Social Sciences Project Abstract
THE EFFECT OF NAZI POLITICS ON THE GERMAN MEDICAL PROFESSION DURING WORLD WAR II
Presenter:
David Jou, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 1500 West Sullivan Road, Aurora IL 60506; dsjou@imsa.edu
Advisors:
Leon Lederman, Ph.D., Resident Scholar, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 1500 West Sullivan Road, Aurora IL 60506; lederman@fnal.gov; 630-907-5046
Judith Scheppler, Ph.D., Coordinator of Student Inquiry, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 1500 West Sullivan Road, Aurora IL 60506; quella@imsa.edu; 630-907-5899
Joanne Wallmuth, Science, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 1500 West Sullivan Road, Aurora IL 60506; wallmuth@imsa.edu; 630-907-5046
Abstract:
The atrocities committed by physicians in Nazi concentration
camps during World War II and the Hitler regime, exemplify the horror and
depravity that can readily take place, when professional ethics and morals are
replaced with faulty political ideology and propaganda. At the end of the
nineteenth century, Germany's
social Darwinists emerged to power, and by the mid-1920s their rhetoric of
racial hygiene had merged with Nazi ideology to create an environment
patronizing acts of violence and brutality in the name of military research and
ethnic cleansing.
The victims slaughtered, numbered in the hundreds of
thousands, with only a handful surviving. Though, seemingly valid, their
experimentations on high altitude, the effect of cold, potability of processed
seawater, along with the effects of mustard gas and phosphorous burn, were only
a guise to torture and exterminate the socially unfit
on a grand scale. The
German medical professions' full cooperation with the Nazi regime began with
accepting an outwardly harmless government philosophy that judged people "based
upon
their perceived costs and benefits to
the state." This distorted ideology served as justification for numerous
atrocities committed in the name of scientific research.