments rapidly increased from 1942, reaching a high point in 1943. The experiments remained at a high level of intensity despite imminent German defeat in 1945. There were more victims who survived than were killed as part of or as a result of the experiments, and the survivors often had severe injuries.

From scientific object to commemorated victim: the children of the Spiegelgrund.

The legacy of German medical research in the era of National Socialism remains contentious, as regards identification of victims, and the appropriate handling of scientific specimens. These questions are acutely posed by the scientific slides, brain sections, and other body parts of victims, who were killed for research. These slides continued to be held by Austrian and German scientific institutes in the second half of the twentieth century. That scientists continued research on these slides between 1945 and the late 1980s suggests a disassociation of guilt and responsibility for the deaths of the victims by the German scientific community.