Medicine and the Nazis

From 1933 to 1945, German physicians, bioscientists, and nurses – the best in the world at the time – willingly committed the most egregious violations of medical and professional ethics in the name of Holocaust medicine. Guided by eugenic theories of race, they sterilized 400,000 citizens against their will, “euthanized” 200,000 disabled German children and adults, and created the gas chambers and crematoria that were used for the mass murder of 6 million Jews, Poles, and Gypsies in the “final solution.” Without the enthusiastic support of physicians, nurses, bioscientists, and healthcare policy makers, the Holocaust might not have happened. For Holocaust survivors, their families, and the medical community, it is important to remember this time period and learn from it, so we can be better equipped to do no harm.

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NAZI HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION
WIKIPEDIA

Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners, including children, by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps in the early to mid 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Chief target populations included Romani, Sinti, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs, disabled Germans, and most prominently of all, Jews from across Europe.

Nazi Physicians and their assistants forced prisoners into participating; they did not willingly volunteer and no consent was given for the procedures. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, trauma, disfigurement or permanent disability, and as such are considered examples of medical torture.

At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various hazardous experiments that were designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel who had been injured, and to advance the Nazi racial ideology.[1] Aribert Heim conducted similar medical experiments at Mauthausen. Carl Værnet is known to have conducted experiments on homosexual prisoners in attempts to "cure" homosexuality.

After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics. The Nazi physicians in the Doctors' trial argued that military necessity justified their torturous experiments, and compared their victims to collateral damage from Allied bombings. But this defense, which was in any case rejected by the Tribunal, cannot apply to the twin experiments of Josef Mengele, which were performed on children and had no connection to military necessity.

DOCTORS
WIKIPEDIA

When the Nazi government came to power it purged Germany of its 6,000 to 7,000 Jewish doctors. Reportedly more than 7% of all German physicians became members of the Nazi party during World War II, a far higher percentage than the general population. In 1942 more than 38,000 German doctors, half the total number of doctors, had joined the Nazi party. While most of these doctors were physicians, some were psychiatrists, and some held doctorates (PhD.'s) in biology, anthropology, or similarly related fields.

Psychiatrists/Doctors who were working for the state, and not for their patient, saw extermination of their patients as the correct solution to the problem of mental illness and the genetically defective.

"The participation in the ‘betrayal of Hippocrates’ had a broad basis within the German medical profession. Without the doctors' active help, the Holocaust could not have happened." wrote E Ernst in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin was the founder of the psychiatric genetics field and was also a founder of the German racial hygiene movement.

Killing and experimentation became medical procedures as they were performed by licensed doctors. A doctor was present at all the mass killings for legal reasons. The excuse that there wasn't any international law to differentiate between legal and illegal human experimentation, was used in the Doctors' trial. Due to the lack of international laws to govern doctors, the Nuremberg Code (1947) was created.

After the war the German Medical Association blamed Nazi atrocities on a small group of 350 criminal doctors.

Doctors such as Werner Heyde[ and Robert Ley, changed their name after the war to avoid responsibility. Dr Walter Schreiber first used by the Soviets was later taken into Operation Paperclip in 1951.

Alphabetical List of the Nazi physicians.

For more detail click on the links below

Action 14f13

Action 14f13, also called "Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment") 14f13", and Aktion 14f13, was a campaign by Nazi Germany to murder Nazi concentration camp prisoners. Also called "invalid" or "prisoner euthanasia", the campaign culled the sick, elderly and those deemed no longer fit for work from the rest of the prisoners in a selection process, after which they were killed. The Nazi campaign was in operation from 1941 to 1944 and later covered other groups of concentration camp prisoners, as well.

Action T4

Aktion T4 (German, pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn teː fiːɐ]) was the postwar designation for a programme of involuntary euthanasia (murder) in Nazi Germany.

[a] The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in the spring of 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with

[b] Under the programme certain German physicians were authorized to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (Gnadentod). In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of his Chancellery, (not the Reich Chancellery Reichskanzlei) and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out the killing,

Viktor Brack

Viktor Hermann Brack (9 November 1904 – 2 June 1948) was a German Nazi war criminal, the organiser of the Euthanasia Programme, Action T4, where the Nazi state systematically murdered over 70,000 disabled German and Austrian people. Following this, Brack was one of the men responsible for the gassing of Jews in the extermination camps, and he conferred with Odilo Globocnik about the practical implementation of the Final Solution. Brack was sentenced to death in 1947 and executed in 1948.

From a middle-class family, he became a member of the NSDAP and SS from the age of 25, and held increasing positions of responsibility in Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin. He was a senior colonel in the SS by the age of 35.

Doctors' Trial

The Doctors' trial (officially United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.) was the first of 12 trials for war crimes of German doctors that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany, after the end of World War II. These trials were held before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The trials are collectively known as the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials", formally the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).

Twenty of the 23 defendants were medical doctors (Viktor Brack, Rudolf Brandt, and Wolfram Sievers were Nazi officials), and were accused of having been involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia. Josef Mengele, one of the leading Nazi doctors, had evaded capture.

The judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal I, were Walter B. Beals (presiding judge) from Washington, Harold L. Sebring from Florida, and Johnson T. Crawford from Oklahoma, with Victor C. Swearingen, a former special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States, as an alternate judge. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Telford Taylor and the chief prosecutor was James M. McHaney. The indictment was filed on October 25, 1946; the trial lasted from December 9 that year until August 20, 1947. Of the 23 defendants, seven were acquitted and seven received death sentences; the remainder received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.

LINKS TO THE FOLLOWING CAN BE ACCESSED AT Wikipedia

Dr. Otto Ambros of chemistry. At the IG Farben Trial was found guilty of War crimes and crimes against humanity and lived until 1990.

Dr. Klaus Schilling not a Nazi and worked in the Dachau concentration camp. He was executed on May 28, 1946.

Dr. Hermann Stieve, German physician who did not join the Nazi party. Those the Nazis imprisoned and executed became his research material.

Dr Shirō Ishii

Dr Otto Georg Thierack

Dr Karl/Carl Krauch Doctor is written on his arrest photo. Dr of chemistry.

Dr Albert Widmann Dr of chemistry. "Dr Widmann operated the gassing apparatus."

Glossary of Nazi Germany

Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre

Hamburg Ravensbrück trials

Josef Kramer not to be confused with Dr Johann Kremer

List of Axis personnel indicted for war crimes

List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust

List of medical eponyms with Nazi associations

List of Nazi concentration camps

List of Nazi Party leaders and officials

List of former Nazi Party members

Mass suicides in 1945 Nazi Germany

Nazi human experimentation

Nuremberg Code

Responsibility for the Holocaust

T4-Gutachter names of medical experts to enact the "euthanasia" program.

Zyklon B

THE OATH OF HIPPOCRATES:
UC Santa Barbara

THE OATH OF HIPPOCRATES (MORE COMMONLY KNOWN AS THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH) IS THE OATH (OR PROMISE) THAT ALL DOCTORS TAKE PRIOR TO BECOMING A DOCTOR. IT CONSISTS OF PROMISING THAT ONE WILL ONLY USE THEIR POWER TO HELP THOSE IN NEED AND THAT NO MATTER WHAT, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES, WILL A DOCTOR USE HIS OR HER POWER IN A MALIGNANT WAY OR WITH THE INTENTION OF PURPOSING HURTING SOMEONE ELSE.

I SWEAR BY APOLLO PHYSICIAN, BY ASCLEPIUS, BY HEALTH, BY PANACEA, AND BY ALL THE GODS AND GODDESSES, MAKING THEM MY WITNESSES, THAT I WILL CARRY OUT, ACCORDING TO MY ABILITY AND JUDGMENT, THIS OATH AND THIS INDENTURE....I WILL USE TREATMENT TO HELP THE SICK ACCORDING TO MY ABILITY AND JUDGMENT, BUT NEVER WITH A VIEW TO INJURY AND WRONGDOING. I WILL KEEP PURE AND HOLY BOTH MY LIFE AND MY ART. IN WHATSOEVER HOUSES I ENTER, I WILL ENTER TO HELP THE SICK, AND I WILL ABSTAIN FROM ALL INTENTIONAL WRONGDOING AND HARM....NOW IF I CARRY OUT THIS OATH, AND BREAK IT NOT, MAY I GAIN FOREVER REPUTATION AMONG ALL MEN FOR MY LIFE AND FOR MY ART; BUT IF I TRANSGRESS IT AND FORSWEAR MYSELF, MAY THE OPPOSITE BEFALL ME.

This quote proves ironic to the Nazi doctors who broke it many times with every euthanasia camp built, or every medicine ever tested on patients, or every experiment carried on to the patients.

MEDICINE AFTER THE HOLOCAUSTFIRST, DO NO HARM
CENTER FOR MEDICINE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST (CMATH)

MISSION

WHY TEACH “MEDICINE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST”?

Although German violations of the most basic medical ethics are well documented, they are virtually unknown by today’s students in the health sciences. It’s rarely discussed that American eugenicists played a critical role in the development of German “racial hygiene” policies. American physicians, philanthropists, politicians, lawyers, and public health officials provided indispensable legislative models, financial aid, and moral support in the 1920s and 1930s for Germany’s political philosophy of “applied biology.”

The Hippocratic Oath, the bedrock of medical ethics, was blatantly violated by the physicians of Nazi Germany when they chose to treat the health of the nation rather than the health of the individual. Simply put, Nazi Germans substituted their government’s eugenic public health policy for the best interests of their patients. The doctor-patient relationship was radically transformed into the Nazi eugenics state-Volkskörper relationship with disastrous results for those with presumed transmissible genetic disabilities.

Although healthcare in Western democracies is arguably the best in the world today, we should pause and reflect upon the similarities to German medicine ethics in the 1930s. There is a resurgence of interest in eugenics and biological determinism following the success of the Human Genome Project, violating medical ethics. Controversy persists regarding abortion, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryonic stem cell research, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The original Hippocratic Oath is in disrepute. Healthcare ethics is being formulated at a centralized, national level.

The mission of the Center for Medicine after the Holocaust (CMATH) is to challenge doctors, nurses, and bioscientists to personally confront the medical ethics of the Holocaust and apply that knowledge to contemporary practice and research, being mindful of the Hippocratic Oath with every step. CMATH is concerned that healthcare personnel, like all human beings, have the capacity to believe they are doing good when they are actually doing harm.

By studying the past, we hope to provide knowledge for today that will prevent the repetition of previous errors and lead to wisdom in future doctors, nurses, bioscientists, and healthcare policy makers so that they will provide better care for their patients and fellow citizens. If the best physicians, nurses, and scientists of the early 20th century could sacrifice their patients for utopian goals, can we be certain that we will not do the same.

INTRODUCTION TO NAZI EUTHANASIA
HOLOCAUST RESEARCH PROJECT (CLICK LINK FOR MORE DETAIL)

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines euthanasia as “the action of inducing a quiet and easy death.” This grant of a “mercy death” may occur with the consent of the individual concerned, is then termed “voluntary” “euthanasia” and was the meaning originally given to the word. However, euthanasia also came to be termed “involuntary”, as for example when a patient is suffering from an incurable and painful disease, or is in a coma and is considered unlikely to regain consciousness. In such circumstances, a third party or parties may determine to put an end to the patient’s suffering.

The circumstances are, in general, that the person involved is no longer capable of making up his or her mind and/or to express his or her ultimate wish. But Nazi ““euthanasia”” was quite different in conception and practice from the dictionary definition, old or new. For it was derived, not from humanitarian or compassionate reasoning, but from pseudo-scientific theory and ruthless economic policy. The Nazis destroyed “life unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes Leben) as they termed it, not as an act of mercy, but as part of a strategy to murder that part of the population least able to defend itself.

That policy was directed not only at German citizens, but at those of other eastern European countries which fell under Nazi hegemony, particularly Poland. The ““euthanasia”” programme formed an essential part of the evolving Nazi policy of extermination on a massive scale. That policy reached its apogee with the murder of the Jews, but had the programme arrived at its intended conclusion, the eventual death toll would have been immeasurably greater.

The Nazis did not create this twisted version of euthanasia. Its roots lay in a selective reading of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, and the distorted “scientific” thinking to which this gave birth. The term "eugenics", a thesis which has no scientific basis, was coined in 1881 by the British naturalist and mathematician Francis Galton. It was described as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding."

This took the concept of “survival of the fittest”, a fundamental element of Nazi ideology, to its logical conclusion. Eugenics developed within the larger movement of Social Darwinism, which applied Darwin's "struggle for survival" to human affairs. The fundamental tenet of the eugenics movement was that restricting the ability of “inferior” people to procreate whilst maximizing that of “superior” individuals, would benefit society. Attention was focused on the feebleminded (an inaccurate term covering everything from mental retardation to alcoholism), labelled as idiots, imbeciles, or morons. It was suggested that there existed a relationship between low intelligence and both immorality and crime.

NAZI RACISM
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM,

The Nazis used public displays to spread their ideas of race. The chart shown here is titled "The Biology of Growth," and is labeled "Stages of Growth for Members of the Nordic Race."

For years before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he was obsessed with ideas about race. In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial "purity" and in the superiority of the "Germanic race"—what he called an Aryan "master race." He pronounced that his race must remain pure in order to one day take over the world. For Hitler, the ideal "Aryan" was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.

When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The Nazis began to put their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human race could be improved by limiting the reproduction of people considered "inferior." Beginning in 1933, German physicians were allowed to perform forced sterilizations, operations making it impossible for the victims to have children. Among the targets of this public program were Roma (Gypsies), an ethnic minority numbering about 30,000 in Germany, and handicapped individuals, including the mentally ill and people born deaf and blind. Also victimized were about 500 African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African colonial soldiers in the Allied armies that occupied the German Rhineland region after World War I.

Hitler and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous "race," which "lived off" the other races and weakened them. After Hitler took power, Nazi teachers in school classrooms began to apply the "principles" of racial science. They measured skull size and nose length, and recorded the color of their pupils' hair and eyes to determine whether students belonged to the true "Aryan race." Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) students were often humiliated in the process.

JULY 14, 1933 - NAZI STATE ENACTS RACIAL PURITY LAW

Believing that "racial purity" requires state regulation of human reproduction, Adolf Hitler issues the Law to Prevent Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. Among other provisions, the measure prohibits "undesirables" from having children and mandates forced sterilization of certain physically or mentally impaired individuals. The law will affect some 400,000 people over the next 18 months.

RESULTS OF SECRET NAZI BREEDING PROGRAM:
ORDINARY FOLKS
NEW YORK TIMES, BY MARK LANDER. 7 NOV, 2006

WERNIGERODE, Germany, Nov. 4 — For Guntram Weber, the journey that led to this quaint town of horse-drawn carts and half-timbered houses was long, wrenching, and anything but redemptive.

Four years ago, Mr. Weber discovered that his father was not, as his mother had told him, a young soldier who died honorably on the battlefield during World War II. Instead, he was a high-ranking SS officer, who oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of people while stationed in what is now western Poland.

“He died peacefully in Argentina, with his old comrades standing at his grave and raising their right arms,” Mr. Weber said, his voice thick with anger and grief. “A racist is forever a racist.”

As Mr. Weber, 63, told his story to a hushed room of mostly gray-haired men and women here, there were sympathetic nods, but little surprise. Most had their own tales of deceit and discovery, life histories that proved to be homespun fairy tales, the dark truth buried under layers of silence.

These are the children of the Lebensborn, an SS program devised to propagate Aryan traits. On this chilly weekend, they gathered here in a corner of central Germany to share their stories, and to speak publicly, for the first time, about the horror of finding out they had been bred to be the next generation of Nazi elite.

“This is the opposite example of the Holocaust,” said Gisela Heidenreich, 63, a family therapist from Bavaria, whose mother was unmarried and whose father, she later discovered, was a senior SS officer. “The idea was to further the Aryan race by whatever means were available.”

Lebensborn, or spring of life, refers to a series of clinics scattered throughout Germany and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women, most of them single, went to give birth in secret. They were cared for by doctors and nurses employed by the SS, the Nazi Party’s feared paramilitary unit.

One such clinic sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode, a remote town near the Harz Mountains. The building, long abandoned now, was part of a bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so people who turned out for the meeting of an association known as Traces of Life.

To be accepted into the Lebensborn, pregnant women had to have the right racial characteristics — blonde hair and blue eyes — prove that they had no genetic disorders, and be able to prove the identity of the father, who had to meet similar criteria. They had to swear fealty to Nazism, and were indoctrinated with Hitler’s ideology while they were in residence.

Many of the fathers were SS officers with their own families. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, encouraged his men to sire children outside of marriage as a way of building a German master race.

About 6,000 to 8,000 people were born in these clinics in Germany between 1936 and 1945. Because of the program’s secrecy, most were not told for decades the circumstances of their births or the identities of their fathers, which were not recorded on their birth certificates. Some still do not know the truth.

Only in the last 20 years, as the wall of silence began crumbling, have researchers been able to document the Lebensborn program. They have knocked down some prurient myths: that these clinics were Nazi bordellos, stocked with flaxen-haired breeders ready to mate with SS men.

“The children were conceived in all the usual ways: love affairs, one-night stands, and so forth,” said Dorothee Schmitz-Köster, who has written a book about Lebensborn. “Abortion was not legal in Germany then, and in many cases, the women did not want to keep the babies.”

Some of the mothers gave them up for adoption to SS families. Others raised the children alone, telling them that their fathers had been killed in the war. Having given birth to illegitimate babies in a fervently Nazi setting, the mothers faced a double stigma in postwar Germany.

Mr. Weber, a creative writing teacher in Berlin, is still struggling to come to grips with his recently uncovered roots. Some hints from family members, followed by research, led him to the truth. Among his more unpleasant discoveries: his godfather was Himmler.

“Most grew up knowing they had a secret,” Ms. Schmitz-Köster said. “They were angry at their mothers, because they had been lied to or abandoned. Some feel shame. There are also a small number who are proud of being Lebensborn. They feel they are part of an elite.”

For Lebensborn children born outside Germany, life was even harsher. In Nazi-occupied Norway, for example, the SS established a clinic because Himmler valued the appearance of Scandinavians. Those babies, born of Norwegian mothers and German soldiers, were branded as children of the enemy after the war, and faced pitiless discrimination.

Other children who met Himmler’s pernicious racial standards were kidnapped as infants from their families in Nazi-occupied countries and sent to Germany, where proper Nazi families raised them.

If anything, the reunion served as proof that racial engineering has its limits. The Germans here looked no different from those at any other gathering of Germans in their golden years: the men with salt-and-pepper beards and balding pates, the women with eyeglasses and frosted hair.

“I’m really an exception,” said Ms. Heidenreich, a tall woman with long blond hair and bright blue eyes.

Ms. Heidenreich, the first of the Lebensborn children to write a book about her experience, argues that the program, sinister as it was, has echoes in today’s world. With advances in genetics, she notes, discriminating parents will soon be able to select traits in their unborn children.

Given that possibility, she said, the evils of the Nazi era must not be allowed to recede into the history books. “If we start engineering blond-haired, blue-eyed babies, can we blame just Hitler?” she said.

Ms. Heidenreich was born in a clinic in Oslo, although her parents were German. Her mother chose to give birth there to get as far away as possible from the village in Bavaria where she had grown up. Ms. Heidenreich was not told about her background but became suspicious after watching a television documentary about the Lebensborn children.

Today, she has trouble reconciling the kindly figure her mother became in later years with the committed Nazi she had been. “She was a lovely grandmother, even if she was a horrible mother,” she said.

Not everybody has had a fraught experience. Ruthild Gorgass, who was born here, said her mother told her about the circumstances of her birth when she was a teenager. Ms. Gorgass had some contact with her father, a manager for a chemical factory, who had another family.

Her mother left her a photo album with an account of her stay in Wernigerode. She had recalled it as an idyllic time, though she had expressed distaste for her daughter’s naming ceremony, in which the baby was placed before an altar bearing a swastika.

“I was really lucky because I had a talkative mother,” said Ms. Gorgass, 64, a retired physical therapist.

As she thumbed through the album, she put on a pair of reading glasses. Peering over them, she said with smile: “My eyes aren’t perfect. We’ve got all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people have.”

LEBENSBORN ('THE SPRING OF LIFE')
FOR THE 'MASTER RACE
10 INTERESTING DETAILS ABOUT THIS NAZI PROGRAM
TOPTENZ, GUEST AUTHOR, JULY 31, 2015

Nazi SS Leader Heinrich Himmler developed the Lebensborn (meaning Wellspring of Life) Program for the Third Reich. The program, which began in December 1935 and continued until the end of the Second World War, persuaded women of so-called pure blood, to mate with single and married SS Officers and ultimately give birth to blonde, blue-eyed children.

Himmler oversaw the Lebensborn Program throughout its tenure and frequently visited Lebensborn homes. He was arrested as a war criminal when the Second World War ended and killed himself by swallowing a cyanide capsule on May 23, 1945 while he was imprisoned.

10. The Goal of the Program

Beginning in the early 1900s, Germany’s birthrate was in decline. Due to tough economic times, and a shortage of marriage-age men, particularly after Germany’s defeat on November 11, 1918 in the First World War, the use of birth control and women seeking abortions became common practices. By 1933, the birthrate per thousand was only 14.7%.

The Lebensborn Program was a method for the Nazi’s to reverse the birthrate decline and at the same time create a superior Aryan master1 race, which would dominate Europe as part of German Fuehrer Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, or Thousand Year Reich. Hitler’s plan was to complete the last third of a trio that included the First Reich (the Holy Roman Empire), and the Second Reich (the Hohenzollern Dynasty), both of which lasted about a thousand years each. As it turned out, the Third Reich only lasted 11 years.

9. Lebensborn Homes Locations

Pregnant women who could prove their children’s Aryan lineage were given special financial support and special treatment by the government. Alternatively, they could leave their children in Lebensborn homes, where the children would receive the best of care and, of course, a Nazi education.

Initially, there were 10 Lebensborn homes and all were located within Germany. The first opened in 1936 in Steinhoering, a small village near Munich.

As World War II raged on and the Nazi’s began to invade and conquer other countries in Europe, it gave Himmler an opportunity to expand the Lebensborn program. Eventually, nine Lebensborn homes were added in Norway, two in Austria and one each in Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg and Denmark. Himmler established more than 20 of these Lebensborn institutions altogether.

8. The Kidnappings

The Lebensborn Program was also responsible for the kidnapping of thousands of European children and many of these children were from Poland and Slovenia. Any children who looked Aryan enough were abducted and those who had virtually no Jewish traits were “Germanized”.

On July 25, 1942, Himmler instructed the SS to send children from Slovenia to Germany. 600 children between the ages of six and 12 were given to Lebensborn officials. In his book, Give a Child to the Fuehrer – the Lebensborn Organization, German historian Volker Koop says he found a list of these Slovenian children in a federal archive along with notes from SS Captain George Roedel who marked next to each child’s name “parents shot”.

These “Germanized” children were told that their parents were dead or had abandoned them and they were given new identities, including new names, birth certificates and even fake lineage and were then sent to Germany to live in institutions or with German families. Children two to six years old were sent to Lebensborn homes. The children who could not be “Germanized” were sent to concentration camps.

7. The Fathers

SS Officers needed state consent to marry and this consent depended on the officer’s prospective wife meeting the strict Lebensborn standards.

In 1936, an ordinance was issued advising every SS member that he should father at least four children. Many of the fathers of Lebensborn children were married members of the SS (the Nazi Party’s most feared military unit) with their own families, who had obeyed Himmler’s order to spread their Aryan seed, even out of wedlock. Due to the secrecy of the program, the identities of the fathers were not recorded on birth certificates.

6. The Mothers

If a woman wanted to participate in the Lebensborn Program, she had to have blonde hair and blue eyes, no trace of any genetic disorders and she had to demonstrate her Aryan ancestry, as far back as her grandparents. She also had to prove the identity of the father, who als1o had to have the proper racial characteristics. Only 40% of the women who applied to join the program actually passed the racial purity test. More than 60% of Lebensborn mothers were unmarried.

The Lebensborn Program had its own registry office system to keep the mother’s and father’s identities a secret and most of these documents were burned at the end of the Second World War.

The Nazi’s believed that women from Norway were perfect for their program, as most were fair-haired with blue eyes. It is estimated that about 50,000 Norwegian women had affairs with German soldiers. They were thought of as German Whores, by other Norwegians and were disciplined with treatments like publicly having their heads shaved, once the war ended. Their children were taken away from them and most never saw them again.

5. The Doctors

Doctors were a vital part of the Lebensborn Program. It is believed that Medical Director Gregor Ebner went to school with and was a close friend of Himmler’s. At the Steinhoering home, he not only supervised the births of 3,000 Lebensborn babies, but also carried out reproduction experiments on many women. Ebner was captured near the end of the Second World War and was tried for crimes against humanity, war crimes and other crimes. When he died in 1974, he still held firm to his Nazi beliefs.

Hundreds of doctors (and nurses) at Lebensborn homes were there not only to care for the children but to also indoctrinate them as Nazis. They also helped determine whether a child was German enough to be adopted or sent to his or her death in a concentration camp.

4. The Children

About 8,000 Lebensborn children were born in Germany. They were baptized in ritualistic ceremonies involving an SS dagger and their parents (adoptive or otherwise) promising the child’s loyalty to the Nazi cause.

Those children who were left by their single mothers in Lebensborn homes were taken care of by doctors and nurses who were employed by the SS. Many were eventually given to rich Nazi families to rear as their own.

In Norway, between 1940 and 1945, approximately 8,000 to 10,000 Lebensborn babies were born and about half of those were born in Lebensborn institutions. The Nazi Party automatically considered these children German.

3. The Lawsuits

When the Second World War ended and Germany pulled out of Norway, there were thousands of Lebensborn babies who, through no fault of their own, were either unwanted or had been taken away from their mothers, many of whom had been arrested because they’d had children with German soldiers.

Some of these unwanted Lebensborn children from Norway say that they were locked up in state sanctioned institutions, subjected to medical experimentation, sexually abused and made to feel shame because of who they were.

A group of Lebensborn children sued the Norwegian government and some settlements have been made. Norway’s Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik made a public apology for the state’s mistreatment of Lebensborn children on December 31, 1999.

2. Famous Lebensborn Babies

Folker Heinecke, a blonde haired, blue-eyed little boy, was kidnapped from the Crimea in 1942. Himmler was apparently fascinated by him and, as was common among kidnapped Lebensborn babies, h1ad him examined by German doctors to make sure he didn’t show any traces of Judaism.

Adalbert Heinecke, a wealthy and honorary SS member, adopted Folker. During the past 60 years, Folker has searched for his birth parents and was one of the Lebensborn children featured in a 2009 BBC Film called Children of the Master Race.

American actress Marta Kristen was born Bridget Annalisa Rusanen on February 26, 1945. Her mother was from Finland her father was a German soldier. Bridget was only two months old when her mother left her in an orphanage in Oslo, Norway. In 1949, an American couple adopted her and her name was changed to Marta. In l969, Marta found her birth mother, Helmi Rusanen, who was living in Finland. Marta appeared in many television shows, like Dr. Kildare, My Three Sons and Wagon Train in the 1960s and is probably most famous for her starring role as Judy Robinson in Lost in Space.

1. The Most Famous Lebensborn Baby

The most famous Lebensborn child is Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad, a founding member of the Swedish pop group Abba. Born on November 15, 1945, Anni-Frid’s father was a German sergeant named Alfred Haase. After the Second World War ended and afraid of retaliations against those who had any dealings with the Germans during the occupation of Norway, Anni-Frid’s Norwegian mother Synni Lyngstad and her maternal grandmother Arntine Lyngstad, took her and moved to Sweden. Soon after moving to Sweden, Synni died from kidney failure. Her grandmother raised Anni-Frid.

Anni-Frid had been told that her father had died during the war but he had actually survived and was a pastry chef living in Germany. She met Haase for the first time in September 1977. Haase died in 2009.

SS MEDICAL CORPS
WIKIPEDIA

EXPLOITATION AND MURDER

Between 1935 and 1938, the SS Medical Corps began to serve a more sinister purpose, with SS doctors assigned to concentration camps where they engaged in a variety of indescribably cruel human medical experiments. SS doctors were called upon in 1936 to assist with Germany's euthanasia program against the mentally disabled and physically handicapped in a program known confidentially as Operation T4. For example, they helped develop the first methods of gassing patients using carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of lorries (vans). Stemming from a secret memorandum signed into effect by Hitler authorizing the killing of "useless eaters" and people considered an economic burden on German society on 9 October 1939, Operation T4 eventually evolved into the Law for Euthanasia for the Incurably Ill. According to historian Götz Aly, the first commandants of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka came out of Operation T4 and "were on its payroll."

In 1938, the SS formed its own Medical Academy in Berlin to train medical personnel and physicians who would serve with the SS-VT, the forerunner of the Waffen-SS.[6] Doctors serving with the Waffen-SS were highly trained both in medical skills and combat tactics with many such doctors receiving high combat awards. During the war's progression, the Waffen-SS had a continuously developing structure for physicians which was highly complex, so sometime in August 1943, Himmler united all the medical branches of the SS and placed them under the command of the Reicharzt-SS much like the Surgeon-General of the army.

Often times personnel in the medical units of the SS performed duties not typically associated with traditional medicine as their primary responsibility once the war began was nothing less than the institutionalized medical genocide of anyone considered an enemy of the Nazi regime.People deemed inferior or undesirable became human guinea pigs and were exploited for scientific research by SS doctors as they conducted inhumane medical experiments at the camps.Human medical experiments, the most notorious of which occurred at Dachau concentration camp and Auschwitz reached their zenith during the war. Such experiments ranged from vivisections, sterilization experiments, infectious disease research, freezing experiments, as well as many other excruciating medical procedures often performed without anesthetic. During this period of time one of the most infamous SS doctors, Doctor Josef Mengele, served as Head Medical Officer of Auschwitz and was responsible for the daily gas chamber selections as well as brutal experiments (including those on human twins).

Another function that SS doctors served was to maximize the economic utility of slave labor at the concentration camps, aiding the SS industry and the Nazi cause through the exploitation of people and resources. Along those lines in December 1942, SS-Gruppenführer Richard Glücks (Inspector of Concentration Camps) sent a directive to the camp doctors telling them that, "The best doctor in a concentration camp is that doctor who holds the work capacity among inmates at its highest possible level. He does this through surveillance and through replacing [the sick or injured] at individual work stations. . . Toward this end it is necessary that the camp doctors take a personal interest and appear on location at work sites

LINKS

Why did Nazi doctors break their ‘Hippocratic Oaths’ Francis Drobniewski
J R Soc Med. 1993 Sep;86(9):541-3.

Medicine and the Holocaust UC Santa Barbara

Medicine after the Holocaust The mission of the Center for Medicine after the Holocaust (CMATH) is to challenge doctors, nurses, and bioscientists to personally confront the medical ethics of the Holocaust and to apply that knowledge to contemporary practice and research.

SCIENCE & THE SWASTIKA:
THE DEADLY EXPERIMENT
Reel Truth History 2019 (48.35)

Nazi
Human Experimentation

Doctors

The Oath
of
Hippocrates

Introduction
To
Nazi
Euthanasia

Nazi
Racism

Results
of
Secret Nazi Breeding Program: Ordinary
Folks

Lebensborn
(the Spring of Life)

for the
'Master Race
10 Interesting Details About This
Nazi Program

SS
Medical Corps

Links

This chart shows how organised the policy was
and the many people involved in it.

VIDEOS

JOSEPH MENGELE:
THE ANGEL OF DEATH -
FULL HISTORY DOCUMENTARY
DocuBox 2020 (1.27.24)
More than fifty year ago, Nazi scientists conducted experiments to prolong Hitler´s life. Joseph Mengele, one of the Nazi doctors who was involved in the experiments,

MEDICINE AND THE NAZIS

THE

INCREDIBLE

STORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE