Nazi Science

The above photograph is of Eugen Fischer, a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics and a member of the Nazi Party. He authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German Southwest Africa. Fischer opposed racial mixing, arguing that Negro blood was of lesser value and that mixing it with white blood would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted the activities of his institute to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS-Doctors, served as a judge on the Hereditary Health Court of Berlin and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and racial purity of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.

Eugenics was not a German concept. Types of eugenic practices have existed for millennia. Some indigenous peoples of Brazil are known to have practised infanticide against children born with physical abnormalities since pre-colonial times. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato suggested selective mating to produce a guardian class. In Sparta, to determine whether or not a Spartan child was fit to live, the children were inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia.

The Nazis modelled their Eugenics program on the American eugenics movement. It was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the 1880s. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton first used the term eugenics to scientifically describe an improvement biologically of genes in human races and the concept of being well-born.

The Nazis also admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against African Americans and segregated them from European Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany. Yet they ultimately decided that it would not go far enough.

The views of Eugen Fischer helped create the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, serving as justification for the Nazi belief that Aryans were racially superior to other races—especially the Jews. Adolf Hitler read the works of Fischer while imprisoned in 1923 and used his eugenic notions to support a pure Aryan society in his manifesto, Mein Kampf.

Fischer retired in 1942 as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. After the war, he worked to secure university teaching positions for many of his former students (including Otmar von Verschuer). As professor emeritus at the University of Freiburg, Fischer continued to lecture and publish articles in anthropological journals. He died in 1967.

Paul Nitsche, a founding member of the German Racial Hygiene Society and prominent psychiatrist, long-combined the advocacy of treatment, including occupational and electroshock therapy, for fitter patients with support for mercy death for incurables. A member of the Nazi Party since May 1933, he served as deputy, then head, of the T-4 Medical Office, a division charged with selecting patients for transfer to T-4 facilities.

Nitsche received his medical license in 1901 and a professorship in 1925. Nitsche did not join the Nazi Party until May 1933. He was a strong supporter of eugenics and euthanasia and was present at the gassing demonstration at what would become the Brandenburg euthanasia centre in either December 1939 or January 1940. He was driven not so much by Nazi racial ideology as by his support of racial science and his vision of progressive medicine. Being well established, Nitsche was no longer motivated by the prospect of career advancement but ideologically committed when he later joined Action T4.

In 1948, Nitsche was placed on trial in Dresden by East German authorities for his crimes in the T-4 Euthanasia program. In 1948, the psychiatrist received the death penalty and was executed.

Otmar von Verschuer (rear) supervises the measurement of two men’s heads as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

Otmar von Verschuer (rear, in the photo above) supervises the measurement of the heads of two men as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, as the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—Department for Human Heredity, Verschuer, a physician and geneticist, examined hundreds of pairs of twins to study whether criminality, feeble-mindedness, tuberculosis, and cancer were inheritable. In 1927, he recommended the forced sterilization of the mentally and morally subnormal. Once a member of an ultra-nationalist paramilitary Freikorps unit of World War I veterans, Verschuer typified those academics whose interest in German national regeneration motivated their research.

In the late stages of the Second World War, Verschuer directly or indirectly started to use research material obtained in the Auschwitz concentration camp, mainly through his former student Josef Mengele, who served there as a camp physician.

Verschuer was never on trial for war crimes despite many indications that not only was he fully cognisant of Mengele’s work at Auschwitz, encouraging collaboration with Mengele. In a report to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) from 1944, Verschuer talked about Mengele’s assistance in supplying the KWI-A with some scientific materials from Auschwitz:
“My assistant, Dr Mengele (MD, PhD), has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with the permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.”

A prominent figure in German psychiatry, genetics, and eugenics in the first half of the 20th century was Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin began his career in psychiatry in Munich. He amassed a vast collection of patient genealogies and concluded that mental disorders were genetic and could be predicted and averted through sterilization. In 1931, he became the director of the government-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. Believing one of the critical dangers facing Germany was the growing number of the mentally unfit. Rüdin helped draft the Nazi sterilization law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring and wrote its official commentary.

The American Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Rüdin’s psychiatric genetics department, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered respectively the Founding Fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia, and Franz Josef Kallmann, who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936.[⁶] Kallmann had claimed in 1935 that minor anomalies in otherwise unaffected relatives of schizophrenic people should be grounds for compulsory sterilization.

Claiming that he was a scientist and not a politician, Rüdin was de-Nazified and classified as a nominal party member. The psychiatrist who helped develop the Nazi mass sterilization law died in retirement in 1952.

These were just the Nazi scientists. There were many more—and they often obtained well-paid jobs after the war.

https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/deadly-medicine/profiles/#01-fischer

Evil science

No matter how you twist or turn it, when you are complicit to a crime, you are just as guilty as the perpetrator, and perhaps even more guilty because you were an enabler of that crime.

Hermann Stieve was Director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy from 1935 to 1952, which was from the early days of the Third Reich until 7 years after the war.

His research on the female reproductive system is controversial, as some of his scientific insights derived from histological investigations on the genital organs of executed women. These investigations were made possible by the sharp increase in executions during the “Third Reich.” Stieve’s research was methodologically accurate and contributed significantly to contemporary scientific debates. Nevertheless, his use of the organs of execution victims, some of them resistance fighters, benefited from the Nazi justice system. He thus indirectly supported this system of injustice.

Charlotte Pommer , a young physician, who had been an assistant to Dr Stieve, reported after the war.

“On 22nd of December 1942 eleven men were hanged and five women decapitated. Fifteen minutes later they were laid out on the dissection tables in the anatomical institute. [She] lay on the first table, […] on the third table the big lifeless body of her husband […] I felt paralyzed and could hardly assist Professor Stieve, who – as always- carried out his scientific exploration with great care and uncommon diligence […] After the impressions of that night I resigned from my position”

Stieve wanted to study human organs. He was able to get some donated uteruses and ovaries from the bodies of accident victims, or from surgeons who had removed them. One of the best historical sources of organs for research, the bodies of executed criminals, had not been available during the early years of his research as the Weimar government made very minimal use of the death penalty, and did not execute any women. In a 1931 letter Stieve complained that it was difficult to get a set of ovaries from a healthy woman.

After the National Socialist regime came to power in January 1933, one of its first goals was the reorganization of the universities. Leadership of the universities was taken away from the individual German states and centralized within the Ministry of Education in Berlin, which was also responsible for the anatomical institutes. This included research funding, recruitment of faculty, and the professional society, the Anatomische Gesellschaft. In terms of the body procurement, the Ministry of Education shared this responsibility with the Ministry of Justice, when bodies from prisons and executions were concerned. All science was to be aligned with NS doctrine and to be utilized for war purposes.

Stieve, who had accepted a professorship at what is now Humboldt University of Berlin as well as the directorship of its anatomical institute, reached an agreement with administrators at Plötzensee Prison outside the city to accept all bodies of those shot, hanged or beheaded, many of them political prisoners. Others were “Polish and Russian slave laborers executed for such acts as socializing with German women,” according to Seidelman. Over the entire Nazi era that came to around 3,000 victims, many more bodies than Stieve needed for research purposes. It is alleged that during his research he claimed the corpses of 182 victims of the Nazi regime, 174 of whom were women at the age rank from 18 to 68, two thirds of victims were of German origin.

I just want to focus n 2 of his subjects.

Liane Berkowitz, a German resistance fighter and was most notable for being was a member of the Berlin-based pro-soviet resistance group that coalesced around Harro Schulze-Boysen, that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Arrested and sentenced to death, she was executed shortly after she gave birth to a daughter in custody.

The young mother was executed in Plötzensee Prison at 7.45 p.m on 5 August 1943, two days before her 19th birthday.

Liane’s daughter Irina was born on 12 April 1943 in the women’s prison on Barnimstraße.[The grandmother took care of the child from July 1943. As the Reichskriegsgericht pronounced the sentence recommendation when checking with Adolf Hitler to dismiss the pregnant Liane Berkowitz from prison, he expressly rejected any reprieve. The death sentence was confirmed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and countersigned. Her body was delivered to Hermann Stieve to be dissected for research. Her final resting place is unknown. Her daughter Irina died on 16 October 1943 in hospital in Eberswalde under unclear circumstances.

Mildred “Mili” Elizabeth Fish-Harnack was an American literary historian, author, translator, and resistance fighter, born in Wisconsin. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved with him to Germany, where she began her career as an academic. Fish-Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. In 1930, the couple moved to Berlin and Fish-Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin. In the early 1930s, the couple became increasingly interested in the Soviet communist system. Harnack established a writers’ group that studied the Soviet planned economy, and the couple were able to arrange a visit to the Soviet Union during August 1932 and by 1933 they were fully committed to Soviet ideology. Through contacts at the American embassy, Fish-Harnack became friends with Martha Dodd, who became a part of her salon where they discussed current affairs. In 1936, Fish-Harnack’s translation of Irving Stone’s biography of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, was published.

In 1938, the couple began to resist Nazism. They became friends with Louise and Donald Heath, who was First Secretary at the embassy, and to whom Harnack passed economic intelligence from his position at the Reich Trade Ministry. By 1940, the couple came into contact with other anti-fascist resistance groups and cooperated with them. The most important of these was run by German air force officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that collaborated with Soviet intelligence. Fish-Harnack became a resistance fighter as a member of a Berlin anti-fascist espionage group, later called the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr. The couple were arrested in September 1942 and executed shortly after.

On 7 September 1942, the Harnacks were arrested by the Gestapo at the seaside village of Preila on the Curonian Spit.

Harnack was sentenced to death on 19 December after a four-day trial before the Reichskriegsgericht (“Reich Military Tribunal”), and was executed three days later at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. Fish-Harnack was initially given six years in prison, but Adolf Hitler refused to endorse the sentence and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a death sentence on 16 January 1943.She was beheaded by guillotine on 16 February 1943. While she was imprisoned, She was the only American woman executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler.

After her execution, her body was released to Hermann Stieve to be dissected for his research into the effects of stress, such as awaiting execution, on the menstrual cycle. After he was finished, he gave what was left to a friend of hers, who had the remains buried in Berlin’s Zehlendorf Cemetery.

Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research, along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims, their cell and bone and tissue, in university collections that still exist today.

sources

https://web.archive.org/web/20150715183928/http://www.gedenkstaette-ploetzensee.de/zoom/09_6_dt.html

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/11/mildred-harnack-was-executed-by-hitler-for-resisting-the-nazis-now-we-know-what-happened-to-her-remains.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48215894

https://www.timesofisrael.com/microscopic-remains-of-nazi-victims-studied-by-german-doctor-buried-in-berlin/

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2013/11/nazi_anatomy_history_the_origins_of_conservatives_anti_abortion_claims_that.html?via=gdpr-consent

https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/jbc/article/view/10848/10058

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19173259/

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And the evil lived on.

“First do no harm” is a term often associated with the Hippocratic Oath. Although the association is technically incorrect, the Hippocratic Oath is nonetheless an oath that Doctors adhere to.

The Hippocratic Oath is an oath of ethics historically taken by physicians. It is one of the most widely known of Greek medical texts. In its original form, it requires a new physician to swear, by a number of healing gods, to uphold specific ethical standards. The oath is the earliest expression of medical ethics in the Western world, establishing several principles of medical ethics which remain of paramount significance today. These include the principles of medical confidentiality and non-maleficence. As the seminal articulation of certain principles that continue to guide and inform medical practice, the ancient text is of more than historic and symbolic value. Swearing a modified form of the oath remains a rite of passage for medical graduates in many countries, and is a requirement enshrined in legal statutes of various jurisdictions, such that violations of the oath may carry criminal or other liability beyond the oath’s symbolic nature. The oath is attributed to the Greek doctor Hippocrates and.

The actual reference to no harm in the oath is really much stronger then ‘first do no harm’ It says the following

“I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein.

Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.”

Although during the Nazi regime the physicians did not sign up to the oath, on a human level it makes only sense that you try to make a patient better rather then harm them. But several Nazi physicians, although they were ‘human beings’ they only acted inhumanely.

A few months ago I asked the question “Is it acceptable to use data from Nazi experiments?” I think that is a difficult question to answer. Initially I would say no, but what if some of that data was used to save the live of someone in my family. Or what if it was used to find a cure for Rheumatoid Arthritis , something I suffer from? Then the answer would probably be yes.

One thing that I don’t understand that the names of some of these evil men were still used as eponyms to describe some syndromes or disorders, long after the war and some are still being used, despite the fact that they were renamed. Below are just some examples where evil was allowed to live on.

Asperger syndrome- Replacement Term: Autism spectrum disorder.

Hans Asperger “managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities. He joined several organizations affiliated with the NSDAP (although not the Nazi party itself), publicly legitimized race hygiene policies including forced sterilizations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated with the child ‘euthanasia’ program.

Beck–Ibrahim disease-Replacement Term: Congenital cutaneous candidiasis

Yusuf Ibrahim (May 27, 1877 in Cairo, Egypt – February 3, 1953 in Jena, Germany), also known as Yusuf Bey Murad Ibrahim, was a physician and pediatrician. He was responsible for the description of congenital cutaneous candidiasis, originally known as Beck-Ibrahim disease. The discovery of his association with the Nazi euthanasia program during the World War II resulted in an effort to rename this disease. The clinic for child and adolescent medicine at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena also chose to change its name from Kinderklinik Jussuf Ibrahim after his Nazi past was uncovered.

Cauchois–Eppinger–Frugoni syndrome-Replacement Term: Portal vein thrombosis

Hans Eppinger was born in Prague, the son of the physician Hans Eppinger. His grandmother was Jewish.Eppinger conducted cruel experiments on Romani prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp in order to test the potability of seawater. Eppinger committed suicide with poison on 25 September 1946, one month before he was scheduled to testify in Nuremberg.

Clara cell-Replacement Term: Club Cell

Max Clara owed his career advancement in no small way to his membership in the Nazi party and active support of its programme. In his 1937 paper, Clara acknowledges that the sample he based his work on “was obtained from a prisoner executed by the Nazi ‘justice system

Hallervorden–Spatz disease-Replacement Term: Pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration.

Julius Hallervorden readily admitted that 697 brains he investigated during the Nazi period were from victims of euthanasia. It is alleged that he was present at the killing of more than 60 children and adolescents in the Brandenburg Psychiatric Institution on 28 October 1940. He was reported to have removed brain material himself from euthanasia victims in a nearby extermination (euthanasia) center.

Hugo Spatz was a German neuropathologist. In 1937, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. He was a member of the Nazi Party, and admitted to knowingly performing much of his controversial research on the brains of executed prisoners. Along with Julius Hallervorden.

Reiter’s syndrome-Replacement Term: Reactive Arthritis

Hans Conrad Julius Reiter was a member of the SS. He participated in medical experiments performed by the Nazis. After the Nazis were defeated, he was arrested by the Red Army in Soviet Union-occupied Germany and tried at Nuremberg. During his detention, he admitted to knowledge of involuntary sterilization, euthanasia, and the murder of mental hospital patients in his function as the gatherer of statistics and acting as “quality control” officer, and to helping design and implement an explicitly criminal undertaking at Buchenwald concentration camp, in which internees were inoculated with an experimental typhus vaccine, resulting in over 200 deaths. He gained an early release from his internment, possibly because he assisted the Allies with his knowledge of germ warfare.

After his release, Reiter went back to work in the field of medicine and research in rheumatology. He died at age 88, in 1969, at his country estate in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe.

Seitelberger disease-Replacement Term: Infantile neuroaxonal dystrophy

“Franz Seitelberger, a Vienna neurologist and former member of the SS, although never involved in the planning or execution of NS-euthanasia, benefited from it scientifically during the post-war period. Examining the brains of 3 ‘euthanasia’ victims from the Landesanstalt Görden in Brandenburg, Seitelberger earned his PhD in 1954 under the supervision of Julius Hallervorden.

Spatz–Stiefler reaction-Replacement Term: Paralysis agitans reaction

Under Spatz’s control and direction, the brain research institute collaborated with the killing institute at Brandenburg-Gorden, obtaining hundreds of brains from the mentally ill of all ages.

Van Bogaert–Scherer–Epstein syndrome-Replacement Term: Cerebrotendineous xanthomatosis

“During the war, Scherer worked at the Neurology Institute in Breslau, Silesia. Here Scherer was directly involved in neuropathological brain analyses of over 300 Polish and German children euthanized in the nearby Loben Psychiatric Clinic for Youth.

Wegener’s granulomatosis-Replacement Term: Granulomatosis with polyangiitis

The facts which were uncovered do not prove Dr Friedrich Wegener guilty of war crimes. However, the evidence suggests that Dr Wegener was, at least at some point of his career, a follower of the Nazi regime. Dr Wegener’s mentor, Martin Staemmler, was an ardent supporter of the racial hygiene. In addition, our data indicate that Dr Wegener was wanted by Polish authorities and that his files were forwarded to the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Finally, Dr Wegener worked in close proximity to the genocide machinery in Lodz.

Although many of the terms were replaced, some of the original terms are still commonly used. The most common is probably the Aspergers syndrome.

I know there is quite a lot of data in this blog. I do believe it is important to understand that by using these eponyms, we are still keeping the evil alive.

sources

https://www.ima.org.il/MedicineIMAJ/viewarticle.aspx?aid=1082

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1962844/

https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/36/4/706.full

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William Herschel-11 January 1787

Many people think that space exploration only started in the 20th century, but in fact it started centuries before.

The first telescope was said to be invented in 1608 in the Netherlands by an eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey..

Ever since that time there have been many scientists who made it their life’s work to investigate what is out there in that vast universe. William Herschel was one of those scientists. Herschel was a a German-born British[3] astronomer and composer.

I won’t be going to deep into his work in this blog, because I will do a follow up soon. However since today is the 234th anniversary of his discovery of 2 of Uranus’s moons. Six years after he had first discovered Uranus.

Titania

Oberon , also designated Uranus IV

As I mentioned earlier he was also a composer..

This is William Herschel’s Symphony No.17, in C major. Played by London Mozart Players.

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Source NASA

When Rock N Roll and Science collide.

It might surprise some of you that Rock N Roll and science can be, and indeed often are good bedfellows. Below are just a few examples.

Eels.

Eels an American rock band, formed in California in 1995 by singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mark Oliver Everett, known by the stage name E. It is the father of this same Mark Oliver Everett who was a highly regarded scientist. Hugh Everett III  was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he termed his “relative state” formulation.

After graduation in September 1956, He joined the Pentagon’s newly-forming Weapons Systems Evaluation Group . There is so much to say about this man ,but I won’t have enough space or time to cover all his life. I would highly recommend the watch the documentary “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives (2007)” about Hugh Everett III which is narrated by Mark Oliver Everett.

 

Brian May

Brian May one of the best guitarists in the world and of course known from the band Queen.  Brian has a Ph.D. in astrophysics. He studied physics and mathematics at Imperial College London and was in the process of getting his Ph.D. when Queen became big. Thirty years later, in 2007, he completed his dissertation.  The man who wrote “We Will Rock You” also wrote A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.

Greg Graffin

Greg Graffin is the lead singer with the LA based punk band “Bad Religion”, but he also double-majored in anthropology and geology at UCLA and got a master’s degree in geology from the same school. His Ph.D. in zoology comes from Cornell University and was titled “Monism, Atheism and the Naturalist Worldview: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology.”

Yes, sometimes Truth is stranger then fiction

Dexter Holland

Dexter Holland is best known as the lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and primary songwriter for the punk rock band The Offspring.

However he is also a molecular biologist.He was a doctoral student at the Laboratory of Viral Oncology and Proteomics Research,  In March 2013, Holland and co-authors published a paper in PLoS One regarding micro RNA in HIV genomes,titled “Identification of Human Micro RNA-Like Sequences Embedded within the Protein-Encoding Genes of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus”.

That must have worked wonders on his self esteem.

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Sources

IMDb

GizModo

WikiPedia

Why do we still blindly trust what scientists say?

Although this blog is set for the WWII and Holocaust narrative, it does tie in with scientific reports produced recently which do not necessarily tie in with that narrative. However it is important to highlight them to illustrate how we trust scientists without questioning them.

Let me say upfront, although people have accused me before for denying climate change, I absolutely do not deny climate change. As a matter of fact I totally believe it is happening, and why should that not be the case because climate change has been around since the dawning of time. We have had several ice ages. In the Jurassic era fossil evidence of ferns and cone-producing plants at the poles suggests that the climate in these regions was much warmer during the Jurassic period than in present day.

The issue I have with some current climate change reports is that this sort of evidence is often omitted , and it is often hard to determine who funds these reports and what agenda is at play.

Recently the EAT Lancet  report was published a report on on food, planet, health compiled by  more than 30 world-leading scientists from across the globe to reach a scientific consensus that defines a healthy and sustainable diet. The problem I have with this report it was funded by Dr Gunhild Stordalen, a former model and vegetarian who clearly had vested interest in producing a report endorsing her vegetarian lifestyle and company, Additionally it was reported she had flown these 30+ scientists all over the world to compile this reports. Producing a massive carbon foot print in the process. Yet no one questioned the validity of the report, just because it was compiled by scientists.

I sincerely mean this when I say , I am pretty sure all these people did this with the best intentions. But as history teaches us ‘best intentions’ used in a political setting can often become disasters and lead to awful crimes.

Where does this fit in to the WWII and Holocaust narrative, I hear you ask. Below are just some examples of scientists who in their mind were doing things with the best intentions, and they were given cart blanche by a government whose agenda was death and destruction, additionally hardly anyone asked questions because some of these things were done in the name of science.

The picture at the start of the blog is of Kurt H. Debus, seated between John F Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Kurt Debus was a German V-2 rocket scientist during World War II. He was also a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and Himmler’s SS, As a leading scientists of the V2 facilities in Peenemunde he would have been aware of the slave labot required to built the facilities, and more then likely will have actively ordered some of this slave labor himself. Yet after the war he was not convicted but got a great job with NASA.

The picture above is from Dr Asperger and one of his patients.Best known for his early studies on mental disorders, especially in children,and especially children with Autism. He was not a member of the Nazi party. Although he was not  a member ,he was a scientist who allied himself so closely with the Nazi ideology that he regularly referred children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, which was set up as a collecting point for children who failed to conform to the regime’s criteria of “worthy to live”.Nearly 800 children died at the clinic between 1940 and 1945, many of whom were murdered under the notorious child “euthanasia” scheme. Including Herta Schreiber, who suffered from encephalitis and died of pneumonia three months after her admittance to Spiegelgrund, on Asperger’s orders, a day after her third birthday.She had suffered from encephalitis.Encephalitis is a swelling of the brain and can be caused by infection or an allergic reaction.Assessed in late June 1941, the young girl suffered from ‘severe personality disorder’, ‘idiocy’ and ‘seizures’.

Asperger added that she ‘must be an unbearable burden to her mother’ and then recommended permanent placement at Spiegelgrund.

Herta was admitted to Spiegelgrund on 1 July 1941.

Dr. Hubertus Strughold MD, Ph.D was a German-born physiologist and prominent medical researcher. For his role in pioneering the study of the physical and psychological effects of manned spaceflight he became known as “The Father of Space Medicine” and every year  since 1963, the Space Medicine Association has given out the Hubertus Strughold Award to a top scientist or clinician for outstanding work in aviation medicine.

In October 1942, Strughold  attended a medical conference in Nuremberg at which SS physician Sigmund Rascher delivered a presentation outlining various medical experiments he had conducted, in conjunction with the Luftwaffe, in which prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were used as human test subjects.

These experiments included physiological tests during which camp inmates were immersed in freezing water, placed in air pressure chambers and made to endure invasive surgical procedures without anesthetic.

in 2004 following an investigation conducted by the Historical Committee of the German Society of Air and Space Medicine, uncovered evidence of oxygen deprivation experiments carried out by Strughold’s Institute for Aviation Medicine in 1943. According to these findings six epileptic children, between the ages of 11 and 13, were taken from the Nazi’s Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre to Strughold’s Berlin laboratory where they were placed in vacuum chambers to induce epileptic seizures in an effort to simulate the effects of high-altitude sicknesses, such as hypoxia.

These are just a few examples of scientists who were never questioned but caused so much harm, but yet their names are praised on the highest level. To be honest these 3 were not even the worse, far from it, there were many who carried out much more devastating experiments. Not only in Nazi Germany but also in Japan, unit 731 from the Japanese imperial army conducted brutal experiments in the name of science, And some of their ‘research’ is still used today.

I am not saying to turn your back to science, far from it. I want everyone to embrace science. I love science. especially when it comes to medical science and space exploration, But I do want to warn not to trust science blindly. Always question the motives behind the science and who benefits most of it. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat the mistakes from the past.

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Sources

Nasa

Eatforum

Sciencing

 

Dr.Robert Ritter and Eva Justin

One lesson that many people haven’t learned from the Nazi era is that scientist don’t always have the best interest of humanity at heart. They often are driven by their own curiosity rather then what’s best for their fellow man. Yet people often follow their advise blindly, without questioning motives or who funds the research carried out by scientists. This week I heard a newly elected politician say during an interview on the radio”Why wouldn’t we trust scientists?” A statement like that scares me. Not because I am anti scientists, far from it, science has made so many positive changes in our lives, but it scares me because it is accepted without being questioned. Science is like any other thing in life, don’t just accept things because someone says it is the right thing to do.

Dr.Robert Ritter was a German scientist. The Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit  in 1936. Which was  headed and run  by Dr. Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin.

Their task was  to conduct an extensive  in-depth study of the “Gypsy question  and to provide the regime with the data which would be used for policies to set up a new Reich “Gypsy law”. After a substantial fieldwork in the spring of 1936. The research consisted of interviews and medical examinations to ascertain the racial classification of the Roma, the Unit concluded that the majority of  Romani,  were not of “pure Gypsy blood”,  and posed a danger to German racial purity and should be deported or eliminated.

Ronert Ritter, who was  a psychiatrist,with a background in child psychiatry and the biology of criminality, hoped to determine the links between heredity and criminality. With funding from the German Association for Scientific Research and access to police records. In 1937  he began to systematically interview all the Gypsies living in Germany.

In a report of his research findings in 1940, Ritter concluded that 90 percent of the Gypsies native to Germany were “of mixed blood.” He described such Gypsies as “the products of mating with the German criminal asocial sub-proletariat.” He further characterized Gypsies as a “primitive” people incapable of real social adaptation.”

Eva Justin was an anthropologist, she specialised in so-called scientific racism. (a pseudo-scientific belief that verifiable evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination).

Justin was one of the first Registered Nurses to earn a PhD. She was able to speak the  Romani language, which earned  her the trust of Roma and Sinti people. Her doctoral thesis was titled “Lebensschicksale artfremd erzogener Zigeunerkinder und ihrer Nachkommen” (fates of alienated educated gypsy children and their descendants)

The children that Justin studied had been selected for deportation. However the transport was delayed to facilitate the conclusion of  her research and until she received her PhD. The children were then sent to the Gypsy family camp at Auschwitz on 6 May 1943. Just over 3 weeks later on May, 30 1943, Josef Mengele  became  chief medical officer of the Romani family camp  at Auschwitz. Some of the children were subjected to his experiments and most were eventually killed in the gas chamber. Approximately 39 or 40 children that Justin had studied were sent to Auschwitz , and all but four died before the end of the war, many before her thesis was published.

She was present when the Sinti and Roma deportations to concentration camps were organized.

Despite the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II, Ritter was not required to take responsibility for his actions during Nazi rule.

In post-war West Germany, Justin worked as a psychologist for the Frankfurt police, even acting as a consultant to the legal system for compensation cases for Holocaust survivors.She died from cancer in 1966 in Offenbach am Main, a city on the outskirts of Frankfurt. In 1958 the Frankfurt district attorney initiated an investigation into Justin’s wartime actions, but the investigation was closed in 1960.

 

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Sources

USHMM

Bundesarchiv

 

Hans Asperger—A Highly Regarded Physician who Ruthlessly Sent Children to Their Death

First, do no harm—is a key element of the Hippocratic oath—the oath physicians take. However, before and during  World War II, many physicians working for or with the Nazi regime were happy to forget that oath.

And not all of them were members of the Nazi party, as was Dr Hans Asperger, an Austrian doctor. He is best known for his early studies on mental disorders, especially in children and especially children with autism.

He was a pioneer in autism research whose name describes high-functioning people with the disorder, referred to as Asperger Syndrome had a previously unknown dark past that included sending children with disabilities to a euthanasia program run by the Nazi regime, according to new investigations into his long-lost files.

In a questionnaire from October 1940, Hans Asperger registered several memberships in Nazi-affiliated associations. However, he did not join the Nazi party.

Herwig Czech, from Vienna’s Medical University, had reported in an academic paper published in the open-access journal Molecular Autism following eight years of research into the paediatrician Hans Asperger.

Czech’s research revealed that Dr Asperger was not the courageous defender of his patients against euthanasia by the Nazis, as many had thought. In fact, it was far from it—he benefited from his cooperation with the regime and publicly legitimized race hygiene policies—including forced sterilization—according to a study published online on 19 April 2018 in the journal, Molecular Autism.

Asperger was a scientist who aligned himself so closely with the Nazi ideology that he regularly referred children to the Am Spiegelgrund Clinic, which was set up as a collecting point for children who failed to conform to the regime’s criteria of worthy to live. Nearly 800 children died at the clinic between 1940 and 1945, many of whom were murdered under the notorious child euthanasia scheme.

Hundreds were either drugged or gassed to death from 1940 to 1945. Even the children authorised for treatment were not killed immediately as a rule, but were used, sometimes for months, in scientific research.

Among Czech’s findings is a photo of the distraught face of Herta Schreiber, who died of pneumonia three months after her admittance to Spiegelgrund, on Asperger’s orders, a day after her third birthday. She had suffered from encephalitis. Encephalitis is a swelling of the brain and can be caused by infection or an allergic reaction. Assessed in late June 1941, the young girl suffered from a severe personality disorder, idiocy and seizures. Asperger added, “She must be an unbearable burden to her mother,” and then recommended permanent placement at Spiegelgrund.

Herta was admitted to Spiegelgrund on 1 July 1941.

On 8 August, she was reported to the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses, the secret organisation behind child euthanasia. With zero chance of recovery and no shortened life expectancy, she was recommended for the program and the euthanasia experts viewed this as an unacceptable combination. On 2 September, a day after her third birthday, Herta died of pneumonia, the most common cause of death at Spiegelgrund. A specimen of her brain was found in a preparation jar in the clinic’s basement in the 1990s and buried in 2002.

“There was no evidence that Asperger deliberately targeted euthanasia for the patients with distinct psychological characteristics he had labelled autistic psychopaths, under the diagnosis for which he became famous,” said Czech. But his diagnoses proved burdensome for many of his patients, even years after the collapse of the Nazi regime. Asperger continued working as a doctor for more than three decades.

The term Asperger Syndrome first came up in London in 1981, by Dr Lorna Wing. She and other scientists, clinicians, and the broader autism community, were unaware of Hans Asperger’s close alliance with, and support of, the Nazi programme of compulsory sterilisation and euthanasia.

Of course, this does not reflect in any way, shape or form on those who are diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, but I do believe we should start looking more critically at the work of scientists of the Nazi era.

Hans Asperger (front row, right) with his medical colleagues in Vienna in 1933. Photograph: Medical University of Vienna/Josephinum)

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Sources

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The Guardian

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Jan Ingenhousz-Scientist

This blog is about one of the best known scientists in the history of the world,Jan Ingenhousz.

Jan Ingenhousz or Ingen-Housz  (8 December 1730 – 7 September 1799) was a Dutch physiologist, biologist and chemist.

He is best known for discovering photosynthesis by showing that light is essential to the process by which green plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. He also discovered that plants, like animals, have cellular respiration.In his lifetime he was known for successfully inoculating the members of the Habsburg family in Vienna against smallpox in 1768 and subsequently being the private counsellor and personal physician to the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.

Okay, lets be fair. He actually wasn’t a well known scientist at all and most of you(including me) probably only saw his name for the first time today, either because of this blog or more likely because Google reminded us of his Birthday today.

Photosynthesis is so essential to life on this planet that it’s easy to forget we didn’t even know about it 250 years ago.

The process of plants converting water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen, using light as a catalyst, was first discovered by Dutch scientist Jan Ingenhousz in 1779.

Ingenhousz began studying medicine at the age of 16, and spent the first part of his career developing a vaccination for smallpox.

In the 1760s he travelled to London and on to Hertfordshire, where he immunised 700 village people in a successful effort to combat an epidemic.

This involved the fairly gruesome process of pricking the skin with a needle that had been dipped into the pus of an infected person’s wound.It worked, however, and after word of Ingenhousz’s success spread, he was invited by the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa to inoculate her entire family.

Over the years, he turned his attention to other scientific pursuits including energy generation, particle motion and gaseous exchange in plants.

Alhough it was already known that plants produced and absorbed gases, it was Ingenhousz who first noticed that oxygen was produced by leaves in sunlight, and carbon dioxide produced in darkness.

This demonstrated that some of the mass of plants comes from the air, and not only the water and nutrients in the soil.

He published his findings in 1779, significantly influencing further research on plant life in the centuries to follow.

Today’s Google doodle focuses on Ingenhousz’s lasting contributions to our understanding of the natural world, on what would have been his 287th birthday.

He died September 7, 1799, Bowood, Wiltshire, England.

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Wolfram Sievers-MD of Sick scientists

Wolfram Sievers was the Reich Manager of the Ancestral Heritage Society (“Ahnenerbe”) and Director of its Institute for Military Scientific Research (Institut fuer Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung)

In order to understand how sick and twisted this man and his colleagues were I will demonstrate this not by horrific images but by a letter he send to another ‘sceintist’ Dr Brandt. The letter was used in the trial against Wolfram Sievers during the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg following the end of World War II(the picture below shows his ‘comrade’ Dr Barndt, during the trial)

“Subject: Securing of skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars for the purpose of scientific research at the Reich University, Strassburg.

We have a nearly complete collection of skulls of all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available, with the result that it is impossible to arrive at precise conclusions from examining them. The war in the east now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish- Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive but characteristic subhuman, we have the chance now to compile good, scientific documents.

The best practical method for obtaining and collecting this skull material could be handled by directing the Wehrmacht to turn over alive all captured Jewish- Bolshevik commissars to the Field Police. They, in turn, are to be given special directives to inform a certain office at regular intervals of the numbers and place of detention of these captured Jews and to give them close attention and care until a special delegate arrives. This special delegate, who will be in charge of securing the material (a junior physician of the Wehrmacht or even the Field Police or a student of medicine equipped with a motor car and driver), will be required to take a previously established series of photographs, make anthropological measurements and, in addition, determine as far as possible other personal data of the prisoners.

Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will separate the head from the body and will forward it to its proper point of destination in an hermetically sealed tin can, especially made for this purpose and filled with a conserving fluid. Having arrived at the laboratory, the comparison tests and anatomical research on the skull, as well as determination of the race membership and of pathological features of the skull form, the form and size of the brain, etc., can proceed by means of photos, measurements and other data supplied on the head, and the skull itself.”

That was the report which you forwarded to Brandt?

A. Yes, that was the report of Professor Hirt.”

 

It was Hirt who mainly carried out the ‘collecting’ but it was Sievers who was his direct superior and it was his wish to have a collection after the war of a extinct race.

Sievers was sentenced to death on 20 August 1947 for crimes against humanity, and hanged on 2 June 1948, at Landsberg prison in Bavaria.

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