When medicine goes wrong

Eminent American physician Alfred Pasternak (pictured) was a child survivor of Auschwitz. He has crowned his career by publishing landmark research on medical experiments carried out on conscious civilian prisoners incarcerated in the Nazi death camps during the Second World War.
The first edition of his book Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps (Akadémiai Kiadó, hardback, 399pp, Ft4,830 (Ft3,622 online, $48 in the US), ISBN: 963 05 8382 8) was published here in Budapest at the end of 2006. A second edition, taking the work much further, is forthcoming.
More than six decades after the end of the war, most people have heard of Josef Mengele. Yet his crime was only part of the most shameful chapter in the history of medicine. Pasternak’s book and a series of lectures seek to set the record straight. His message deserves to be widely considered.
The first part of the book explores the disgrace and humiliation experienced by the German medical profession through its voluntary Nazification as it became a dominant agent of the national extermination program. The second examines the nature and function of the human experiments in the camps. The third evaluates the ethical implications of the surviving research.
Pasternak is a native of Hungary. He was the only child survivor to return from Auschwitz to his provincial Jewish community after the war. Close to 100 members of his family perished, along with hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the final, most prolific phase of the Nazi extermination campaign in 1944.
His book is intended to silence the growing chorus of Holocaust revisionists and to warn that rational people, even doctors, can be swayed by persuasive, if insane, arguments.
The issue of Nazi medical experiments perpetrated on initially conscious subjects is poorly covered by the academic press. The author synthesizes the historical literature and makes use of a wealth of archived material for the first time. He writes with proper scientific reserve, but his controlled passion makes for gripping reading.
He warns: “We must not make the mistake of thinking that the horrors of the Nazi era were a matter of just a handful of evil men doing terrible things. Many people were involved.”
Pasternak emigrated to the US in 1956, after the failed Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule. He conducted his postgraduate training at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He has practised there as an obstetrician and gynecologist.
Today, he is a clinical professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and the holder of many honors. These include The Israel Flame of Truth Award for Higher Education as well as two Honorary Citations from the US Congress. He has been an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Science (MTA) since 2005.

Research

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Elizabeth, a fellow doctor. In current work unrelated to the present book, Pasternak is engaged in research on the long-term gynaecological effects of incarceration in the Nazi camps.
This book is the second of what Pasternak hopes will be at least three major studies exposing the Nazi death camp experiments.
The first was Auschwitz – A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, published shortly after the war by Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish-Hungarian doctor forced to participate in Mengele’s infamous experiments with twins and dwarves.
Pasternak acknowledges that the extensive list assembled in his present study of heartbreaking and stomach-churning experiments conducted in the death camps is still far from complete.
The work covers huge areas of fresh historical evidence, but a lot of data, recently made available in the archives of formerly Soviet-dominated Europe and elsewhere, is still to be explored.
He originally approached the topic as a universal issue rather than just a Jewish tragedy. But he has always felt compelled to do “something, however little,” to guard against the recurrence of the Holocaust.
This is in line with the conclusions of extensive studies into chronic stress disorder experienced by Holocaust survivors. Most of them tend to avoid anything related to their memories of the horror, for fear of the nightmares and depression triggered by it.
A minority responds by confronting the past at every opportunity through books, films and the recollections of fellow survivors. “I most definitely belong to the second group,” Pasternak says.
He first sought private memoranda, letters, records and diaries of the period, building an extensive library. He was surprised to learn that the medical experimentation conducted in the camps has remained “a neglected part of Holocaust historiography.”
This book is Pasternak’s response to huge public interest generated by a series of lectures about the Nazi experiments, which he gave at the American History of Medicine Society and elsewhere. The Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel was among many who urged him to write it, arguing that otherwise it might never be written – which would be his responsibility.
Another person persuading him to write was Szilveszter E Vizi, president of the MTA.
Pasternak says the first fateful collective step taken by the German medical profession was its enthusiastic embrace of Nazification. Nearly half the doctors formally enrolled in the Nazi Party. Many reaped distinct economic benefits from the dismissal of Jewish colleagues and rivals. Even before the outbreak of the war, they performed 400,000 sterilization operations on victims chosen for their supposed physical as well as racial inferiority.
They also played a central role in the subsequent euthanasia program, pretending to deliver acts of mercy instead of death to 1% of the German population. They thus laid the ground for the wholesale extermination of Jews.
Eventually, in Auschwitz, medical doctors participated in every step of the systematic extermination of millions of captives.
The death camp human experiments fell into three categories: those designed to solve medical problems for the military; those intended to prove the superiority of the Aryan race; and those carried out to satisfy the curiosity of powerful individuals.
For example, hypothermia, high-altitude and seawater experiments addressed naval and air-force combat and rescue problems. Experiments with sulpha drugs, with the treatment of mustard gas and phosphorus burns, and with various approaches to wound healing aimed at minimizing the effects of common wartime injuries.

Unreliable

A skeleton collection assembled by August Hirt, containing the remains of people chosen and murdered for their specific bone structures, was intended to provide evidence in support of Aryan racial superiority claims. So were the anthropological studies conducted by Mengele.
Experiments with a medical treatment of homosexuality, sun exposure and lethal doses of anaesthetics simply satisfied the whims of individuals.
A lot of the data obtained from the obscene death camp experiments is scientifically unreliable because many Jewish physicians ordered to assist with them deliberately sabotaged the surviving records. Nevertheless, contemporary medicine is still grappling with a profound ethical dilemma arising from the temptation to rely on some such research results – perhaps even to save lives.
The book ends with the biography of 195 Nazi medical monsters illustrated by the portraits of 24 of them. Pasternak was shocked by the large number of eminent physicians among them.
There is nothing in their features to betray a tendency to extraordinary cruelty. The trouble is that they are entirely human, like any of us.

Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent who writes on Eastern Europe.