The Truth About Nazi Doctors: A Conversation with Dr. Jonathan Hudson and Dr. Michael S. Bryant
Bret Weinstein speaks with Dr. Jonny Hudson and Dr. Michael S. Bryant on the subject of Nazi doctors. Dr. Jonny Hudson has a PhD in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Dr. Michael S. Bryant has a PhD in Modern European History and is a Professor of History and Legal Studies at Bryant University. He is also the author of “Confronting the ‘Good Death’: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-53” and Nazi "Crimes and their Punishment." ***** Sponsors: Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club: Scrumptious &a...
Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of the Dark Horse podcast.
This episode is going to cover Nazi medicine and if there is interest in this topic, it is likely to be the first in a series.
I am sitting with Dr. Jonathan Hudson and Dr. Michael Bryant this morning.
I think it's probably best if Dr. Hudson explains how the three of us know each other and his credentials and Michael's, and we will fill in any details that are left out.
So without further ado, Michael and Jonathan, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thanks for having us, Brett.
Thank you, Brett.
It's great to be here.
So us guys have known each other for about five years now.
Seems a long time now, doesn't it?
The reason that I contacted both of you was because about five years ago, I was thinking about my PhD dissertation and I reached out.
You two are from obviously very different fields.
Michael's a professor of history and law.
You're a biologist.
And I reached out to both of you, hoping to get your expertise in the help of my dissertation.
And Michael helped me with historical sources and where to find them.
And then I was interested in evolutionary biology and how that would fit into my dissertation.
So I then reached out to Brett as well.
And since we've worked together in various capacities, we've done a podcast together.
Me and Michael have done a few podcasts together.
And Brett, we've worked together because you became the chair of my PhD dissertation.
Excellent.
So I will just say for my part that my interest in this topic began when I was an undergraduate studying under Bob Trivers, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century.
And essentially, I wrote a final paper in his course on behavioral evolution that tested the hypothesis that Nazi atrocities were not the result of insanity, as was often claimed at the time, but were in fact the result of an adaptive evolutionary pattern.
In essence, that the Nazis put a special spin on a very general pattern of evolution, genocide, and that if one looked at the details of that genocide, one could deduce that this was,
in fact, a mechanism by which one population excluded other populations and thereby increased the percentage of the resources of the world that was dedicated to the flourishing of their own genetic kin.
My conclusion after doing that research was that insanity was in fact not a credible explanation and that indeed adaptive evolution was strongly implicated.
And I will say that the strongest piece of evidence I came up with in that work was the patterns that unfolded under Nazi medicine, that Nazi medicine was so deliberate and scientific and effectively one could understand as soon as one imagined a population,
in this case the Nazis, deciding that another population was not due human consideration, that everything else followed quite directly, that one could learn things about, for example, human physiology that one could not learn if one was held to the treatment of other human beings with parallel decency as one would treat one's own relatives.
So that's where my interest began.
And I will say this feels like a bookend to that work, which began when I was a very young man.
And I am not a very young man anymore.
In fact, I'm not young at all.
I am quite pleased to have you both here because your expertise ranges into areas that are necessary to see the full picture, places I can't get to from the evolutionary biology alone.
In fact, I have become fascinated in recent years by the legal aspects, which I knew very little about, the doctor's trial, for example, that took place in 1946 and 47.
And Michael, you are a legal scholar in addition to being a Holocaust scholar, and therefore we can complete this picture, which I think has rarely been done.
I don't think there is another treatment that ranges from the biology to the legality.
So I think this is we are fleshing out new territory.
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Michael, do you want to say anything more about your background and expertise?
Sure.
My background here is somewhat similar to yours, Brett, because I first encountered this topic of Nazi medicine as a much younger person.
For me, it really went back to the 1980s when as an exchange student, I was in law school at the time and also in theology school.
I had a stipend to study theology overseas at the University of Goethe.
And Goethegen was one of the citadels of scientific learning in Germany.
It still is even today, but especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It was just a mecca of German science.
And I actually went there to study theology and to study the German language.
But I happened to run, during the time I was there, I happened to run into a book by Ernst Kle, German author, who was among the first to document through really intensive research the euthanasia program and the eugenics programs of the Third Reich and to begin to address some of these extremely important questions about the status of German science and its co-optation by a genocidal regime in the 1930s and 40s.
And I found this to be so compelling, even as a non-historian, as a student who wasn't even really studying history per se, I was drawn into this topic as a young person and then came back to it years later when I was a graduate student.
I was looking for a topic to write on for my dissertation.
And I ultimately decided to go back to Clay's work and then to expand on Clay's work by looking specifically at the trials that engaged with Nazi medicine and the euthanasia program in particular.
And those trials went on for many decades after the war.
The big one, of course, was the one that you just referred to, which is the doctor's trial in 1946 and 1947.
I am not a medical historian per se, but anybody who studies the Nazi past, anybody who studies Nazi crimes cannot but confront and try to come to terms with the crimes of Nazi science and specifically Nazi medicine,
which were such a conspicuous part of the Nazi biomedical vision and Hitler's pursuit of expanding Germany's borders and then purifying the territories acquired by Germany through sterilization and through genocide.
So we're going to turn this over to Johnny to lead us through the topic in a moment.
But I will just say one other thing in advance, that for those who are listening in, trying to figure out whether to spend their time on this topic, I think the three of us all feel that the relevance of this topic has never been higher,
that things that are unfolding surrounding issues of informed consent are now front and center in our public discussion, and that informed consent, you correct me if I'm wrong,
but informed consent was understood by the Nuremberg trial court to be so fundamental that doctors, seven of them, were literally hung in the aftermath of that trial for having violated the informed consent of their patients, even though informed consent had not been formally codified.
It was, in fact, codified by the Nuremberg court in the aftermath of that trial.
So while this is a podcast about a historical event, that event's relevance to the present is profound.
And I have come to understand from Johnny that it is little discussed, that this is actually not a focus of a huge amount of active scholarship in the ways that other parts of the Holocaust are.
So I think it's likely to be very worthwhile.
And if people feel that they don't know terribly much about the topic, they are in very good company.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The foundation for medical ethics around the world comes from the Nuremberg Code.
And the Helsinki Declaration and the Belmont Report, the two more recent declarations on medical ethics are based on the Nuremberg Code.
So we can say that essentially when a clinical trial gets approval today or when your doctor asks for consent, the root of that is in the Nuremberg Doctor's trial.
And it was interesting for you to mention that dissertation that you wrote all those years ago, because I can remember very clearly thinking, is there an evolutionary biologist out there that's thinking about the Holocaust and watching a Joe Rogan episode of you, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, and not really watching it, like reading at the same time.
And then you mentioned, oh, I wrote a dissertation on the Holocaust quite early on in the podcast.
And my ears pricked up and I was like, there's someone out there.
And that is the provenance of why you and I are speaking today.
And then Michael's Written two incredible books on the Holocaust, the Confronting the Good Death and then the Operation Reinhardt Death Camp Trials.
So I'd advise anyone listening to this podcast.
Michael's too modest and gracious, but I would say either pause this right now and go out and buy them or wait till these podcasts done.
There are two really incredible books and the one on the Operation Reinhardt Death Camp Trials showed me that there are actually sources out there for me to write something on for Blinker.
So those two things combined.
And then I always think it's interesting for me to think about my first interactions with the field of Nazi medicine.
So I can remember being at university and in the library and I was becoming interested in perpetrator studies, which is where I've landed now.
And I remember seeing a book on the shelf of Nazi medicine and me thinking, like, that is a bridge too far.
I had the impression, I don't know what knowledge I was going off at the time, but just the very thought of going into that subfield, I thought was just beyond what I would ever do or could ever take.
And I find that interesting because I was doing perpetrator studies.
I was learning about Christopher, the Browning Goldhagen debate, victims being merciless shot, children being murdered, shoved into gas chambers, thrown onto fires.
But for some reason, and it's not something that I really understand yet, the medical experiments just seemed like it was too ghastly for me or just too conceptually difficult for me to even try and understand.
I don't know if either of you two have had like a, if that is reminiscent of something that you've thought or felt before.
Johnny, it sounds like you're talking about a feeling of repulsion from this topic.
I actually, in my experience teaching the Holocaust and teaching the doctor's trial, I actually find that students are almost mesmerized by this history.
A lot of them know nothing about it, for one thing.
And then when you begin talking about the kinds of people who were put on trial, we're not talking about lower-level guards who are beating people in concentration camps.
We're talking about the creme de la creme of the German medical profession in Germany in the 1930s and in the 1940s.
One thing I point out to the students is that but for the war and but for the crimes committed by Nazi doctors and Nazi scientists, some of these people might have been in competition for Nobel Prizes at some point.
These were highly decorated, illustrious figures who become involved in the worst forms of inhumanity and barbarism.
I think this is what draws, it actually draws people to the subject, at least in my experience.
Well, as you mentioned Nobel laureates, I think it's instructive that by 1933, Germany had more Nobel laureates in science and medicine than any other country.
And that's an aspect I think that's quite disturbing that this, and I think that's the Nazi period, if you extend that to other industries as well, if you're talking about like literature, architecture, even cinema and other just areas, that Germany was one of the most, if not the most advanced country in the world when the Nazis came to power.
I think that's what is one of the reasons that this is so disturbing.
And it's especially the case when we're talking about medicine, because, and this is the same with law, as we've spoken about before, Michael, because Germany was a global hub for medical education.
The university system, the laboratory system, the like clinical training that they were offering at the time, people would flock to Germany before 1933 and even afterwards.
Absolutely.
The doctors were highly educated, internationally respected people.
I'm sorry, Brett, but could I just slide?
This is true for Americans too.
And this is something that many people are not aware of.
But before the war, it was very common for German medical students to spend a period of time, they called it a von der Jaar, a period of travel through Germany in which they would study German medicine because it was at the forefront of so many different therapies and strategies of dealing with healthcare.
Germany was at the pinnacle of scientific achievement in this regard.
So I was just going to add that I do experience a kind of special revulsion at the idea of Nazi medicine.
And the way I've come to conceptualize it is actually related to what Michael was saying, is there's we know that human beings engage in monstrous behavior for various reasons, but it is impossible to dismiss doctors behaving in a scientific modality as anything other than fully conscious of what they are doing.
And that creates, it blocks off an entire escape route for denial.
If you wish to deny something about the Holocaust, understanding what the Nazi doctors did and what they said to themselves about why they were doing this, it leaves you no refuge.
So I think that that has a lot to do with why this topic feels initially beyond the pale, as you were describing it, Johnny.
And anyway, it's a very good reason for us to focus on it because we are obligated If we are going to engage in being historically accurate,
which we must be, as we have been talking about privately for many years now, if we are to prevent future genocides, then we are going to have to understand why they happen.
And that means not pretending that this has nothing to do with evolution, not pretending that this is the result of madness or a misunderstanding of logic, but understanding that this actually is a mode of behavior that is recurrent.
Yes, the Nazi version of it was special in some ways, but it was not a fundamental departure from human behavior as it is known elsewhere.
That is going to provide us the tools to prevent the preconditions that result in genocide from re-emerging, which is if we're serious about never again, that's the route there, to understand it well enough that we do not create the preconditions that cause this to happen.
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Yeah, and I wanted to raise a question before me and Michael get into the history of this.
The word pseudoscience is something that I've been, that I've thought about quite a lot with my past engagements with Nazi medicine.
And then I thought it would be interesting to ask you, Brett, because I don't see much space for the application of this word.
It's not something...
I see really disgusting stuff happening, done terribly, outcomes obviously horrendous, abhorrent.
But of the standards and the methodology of the time, calling it pseudoscience can actually be really counterproductive.
And I don't actually, I don't, I'm wondering where the boundary between bad science and pseudoscience is, because you can do things badly.
It doesn't mean that it's pseudoscience.
And I think that word has been quite detrimental.
I think it's let quite a lot of people off the hook.
After the war, the German Medical Association were trying to say there were about 350 rogue doctors that were performing pseudo-scientific procedures when actually it was the entire medical establishment and some vanishingly few examples of people that acted with honor and dignity and didn't get involved in this?
Well, let's draw a taxonomy.
Maybe we will be forced to fix it later.
But I would say at the outset here, the difference between bad science, well, I'm going to say there are two kinds of bad science.
There's immoral science that is, by its framework, still fundamentally scientific.
You can do a proper hypothesis test, the experiment for which is unforgivable, but nonetheless scientifically valid in terms of what it tells you.
You can do bad science that is intended to be scientific, but poorly structured.
So that's two kinds of bad science.
Did you do the experiment incorrectly or was the experiment that you did unacceptable but correctly done?
And then there's pseudoscience in which you're not really trying to discover anything.
You are trying to give something a veneer of science, but you already have your conclusion for whatever reason.
And so anyway, I would imagine that all of these things can be put into one of those three categories.
And my expectation is that an awful lot of it is going to land in the unforgivable but scientifically valid quadrant, and that many people will seek to push things from that quadrant into The pseudo-scientific quadrant specifically so they don't have to grapple with the implications of highly conscious,
highly educated, sophisticated people behaving in an utterly barbaric fashion while maintaining their analytical faculties.
So pseudoscience is when you already have your conclusions and then you go and look for the proof afterwards.
And no matter what you find, your conclusions are going to stay the same.
Yeah, science demands that you don't, you may have a suspicion about what's going to happen.
In fact, that's what a hypothesis is.
But you have to allow your experimental mode to tell you that your hypothesis isn't right.
And if your point is, well, I'm going to do scientifically or I'm going to do things that look scientific because I know this is right or because I want it to look right, then, you know, that's the opposite of science.
So you're leading with a conclusion and you've got no interest in, it's not a hypothesis.
It begins with a conclusion and then you're trying to collect data that will support that conclusion.
And you have no interest whatsoever if the data shows something that's contrary to your preconceived conclusion.
That's pseudoscience.
Exactly.
Okay, brilliant.
Well, I think we might encounter a bit of pseudoscience then, if that's the case.
Brett, you're describing the experimental aspect of Nazi science.
It seems to me, and of course, that is an important, very important component of what we're talking about.
But of course, there was an applied aspect to it as well, and that's Nazi medicine.
And with Nazi medicine, we enter into what I think is the heart of the problem, which was the destruction of the Hippocratic Oath and the idea that above all things, do no harm to the patient, and that the individual patient and that patient's suffering should be an object of the doctor's attention.
This Hippocratic Oath is phased out under the Nazis with Nazi medicine, and instead, the folk community, society as a physical body, becomes the new focus of Nazi medicine.
And the idea then is that the individual can be sacrificed, especially if the individual is considered valueless based upon their group characteristics.
That individual can be sacrificed either individually or as a group in the interests of the folk community.
Yeah, I think that's one of the key messages that we're going to land upon by the end of this podcast and if we do the series afterwards.
There's the word, Michael, and forgive my German if this isn't right, Volksgehundheit.
Volksgeundheit.
Yeah.
So it's, and it's quite a simple step, but quite a devastating one that the doctors move from their responsibility to the individual to the nation is the individual that they're treating.
And in that, and we might see things reminiscent from that in our world today, in that the person that they're supposed to be caring for can become collateral for the greater good of, and it's conceptually quite a simple thing to do.
Now the doctor is in service of the nation, not the individual.
This has disastrous consequences.
I would like to make things uncomfortable right at the start and just point out that this is actually an entirely accepted fact of medicine with one giant alteration by the Nazis.
In medicine, we do not extend the principle of the Hippocratic Oath, and I will argue if we are careful about it, we are not required to extend it to laboratory animals.
So we accept that you can run an experiment in which you may cause pathology to an animal, and you may even require the animal be sacrificed in order to diagnose the pathology in order to determine the effect of a treatment.
And that effectively, you only need to make one leap in order to understand what's taking place in the realm of, as you properly dichotomize it, Michael, Nazi medicine and Nazi science, which are related but distinct things.
If you understand that what the Nazis have actually done is they have ejected their subjects from a right to human compassion, they have effectively demoted Jews and debilitated people and gypsies and others that they feel are unworthy.
They have demoted them from human status, which therefore renders them having the status roughly of a laboratory animal from their perspective.
I think we will find that much follows from that one alteration in mindset.
Yeah, I'll actually read a quote at the moment because it really ties into what we're talking about before me and Michael get really into the history.
So Robert J. Lifton, as Michael will know, and perhaps you, Brett, as well, was a great historian of the medical atrocities committed by the Nazis.
And he interviewed various different Nazi doctor perpetrators.
One is Fritz Klein, who worked at Auschwitz.
And he asked Fritz Klein how he could reconcile concentration camps and his work in Auschwitz with the Hippocratic oath that he'd taken.
And he replied, of course, I am a doctor And I want to preserve life.
And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body.
The dew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.
And that is just another, well, that's a prime example of this concept of Boltzgerhunzheit.
The German physician didn't need to discard the Hippocratic oath, just needed to, like, the conceptual shift between what that Hippocratic oath meant in terms of the care for the patient, as we've spoken about.
And these examples of doctors and physicians speaking in this manner are really bountiful from the Nazi period.
And it was absolutely fundamental to the Nazis that they got the doctors thinking in this way.
Otherwise, they're not going to be able to perhaps live with themselves or feel like they've got the legal cover to do this.
I've got another one here.
This guy's going to come up later.
It's called Otmar van Peschua.
And he says, at times you should be aware of the duties of the National Socialist Physician.
This is from a textbook that came out in 1940.
Who keeps in mind not only the individual person, but the entire Volkskorpa, which is people's body, in which the single person, like the cell in the human organism, is just a building block, just a cell of the people as a whole.
Once you get people thinking like that, the end is neighbor, you know, this slippery slope.
Johnny, those are perfect illustrations of what I was referring to earlier when I talked about the body of the people, what the Nazis called the Volkskope, right?
Or the Volksgemeinschaft is another term you sometimes hear, but it's this effort to visualize society as a body, a physical body itself, so that when Fritz Klein talks about cutting out abscesses and diseased parts of the body, like Jews,
for example, this mentality is perfectly consistent with the Nazi approach to society and the conception of superior and inferior groups, the inferior groups, of course, being almost like infections in the body of the people that have to be cut away.
And I thought the perfect way to lead us into this history would be to talk about the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society.
And that was a scientific organization that was founded in 1911 by the conception was from a guy called Adolf Harnock, who was an intellectual and a theologian, a Lutheran theologian.
And he had this idea of under this umbrella of a society making these focused research institutes in different fields of science and funding them from private investment and the government, having a director on each one, and for it to be extra university.
So these research institutes didn't have other commitments whatsoever.
They were going to be well funded and Germany would become one of the leaders in scientific innovation.
And this was supported by the Kaiser and German industrialists.
So the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society came into being in 1911.
And then soon after, its first institutes, the Kaiser Wilmhelm Institutes, were born.
And the first were in chemistry, the Kaiser Wilmhelm Institute for Chemistry.
And really impressive scientists directed these different institutions.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry was headed by Fritz Haber, one of the most famous physicians of all time.
And then the KWI, which is the agreement.
Hold on.
Is that the same Fritz Haber as of the Haber-Bosch process?
Absolutely, yeah.
Yes.
Which deserves a podcast of its own.
The way that his synthesis of ammonia was able to make synthetic fertilizer and be used in bombs at the same time is something that I just find unbelievably interesting.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but the Haber-Bosch process originates out of World War I bomb-making science.
It takes inorganic nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is incredibly common.
In fact, it's the most common element in our atmosphere, but is biologically inaccessible, which is a famous limitation in biology.
There are a small number of creatures that can make nitrogen available, and they play a profoundly important ecological role.
And so the Haber-Bosch process actually avails humans of this technology using energy, in this case fossil fuel energy, to make nitrogen available and is responsible for the population of the Earth being as large as it is today.
The fertilizers that are made from atmospheric nitrogen have more than doubled the number of people on the planet.
And so it's interesting to find Fritz Haber here.
He'll come back into the story later because although he'd converted to Christianity to the Nazis, he was still Jewish.
And I'll get onto this later.
He resigns his position out of protest after the Nazis come to power.
There's like different Kaiser Wilmhelm Institutes, one's in brain research, which is led by someone called Oscar Voigt.
And then by the 1920s, the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society has really reached its goal of being one of the world's premier science organizations, along with the Cavendish Laboratory in the UK and MIT, the Soviet Association of Scientists and the Pasteur Institute.
The Kaiser Wilmhelm Society is the institutes are growing and growing and growing and it's getting Nobel laureates.
Einstein is the first director of the Kaiser Wilmhelm Institute for Physics and he holds that position from 1917 to 1933.
Probably work out why it lasted until 1933.
And then they have 15 Nobel laureates.
So this is like an incredibly successful project, program.
And in 1927, and the name of this Kaiser Wilmhelm Institute might make you wince for good reasons a little bit, it's established the Kaiser Wilmhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary and Eugenics.
And that's in 1927.
And the director of that is a guy called Ogen Fischer.
Now, we were talking about pseudoscience earlier.
And I was thinking that what he's most famous for was just bad science.
But based on what was spoken about, I'd say it was definitely pseudoscience.
So he was famous for going over to German South West Africa, present day Namibia, in 1908.
And he arrived there with racist assumptions that he wanted to prove.
So he wanted to prove the dangers of what they termed misengination.
So he got a, he did some field research on about 50 individuals, which were mixed race, so German colonists and some of the native ethnic groups, the Nama and the Herero.
And he came to the conclusion, based on this small sample size, that interracial unions produced people that were degenerate, deviant, immoral, and a danger to the body politic, the racial health of Germany.
And even though he'd gone there with predetermined ideological lens and just done this small sample size, his book, which is called, he went to an area called Reherboth.
And his book is called The Reherboth Bastards in German Southwest Africa and the dangers of miscegenation.
And he is one of the intellectual founders of Nazi laws.
So we know that Hitler was reading him whilst he was imprisoned in 1923 for the Putsch.
And then we can see this work that he did and his subsequent books extended into different laws that the Nazis instituted, most famously perhaps the Nuremberg laws.
And so this guy becomes the director of this incredibly prestigious scientific organization.
He becomes the founder of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary, and Genetics.
And then from...
I want to flag a pattern that I'm sure we are going to see repeatedly.
The idea that miscegenation, the mixing of races, produces inferior stock is, as you point out, highly likely to be pseudoscientific.
It's a valid hypothesis that you could test, but if you did, you would likely find the opposite because of something called hybrid vigor, which is well known from captive breeding.
If you take two purebred dogs, for example, you will likely create a superior dog by breeding them together, effectively by avoiding the disadvantages of each breed.
You will get the combined capacity of both.
Now, it's not an unalloyed good.
There are advantages you get by trying to breed purely in dogs or horses or other such creatures, and there are advantages you get by hybridizing very pure breeds.
But any such study is likely to reveal that there is at least a profound hybrid vigor effect.
But the pattern I want to highlight is this.
The Nazis are consciously Darwinian in a sense.
They are aware of Darwin.
They speak in Darwinian terms.
Obviously, eugenics requires an understanding of genes and an understanding that there is at least Darwinian adaptation in order to make the arguments that supposedly support it.
And eugenics is a doomed line of argument.
In other words, it proceeds from very crude Darwinism.
It does not take account of the reality of the complexity of genetics.
However, as much as the Nazis speak in broken Darwinian logic, they enact a high-quality Darwinian logic, which is the problem.
If we say, if we try to test the hypothesis, are the Nazis behaving in a Darwinian fashion, and we go to what Nazis say about what they're doing, we will often find that it's ridiculous.
If we look at their actions, however, we will find a very different pattern, because in effect, what we should, the hypothesis we should be testing is, Are the Nazis behaving in ways that increase the percentage of the human genes on the planet that originate from the German lineage?
And in this regard, we will not falsify the hypothesis.
We will find that again and again that Nazis are engaged in behavior that spreads German genes irrespective of the quality of the logic that they use and its often incorrect Darwinian conclusions.
And I think we see that exactly in this case.
Yeah, it's absolutely clear that he just went, he had his conclusions and he went over just to get a bit of data.
And a bit of data means like in terms of the sample size, but they'd be taking really detailed, he was taking really detailed anthropometric measurements, like from like every part of a human being,
their limbs, they had skin tone charts, their eyes, their hair, everything was measured in minute detail just to kind of make it look like a lot of work had gone into this and that these were sound conclusions.
But he didn't go back and then compare his data set to any other populations.
If you were going to do something like this, you would want to go to every corner of the world and do big sample sizes.
You'd want to cross-reference, of course.
Just ridiculous that you would take a sample size of 50 people and then for this to be the foundation of racial laws that affect an entire population, country of people and the world.
And he was like one of many different race theorists that were around at this time.
And there were quite a few of them in the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society.
And then when the Nazis came to power, the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society, in fact, the entire German, the precursor to the German Medical Association, just like threw its weight behind the Nazis.
I've got a couple of quotes here of the forerunner of the German Medical Association called the Prussian Chamber of Physicians.
So Hitler assumes power and they say, they declared its readiness to place all of its energies and experience at the service of the government of the national resurrection, which is the Nazis, which it salutes with joy and gratitude.
None of us is likely to shed a single tear for the democratic government, the Weimar Republic, that has now passed into history.
And the president of the German Medical Association wrote to Hitler, and he said that he welcomes with the greatest joy the determination of the Reich government with the promise faithfully to fulfill our duty as servants of the people's health.
And we see that in no other profession do so many people join the Nazi party than the physicians and the doctors become the most represented people in the Nazi party.
Wow.
I didn't know that.
More than 40% join the party.
I think more than 50% by the end of it.
Why do you think that was, Michael?
Why do you think more physicians and doctors are joining than any other profession in Germany?
I think this bears upon what Brett was talking about earlier.
I think that the German medical profession was already primed and predisposed towards many of the ideas that the Nazis were espousing, not to mention the fact that in the National Socialist State, the role of the doctor would be elevated.
Ultimately, it was the doctor who would tend to the body of the people by trying to boost the reproduction of the so-called valuable individuals who were of Germanic stock and at the same time initially sterilize, we know that the Nazis passed sterilization laws as soon as they came to power, to sterilize groups that they did not want to reproduce, beginning with the disabled, and then by the late 30s and early 40s, killing these groups outright.
I think that German science and German medicine in particular was very receptive to what the Nazis were selling.
Listen, have no illusions about this, right?
Lots of political parties, including the SPD, the Socialist Party, in Germany, the Communist Party of Germany, other political parties, the German National People's Party, all of them supported these eugenic sorts of ideas.
The Nazis were not unique in this regard.
But of course, what the Nazis were, were zealous in pursuing these ideas once they came to power.
And I think that in opening a portal to greater participation of German medicine, the Nazis were really issuing an invitation that German doctors, German psychiatrists, healthcare professionals simply couldn't resist.
It was just, they were perfectly predisposed to endorse these ideas based upon the kinds of ideas that they were beginning to support already in the 1920s.
And there's a longer history here that we could talk about.
And when you think about the obstacles to science, say you're doing brain research, it's quite difficult.
And even today, so for anatomists, one of the main obstacles is getting specimens that you can practice on.
So we've got a system here.
And say you're doing brain research.
It's like, we're going to give you an unlimited amount of brains.
And this has been a sticking point to these different organizations.
Oh, we've only got so many brains.
And obviously, no matter how you treat a brain, it's going to degrade as soon as it hits the air.
okay, you've got basically a conveyor belt of brains of victims, and or like your wildest dreams as a scientist are just unlimited resources to be able to practice on and then being valorized for doing so as well.
You can see the enticement, whether or not you were ideologically convinced or not.
But I think you would, in your own mind, you would convince yourself ideologically as well because of the benefits of that.
That would reinforce it.
And Johnny, to build on that point a little more, as soon as German medical professionals had the opportunity, they pounced.
So once the Nazis adopted the Children's Euthanasia Program, which comes online in 1939, almost immediately they begin killing youngsters and then sending their brains to various KWI institutes for analysis by the scientists there.
And that starts immediately with the murder of the children in the fall of 1939.
That's one of the things when I'm thinking about Nazi medicine, like that sentence, and we'll get onto this a little bit once the war starts, like the KWI for brain research, which is headed by a guy called Hugo Spatz, and then the leader of the neuropathology department is Julius Hallevorden.
They're harvesting children's brains.
And just that, I've said this to someone before.
How is that a sentence that actually isn't from the fevered mind of a lunatic?
How is that something that actually happened in the world that I live in, in the civilized, advanced country?
They were literally, as I say, harvesting.
Harvesting.
It's even worse.
It's even worse than that, too, because we have evidence that some of these children were not even all, not that much disabled, really.
Many of them were just young, rambunctious kids in some cases who might have had some learning disabilities, but they were not mentally retarded.
They were not severely disabled as the Nazis tried to portray them as being.
And we have evidence that some of them were murdered specifically for the purpose of generating research material for the KWI.
Absolutely.
And the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society, the kind of descent into infamy really came in April 1933 when the Nazis introduced something called the Civil Service Law, the law for the preservation of the civil service.
And the general secretary of the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society at the time was Friedrich Glum.
And he adopted this.
And this law basically said that Jews and other people, it could be people that were politically incompatible or racially incompatible, should be removed out of any positions of authority.
And when we're, and an important part of that was the Aryan paragraph, which I'll read to you in a moment because it's just so absurd.
When we're thinking about, okay, so why are all these doctors going along with this?
Like, I would say to the people watching this, and like, of course, we wouldn't take part in anything like this, but say the people above you at work were just like fired, like your manager and the person above them.
And then someone comes to you and says, okay, you don't have to interview for it whatsoever.
You're just going to get your boss's job or even the boss's boss's job.
You're just going to be elevated up without having to do anything whatsoever.
All you need to do is not protest to what we're doing.
So you can see the incentive structure here of different, and this is happening hundreds of times because Jewish people were quite successful in, especially like in Berlin, the center of like medical progress and institutions.
It's just people's bosses are getting fired and they're just being elevated up like that.
That's what this law does.
And the society just goes along with this.
And I'll read the Aryan paragraph before we go on because I thought it was, you have to hear it to believe it, really.
And after this was introduced into different civil service professions, basically every profession in Germany in some form took this paragraph and this law on.
And it says, the Aryans, also Indo-Germans, are one of the three branches of the Caucasian white race.
They are divided into the Western, that is the German, Roman, Greek, Slav, Let, Celt, Albacen, and the Eastern Asiatic Aryans.
Okay, hopefully you're following along so far.
You haven't got lost so far.
It gets even more complicated and ridiculous.
That is the Indian and the Iranian.
Non-Aryans are therefore the members of two other races, namely the Mongolian in brackets yellow and the Negroid in brackets black races.
Number two, the members of the two other branches of the Caucasian race, namely the Semites, Jews, Arabs, and Hamites, Berbers.
The Finns and the Hungarians belong to the Mongoloid race, but it is hardly the intention of the law to treat them as non-Aryans.
Thus, the non-Jewish members of the European Volk are Aryans.
Did that make any sense to you?
Well, it's a pure assertion of a pragmatic division that has nothing to do with the underlying biology.
It is the pseudoscience that you were referring to earlier.
I did want to Stop to point something out though.
Actually, two things.
One, I think it is important as we're trying to navigate the mindset of these monstrous people.
The Nazis are as bad as you think, but we are worse than you think.
And what I would just use as an example, I think most people would not be able to handle the information if they understood what we currently do to great apes like chimpanzees in scientific experiments.
If you gave somebody a five-minute tour of what is done in the name of science to these creatures that, yes, are not human, but possess rudiments of every capability we have other than language, and even there you can argue for rudiments, it's very hard to justify.
And what it requires is that most people just don't know about it.
They vaguely know that something happens that they wouldn't, they don't want to know more, that it's done in their name, which makes them even more motivated to ignore that process.
And at the same time, that means that there are human beings who nine to five, five days a week go to buildings where these experiments are done and think it's normal.
They think there's not a moral question about it.
So again, the distinction between doing what we currently do to chimpanzees or vervet monkeys or any primate and extending our inferred right to do these things to people, that's not as big a leap as it might be.
It's a leap that most people can understand.
In fact, we have God-given rights that we deem ourselves entitled to take away if you behave sufficiently badly.
And almost nobody would object to this in moral terms.
We take away people's freedoms.
We sometimes deny them of life itself because their behavior justifies our right to do this in our minds.
And I'm not arguing against that.
But what I'm saying is the leaps are smaller than we like to tell ourselves.
I also want to point out that this theme, which I'm imagining is going to come up repeatedly about the body, the nation being like a body, is on the one hand preposterous and on the other hand, not entirely wrong.
There is a way, and in fact, Johnny, you and I have spent a lot of time on the idea of lineage.
Lineage, we can technically define as an individual and all of its descendants, but effectively lineage is a description of the way genes propagate themselves.
And the body is a lineage, right?
You were at one point one cell.
You're now 30 trillion or so cells.
All of those cells are clones of each other.
They're effectively identical twins, which is why you function as a body.
You are perfectly agreed in what the direction forward is.
A nation, depending on how it is structured, is more or less like that body.
It's never precisely like it because you're not a nation of clones.
But from the point of view of an individual trying to determine how collaborative to be with other individuals from the nation, there's an underlying genetic calculation which we pretend doesn't exist.
And I am not arguing in favor of it.
I think it's a dead end.
But the idea that the genes, the underlying genes, the way I like to say it is they have unbridled ambition and zero vanity.
These genes will do anything to get into the future.
They do not care if they are superior or inferior in terms of their functional capability.
They are simply struggling or they are behaving as if they are struggling.
Genes are not conscious, but they are behaving in ways that get them into the future, even when it means excluding genes that do the job of those genes better than the ones that are doing the striving in this example.
So that's a very uncomfortable basket of logical conclusions.
I think they are each unassailable, but they create a very different place to stand in looking at Nazi rationalizations of their own monstrous behavior, because in some sense, this is one of the routes that the genes use to get into the future.
And yeah, we damn well better be prepared because the genes haven't forgotten this route.
And given the right opportunity, they will come up with new rationalizations that are maybe modernized, but result in the same effect.
Brett, if I could, one thing that's very conspicuous to anybody who studies this subject and deals with perpetrator testimony is that there really appears to be genuine malice and genuine, at least expressions of hatred towards the out-groups.
Of course, the out-groups, you've mentioned some of them, the Jews being the primary ones, but the Roma, the Romani, so-called gypsies being another conspicuous victim group who are objects of genocide by 1941 and 42.
The mentally disabled, you see lots of references at the highest levels to getting rid of the idiots almost with a sense of delight, a sense of relish and glee.
I guess my question for you as an evolutionary biologist is, do you see the malice here, which I don't think, you correct me if I'm mistaken, because you have much more experience in this than I do.
When we talk about laboratory animals, and I completely abhor the way that animals are treated.
That's why I became a vegetarian years ago.
Abhor it.
But by the same token, I don't sense that there is this level of detestation and of contempt for the laboratory animal that you find in the minds of so many of these perpetrators towards Jews, towards the Romani, towards the mentally handicapped.
So is it the view then of an evolutionary biologist that this hatred is somehow manufactured as a way to justify that more fundamental genetic impulse?
I exactly agree with the distinction you are drawing.
Most of the people who are engaged in these medical experiments have no malice whatsoever.
towards the animals in question I believe there are a small number who are defective in this regard and do, but it's the exception, not the rule.
However, that malice, I would argue, is a mechanism for breaking a natural human affinity that would otherwise prevent the genes from accomplishing their objective here.
And so one of the patterns that you see very frequently in the run-up to war is the dehumanization of the enemy.
There's very frequently the invocation of metaphors of disease.
Obviously, there are Cossus belli, which create the impression that the population to be attacked has, in fact, behaved immorally and delivered a sucker punch that must be responded to in the most extreme terms.
In other words, and ultimately, I think what we are going to discover is that there's a very uncomfortable reality.
We already know part of this.
But the hormone oxytocin, which became famous as the love hormone, actually isn't the love hormone.
That's half of its job.
Oxytocin is the in-group-out-group hormone.
So when a woman gives birth to a child and is flooded with oxytocin and a deep bond of love that can only be explained as an extension of self arises out of nothing, that's oxytocin doing half of its job.
But we find also that oxytocin is mediating the hatred of the out-group.
So oxytocin amplifies both of these tendencies.
And if you think about the status of, for example, Jews in Germany in the run-up to the Holocaust, you have this population that is,
to one extent, more genetically remote than the so-called Aryans from the Aryan perspective, and at another level, integrated into this collaborative endeavor, which is the nation.
And what do you do if your genes are driving you?
Let's say times are bad, which is the precondition.
Economic times are bad.
And the genes are, they are not thinking, of course, but they're behaving as if they are thinking.
Well, here's a population.
It's a minority.
It's integrated.
Not only is it integrated functionally into society, but it's integrated.
It's intermarried in many cases.
So it is like an organ, and the removal of it is not simple.
So what I'm going to argue is that in good times, the Germans are perfectly happy to enjoy the benefit of a close partnership with this other population.
As economic contraction causes some version of musical chairs, the music to stop, the genes change course and they, again, I'm going to have to speak metaphorically because genes don't think, but they behave as if this group of collaborators is suddenly a liability and they start rationalizing what to do about it.
And I guess this leads to this final point.
And I did not really expect myself to be in this position in this podcast, but I think it's necessary because I think the ugliness of all of this is the thing that we have yet to fully grapple with.
You know, it's too easy to view it as the province of others rather than a characteristic that we are burdened with by evolution itself.
But every population has what's called a carrying capacity.
Carrying capacity is the number of individuals that a habitat can support.
If your carrying capacity is going up because technology is increasing how many individuals can be supported, then it's not like it's like musical chairs while the music is playing.
There's no need to battle anybody because there's plenty.
But that economic contraction causes the genes to deploy this other program.
And you can imagine if the carrying capacity is frozen or it's going to go down because of economic contraction, that the question isn't, you know, let's take the example of your rambunctious kids who the Nazis target in the T4 program.
Whether the Nazis understand what they're doing or not, they are evicting people from that carrying capacity who will then be replaced by others.
And I don't know how conscious they are of it, but the idea that the person whose brain they harvest because they effectively deem them too much trouble to deal with and do not extend to them the basic human dignity that they are due, that person is going to be replaced by somebody else.
And the power that is ascendant is gambling, whether it understands it or not, that that person will be replaced with somebody who will contribute to the nationalist program more efficiently than the person they've eliminated.
And, you know, I guess my point is that is a diabolical logic, and I hope that we never face it again.
However, it is not illogical.
And, Brett, just to elaborate on this really important point that you're making, it's very well known among historians of this topic that World War I in particular was a major watershed in this history, right?
Because before World War I, so many of the attacks on minority groups were on the fringes of German society.
There was this pan-German movement that urged that Germany should attack other countries and seize their resources and should purge itself of its racial contaminants and get rid of minorities and other inassimable elements in society.
They were on the fringes of society.
They never broke through really into mainstream politics.
And similarly, the eugenics movement was not particularly successful in Germany up until after World War I, after 1920 in particular.
And all of a sudden now you begin to see a lot of the ideas that Brett you've talked about and Johnny that you've been summarizing too.
These ideas now begin to resurface and to gain more and more traction.
And of course, this provides the ideal environment for a party like the nascent National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazi Party, to find a foothold and eventually boost itself into power.
And I think it's when you read the literature of the era, especially people like Bending and Holke, who were advocates of already in 1921, of murdering the mentally disabled, now there's more and more of an audience responding to what they're saying and more and more doctors and psychiatrists gives these ideas a harder look.
And their writings seem to be characterized by a mentality of resource scarcity that goes back to the privations of World War I and the British blockade and real starvation that took place in Germany during the war.
So I see all of this as being very amenable to the thesis, Brett, that you're advancing here.
I think it makes it, well, if you're in that situation, if you're falling on really hard times and you're surrounded by chaos and you can't feed your kids and people are starving on the streets, then that is fertile ground to actually start being a true believer.
So we've spoke before about we can't really separate ideological conviction with material interests because those it's very difficult to disentangle those two things.
And from what I see, it's much easier to actually start believing in this crap if you're really, really struggling.
So it's not like, okay, I'm just going to, and that's the, that's the, that's the instrumental value of racism.
You can, you can see people that are amenable to thinking this way, and you can leverage that vulnerability by providing them usually with quite simple answers to very difficult questions, and you can motivate them to behave in the way that you want.
Well, I would argue that ideology is inherently a means to a genetic end.
Ideology we have been aware of, obviously, for millennia.
Genes we've been aware of for a century.
The fact that it is not surprising to find that people will embrace an ideology that promises to deliver well-being, especially when they are under pressure.
And this is what I mean by genes have unbridled ambition and zero vanity.
Genes will switch ideology at the moment that one ideology seems to promise further starvation and another ideology seems to promise food.
And it is not hard to understand why people will do that.
In this case, the ideology in question is promising economic well-being by exterminating another population, the extermination of which is justified in ridiculous terms, but comprehensible terms.
So you can imagine, it's exactly the example you provide.
Somebody has just eliminated the people above you in your working environment and offered you their status, their salary, in exchange for pretending that it was a justified alteration.
Most people will take that deal.
Almost everybody will.
Now, it's one thing in a work environment, which is not ostensibly about morals.
It is another thing in a society in which we have to decide what the status of morals are.
Are morals going to constrain us when we have genuine opportunities in front of us that should only be foregone because they are unacceptable?
I would say yes.
I would say that actually there's a robust logic there that requires that in the long term, availing yourself of immoral opportunities is self-defeating, which I believe it is.
But it is not surprising to see many societies make the opposite bet.
Because in the short term, it alleviates a problem.
Maybe it alleviates starvation because you simply, you know, the oxytocin allows you to define some group of individuals whose stuff you can take and times get better if all you do is imagine they deserved it.
Yeah.
So just to follow the story from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.
So now the war has started and we've seen that they're absolutely complicit in Nazi racial policy.
They've contributed these racial taxonomies which are being used to justify different laws.
They've given scientific legitimacy through this really well-renowned scientific organization and have thrown their weight behind the Nazis.
Many of these institutions have.
There's vanishingly small examples of people involved in this.
It was after the war, it was renamed the Max Planck Society because it had a branding issue.
He did conduct himself with dignity and honor.
He actually had a personal meeting with Hitler to try and convince him that Fritz Haber should be allowed to remain in the society and as the director of the institution, Fritz Haber resigns as protest.
Obviously, he's kind of jumping before he was pushed.
And then he dies very soon after of heart failure in Switzerland.
So, you know, it sounds a bit corny, but of a broken heart, really.
Like the stress of his situation must have contributed to that.
Einstein, Max Planck tries to get Einstein to stay.
And Einstein thinks better of it, so flees.
And I'm glad that he did because it wasn't going to end well if he'd have stayed.
And then during when, and this is all before the war breaks out, this is just as the Nazis, when the war breaks out, the various different institutes of the Maz of the Kaiser Wilmhelm Society become deeply implicit in the sterilization or murder programmes of the Nazis.
For the Kaiser Wilmhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Genetics, Ogen Fischer, who I mentioned earlier, who was doing that pseudoscience in Namibia, and just as a little aside, in 2018,
Germany was sending skulls of Herero, of the, of some Herero victims of these medical experiments, because the skulls had been taken back to Germany and they're only sent back, repatriated in 2018.
But anyway, Fischer is replaced in October 1942 by a man called Otmar von Veschuer.
And at the time, if you were a scientist, really, he had a famous name at the time.
He was a pioneer in twin studies and a leading geneticist, really well internationally renowned.
Now, that's 1942.
In 1936, he'd founded his own institute at the University of Frankfurt called the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene.
And there, one of his star students, his protégé, was, and received a PhD underneath him in 1938, was who do we who do we think that was?
Mengele.
Dr. Joseph Mengele was his protégé and received his PhD in medicine at the age of 27 years old at the University of Frankfurt.
In October 1942, Mengele is acting as a kind of physician for a Waffen-SS Vikings unit, and he was decorated in this position and highly respected by his colleagues.
And he comes back to Germany in about December 1942 and meets up with his old master, Ottmar von Verschuer.
Now, we don't have specific evidence as to why Mengele is placed in Auschwitz.
However, leading historians, Mengele historians, think that, and this definitely seems the most likely scenario, that Otmar von Veschua places Mengele in Auschwitz as his research proxy.
And the evidence for that is that After, and this is May 1943, that Mengele gets to Auschwitz.
After that, we have correspondence between Veschua and Mengele.
And we don't just have, I've got a bit of the correspondence here, I'll read to you.
See, lots, everybody knows about Mengele.
Hardly anybody knows about Vesua.
After the war, like absolutely scot-free.
Not only did he get off scot-free, if you think about the things that people get cancelled for these days, he went on to become a professor at the University of Munster and led a really highly respected genetic institute until he passed away in 1969.
And this is part of a correspondence between him and Mengele, or no, part of a correspondence that he mentions this relationship with his research proxy at Auschwitz.
He says, my assistant, Dr. Mengele, is presently employed as Haupsturm Fjurer and camp physician in the concentration camp Auschwitz.
Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp are being carried out with the permission of SS Reichsführer Himmler.
The blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.
And it wasn't just blood samples.
It was, we've got witnesses saying that they'd seen cases and they took a look and there was vials of eyes in there, limbs, corpses, all being sent back to the Kaiser Wilmhelm Institute.
And this kind of this leads us to the subject of Mengele, Michael, that we were talking about.
Obviously, it's a well-trodden topic, but I think it's worth discussing again the thing about Mengele, what he's become in relation to what he actually was, the skin and bones that he actually was, the human being that he actually was.
He's become more of a, I'd say, a totemic symbol for human evil.
And that's kind of distracted away from what we actually know about him and what he was.
What would you say, Michael, about that?
Well, Mengele was, again, a fairly well-regarded figure in the field of German medicine.
I think it's important to remember that he was not just a doctor at Auschwitz.
He was the chief doctor.
He was the head of medical services at Auschwitz.
This is a fairly significant position that he occupied.
And in addition to securing these research materials for Fershur, his mentor, he was also engaged in the devil's work in Auschwitz.
He was participating in selections on the ramp.
Let's not forget, too, another really interesting aspect of his career that we don't think about too often is that he was responsible as the chief doctor to try to prevent the spread of epidemic disease, especially from the prisoners to the SS staff, the guards and the doctors and all of the other SS people who were present in Auschwitz.
It was his responsibility to create that quote-unquote sanitaire between the prisoners and the SS.
And one of the ways in which he does this is just by liquidating entire camps in Birkenal, one of which, of course, is the gypsy camp that he had charge of and was an experimental station for him.
This is a prolific medical mass murderer.
He himself did not commit any crimes with his own hands, but he was the sort of person who would issue orders and ensure that his orders, which were genocidal in nature, were carried out.
He would.
There's sources that say that he went around and administered lethal injections of Roma people from the No, that's true.
Yeah, of course, a lot of...
I was thinking of Jews in particular who were being sent on the ramp, either to life for a limited time or to death in the gas chambers.
And he was the one, along with other doctors, who would point either to the right or to the left and directing them.
But you're absolutely right.
He did inject Romani in particular.
I want to add a couple of things here.
Yeah, please do.
One, I wasn't aware that a primary role for him was to prevent the spread of disease from prisoners to the guards, who, of course, would take it home to the German population when they went home at night.
But it makes perfect sense.
And this would be a terrible problem because not only do you have a highly concentrated population in which disease would easily spread, but that population has been the victim of privation, most of them before they ever arrive at the camps.
So they are in a weakened state, will bring diseases from all over Eastern Europe into these camps, which will then spread easily between them in their unsanitary and undernourished condition, which then, of course, feeds the rationalization that the Nazis are using, that these are defective, diseased people.
They're literally diseased as a result of Nazi cruelty.
But in any case, one can imagine the actual epidemiological concern that arises, not because these are defective people, but because of the conditions that they've been exposed to, would then feed the sense that they were less than human and in fact a threat to those considered fully human.
Anyway, those are pieces that had not connected for me before.
There was a condition called NOMA, which apparently Something that was basically non-existent in Europe at the time, but in these conditions in Auschwitz, it reappeared, especially in this gypsy camp, because no sanitation whatsoever and just the inhumane conditions.
And he decided that he was going to research this.
And, you know, he, if we're talking about science with a breaks off here, he not only had his pick of victims and so-called human material, but he could also, from the transports, when he was there, he was sending hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths.
He could also say, if you're a physician or you've got any medical background, you know, step out of the crowd.
And he could pick and choose different specialists from, you know, especially Hungary when the Hungarian deportations happened.
Like some brilliant, brilliant scientists and doctors and physicians.
He could make these research teams from these victims.
And he did this with this disease NOMA, whereas it could easily have just been eliminated in the camp.
And it's particularly rather ghastly because it was a condition that attacked the tissues in the face.
He would decapitate the victims and keep their heads in jars.
And these would be sent back to different institutes in the Reich as well.
Apart from that, he was particularly interested in eyes as well.
So there's a condition called heterochromia, like quite rare.
But if you're thinking about how many hundreds of thousands of people are passing through in normal circumstances to find the eyes of somebody that has heterochromia would be very rare, especially to get hold of it.
And then like other things, like the most famous thing is twins.
The twins are, I think it's one in 80.
And Veshua, like I mentioned, was one of the world's leading authorities in twin studies.
And there are these pictures of him in Germany, taking all of these anthropometric scales of twins, like measuring everything about them, all their life history.
However, if you're thinking that you want to be able to cross-reference your findings, and if these twins are children in Germany and they're not of a persecuted minority, you're going to have to get the parents' consent as well.
The sample size that you're going to be able to build is a massive obstruction to progress in this field.
And it was an incredibly popular field.
It was said to hold the key between what we know about environment and heredity.
And we've all seen these, we've probably all read twin studies, but we've seen these videos of identical twins that have never, that didn't know each other.
And then they meet up and they've got these similarities.
It's so compelling and so fascinating.
And at this time, there was a real buzz about this science and he was the world's leading authority.
So Mengele gets to Auschwitz and you can just imagine, like, say you've flicked that switch.
So no morality, no human decency, no compassion for any other human beings.
One way or another, that switch has been flicked.
Okay, now what are you left with?
You're left with an unprecedented opportunity to do science.
And Mengele is quoted in saying it would have been a crime not to, because the way that, and he had physicians that were beneath him coming to him saying, like, I'm struggling with what we're doing here.
And he'd say, they're already dead.
They might look like they're alive, but if they've been sent, we're saving them from the gas chambers.
So they're, you know, not only are they not human, they're not even alive, although they might be walking around and, you know, they might even resemble a human being.
They're actually ghosts.
So two things.
One, the obsession with identical twins is a prime example of bad science in the category of totally valid, but immoral in this case.
The ability to do terrifying things to identical twins and neutralize the genetic differences that would exist between any two other individuals is logically valid, but terrifying.
So we've seen an example of pseudoscience.
This is an example of bad science in the immoral sense, but not at the illogical sense.
The other question I have for you is, it will be tempting to dismiss someone like Mengele as sociopathic or psychopathic.
But that hypothesis makes a prediction.
The prediction that he was sociopathic or psychopathic, that would suggest that he was incapable of normal love and compassion.
And what I want to ask you about is, is there any evidence that his family relations were those of a psychopath?
Michael, you can add to this if you've got anything, but I'd say absolutely not.
We have letters between him and his wife when he was stationed at Auschwitz.
She visited.
The plans were right up until Christmas 1944, that she was going to join him in Auschwitz.
And then after the war, he, as people know, successfully escapes to Argentina.
Before that, actually, he spends three years as a farmhand on a farm in Germany.
And they just thought he was like a perfectly pleasant, really hard-working guy.
And then throughout his time in South America, he's, you know, he's chaste.
However, there's no evidence of him ever doing anything criminal.
And people around him seem to warm to him and want to protect him and believe his lies.
He even establishes his son until I think the age of 16 thinks that Mengele, who he's met once, because his son was born, I think, around 1944, but they're able to tell his son that Mengele is actually his uncle.
And then they decide to tell his son the truth when he's about 16 years old.
He's able to build some kind of relationship with his son, like through these intricate message systems that they've got, these Nazis in South America and then his family.
So the only thing that's psychopathic, and this sounds a bit strange, is the monstrous things that he did at Auschwitz.
Before, obviously, he'd got two doctorates and he'd always impressed, he'd impressed not only academically, but when he was serving for the Waffen-SS as well, he was really quite loved by his comrades and awarded different distinctions as well.
The balance of incentives and disincentives in Auschwitz for someone like him, not only did he have these deep interests, but obviously he's got this loyalty to Vershua.
And for him to say, I can supply you with endless material, and I'm sure he was able to justify that in many different ways.
But to answer your question, I don't know if Michael agrees or not.
I'm not sure that I can really improve all that much on what Johnny just said.
I think that's very accurate.
I would just point out, this applies to other perpetrators too.
And Johnny and I have done some podcasts on Belzik and Auschwitz and some of the other death camps.
And every so often you'll have a character like Wilhelm Bolger, for example, at Auschwitz, who, from all appearances, was a sadist, was a psychopath.
But that was evidenced even before he arrived in Auschwitz.
He had a record.
He actually had a criminal record of violence towards other people, engaging in, I guess we call it antisocial behavior, right?
Already in the 1930s.
And there were some other perpetrators who fit that mold, but most of them don't.
Most of the perpetrators, either in the camps or in the shooting squads of Eastern Europe, most of them were, to use that very hackneyed phrase at this point from Christopher Browning, they were ordinary men.
They had no criminal records, no history of misbehavior up until the time of the war.
And then after the war was over, there was, in many cases, no record of antisocial personality disorder or whatever sort of pathological label you want to attach.
No evidence of that either.
And that's true for Menge as well.
What I find so interesting about the post-war career of Mengele is that he was living in Bavaria as a farmhand, not that far from where the doctor's trial took place.
And he was never on any list to be arrested or to be brought in front of the Nuremberg court.
Now, Feschur was actually arrested.
He was never put on trial.
He was able to recycle back into German society and resume a very prominent place in German genetics after the war.
But Mengele was actually laying low until he could eventually, in 1949, get out of the country and flee to Paraguay using the rat line, the so-called rat line.
And that adds to, I think, this idea that people have about Mengele, the fact that he escaped legal and cosmic justice.
He got away to South America.
And there was this moment in 1960.
Mossad, everybody was looking for him.
Mossad, they almost certainly in 1962 saw him near the farm that he was being held up on.
And then they drew back their investigations.
And then he was able to basically survive until 1979.
And that adds to the mysticism about this guy.
He's like this ghoul that got away and had the last laugh.
Because I think if we'd have had him in a box like Eichmann, and we've spoken, me and Michael, about another perpetrator called Christian Wirth.
And he was used at these Operation Reinhardt death camp trials as this kind of demonic force.
And I was doing it because Wirth would have killed me.
I think if we'd have had Wirth in a box, he would have seen that this is just a mortal.
And maybe if we'd have had Mengele in that box, then he wouldn't be this demonic figure that we have.
I'd also say, you know, to add to that, most people just have a very vague understanding of what Mengele actually did in Auschwitz.
It's the idea of him that is so repugnant.
Well, hold on.
Before you go further down that road, I think we've just found out something very important.
If Mengele had normal, warm, familial relations, if people who met him even after he had done what he did at Auschwitz found him personable, likable, hardworking, then we should take no comfort in the idea of him being psychopathic because that is unlikely.
That in fact, and I think this is going to be one of the profound lessons here, what we need to understand is that that's not the explanation.
In some sense, we can back out the explanation for his truly monstrous behavior, which is that he is a utilitarian who has become convinced that a population is not entitled to the rights and the decency we extend to humans.
In other words, the rationalization that a medical worker has inflicting cruelty on a chimpanzee is of the same construction as Mangela being unbearably cruel to patients under his care who are not deemed worthy of human compassion.
And that, I think, ought to disturb us profoundly.
And this is, in fact, why I wrote that paper all those years ago, was that I didn't believe the story that these monsters were defective people acting on an illogical program that didn't add up.
They were too good at what they did to be that broken.
And the idea that there is a program that exists in human beings, likely all human beings, that switches off human compassion and that any atrocity can follow from the flipping of that switch is the key to preventing this from happening again.
You have to know that the switch is there.
And if you decide that, oh, we've got a problem with psychopaths who periodically gain power and engage in this terrible behavior, you'll miss it and the switch will get flipped again.
If you understand that the switch is there and that preventing its being flipped is the key, you'll behave an entirely different way.
So my hope is, in some sense, I don't want people to misunderstand the horror of the Nazis.
It is as bad as you think, and in many cases, worse.
That we, the normal people who don't behave this way and can't conceive of behaving this way, are closer to being able, that it is a flip of a smaller number of switches than you think should rob us of any comfort we have that we are fundamentally different.
If we are different, we are developmentally different.
And it is that developmental difference that we should be cultivating in people.
We don't want you to be capable of being turned into a Nazi by a change in circumstances.
That's the thing we should be focused on.
And it involves staring at Nazi atrocities and understanding that they were not, in general, as Michael points out, perpetrated by people of a fundamentally monstrous nature.
That was the exception in these camps, not the rule.
And isn't it interesting, Brett, that the German medical profession actually tried to portray what happened during the Third Reich as being the province of just a small handful of miscreants, like 250, 300 healthcare personnel and doctors and psychiatrists who supposedly perverted pure German medicine and pure German science and delivered it into the clutches of the Nazis.
And that was really the narrative of the German Medical Association from 1945 or 46, whenever it was reassembled, up until the 1970s, 1980s.
I mean, for decades after the war.
We didn't actually get a formal apology until 2012.
Yeah.
Later.
Formally apologized in 2011.
I've actually, since we've mentioned it, I've actually got it here.
So this was the Nuremberg Declaration on the Role of the Medical Profession during the Nazi era resolution of the 115th German Medical Association, 2012 Nuremberg.
This is the end of it.
And it's not very long, but I won't read the whole thing.
Said, these crimes were not the actions of individual doctors, but rather they occurred with the involvement of leading representatives of the medical profession and medical societies, as well with the significant involvement of prominent representatives of university medicine and renowned biomedical research institutions.
These human rights violations by Nazi medicine continue to have an impact today and raise questions about doctors' self-image, their professional conduct and medical ethics.
We recognize, the 115th German Medical Association therefore states, we recognize the significant responsibility of physicians for the injustices of Nazi medicine and consider what happened as a warning for the present and the future.
We express our deepest regret that doctors, contrary to their mandate to heal, have committed multiple human rights violations.
We remember the living and the deceased victims and their descendants and ask them for forgiveness.
But it took a while, didn't it?
And Johnny, that was 2012.
So that was 13 years ago.
But for decades and decades after the war, the opposite view was propounded by representatives of the German Medical Association.
Their view was that the crimes were committed by psychopaths and by miscreants who did not represent the mainstream of German medicine or German science.
Yeah, there were like these we're talking about harvesting of brains.
Absolutely, there's still so-called human specimens in the basements of the universities in Germany.
There's no plausible way that they're not still there because they only started properly clearing them out.
Like we've been talking about the Kaiser Wilmholm Society, which then rebranded because, you know, there was a branding issue.
They'd been harvesting brains and being taking part in racial policy and, you know, Mengele, all of that.
So they just essentially changed their name to the Max Planck Institute.
The general secretary of the Kaiser Wilmholm Society committed suicide in 1945.
Pretty convenient for them because then there could be like a cutoff.
But then there's like the Spiegelgrund, the children's hospital in Austria, just jars of brains in the basement.
And then the debate about, which I found absolutely fascinating.
Okay, what to do with them?
Because you can't, you have to dispose of them, I suppose, respectfully.
And even if you're a non-religious person, it seems that we have to uphold some kind of dignity for the dead.
But this has only been happening in like the last 20 or so years that we've been trying to find these so-called human specimens in the basements of these major medical institutions in Germany.
And this was rife.
So as I'm speaking right now, it is really implausible that all of them have been cleared out.
There's definitely victims' remains, would you say, Michael, in these institutions as we speak?
Very much.
And again, getting back to this really crucial point that you're raising, Johnny, I mean, it took decades for the German medical profession as a whole, as well as the scientific professions across the board.
It took them decades to come to grips with this.
And really, there was probably the need for a generational change when the older people needed to just basically retire and move on.
And a younger generation needed to step forward that would be willing to confront the true crimes as being a mainstream phenomenon in German science.
This is easy enough to understand, right?
If you participate in something sufficiently monstrous, then what do you do upon the discovery that it was monstrous?
If you have fallen into some utilitarian rationalization for evil, and then, you know, your side loses and you're forced to grapple with the actual implications of it, I don't know how the mind reconciles it.
And I would point out that there is, you know, obviously all of us are native speakers of English, but in English, typically the rationalization that apparently existed until 2012 when the formal apology was finally delivered is something like what we hear, oh, it was bad apples.
But I'm often struck by the fact that when people say that some terrible thing was the result of bad apples, they always eliminate the second half of that aphorism.
Bad apples spoil the bunch.
And the idea is a bad apple is not a bad apple.
A bad apple causes the entire bag to go bad.
And that what happened is the spread of whatever rationalization causes the switch to get flipped that causes a population to withdraw compassion from another population.
And, you know, the thing I am repeatedly struck by here, as I have been before, is that the gap between the utterly monstrous behavior of the Nazis and normal folk who think that they could never possibly find themselves there, that gap is smaller than anyone wants to acknowledge.
We've effectively participated in a global rationalization that primes us to find ourselves here again and again rather than never again.
Isn't it interesting that Philip Zimbardo, who did the famous prison experiment at Stanford, talked about this concept of bad apples versus what he calls bad barrels.
And he's of the view that the situation is not one where you start with individuals, you start with the structures that they're embedded in.
And that leads then to bad to bad apples.
And the structure, unfortunately, is an evolutionarily recurrent predicament.
It is an ebb and flow of growth that causes people to be able to collaborate because it's positive to do so.
And then the collaboration breaks down because of privation.
And you have people treating those that they previously treated as equals as if they're not even human.
And it is terrifying to live in the knowledge that that can and does happen with some regularity.
So the interesting thing is that people, everybody knows Mengele's name.
If you were going to choose three Nazis that you would expect the man in the street to know or the woman in the street to know, Hitler, Himmler, Mengele.
I think we all understand it like that.
And that's quite interesting because I get the feeling that people have a very vague understanding of what this man's crimes actually were.
I know, certainly I used to, although I knew a certain amount, it's more the like the feeling that you get from the mention of that name mengele kind of makes yourself it kind of makes you just feel sick to your stomach and you know that he did something awful and you know that he did it to children and that's kind of enough to everybody and but i would say also that what
what people think that he did is nowhere near as bad when you actually learn like all the things that he did to all of these different children like the the estimate is one and a half thousand pairs of of twins so up to three thousand individuals that he experimented on and the things that he did to them and we were talking about science this unhindered
science science with the breaks off what was almost impossible for twin studies is for is for a comparative autopsy but
obviously Mengele can can um artificially do this he can he can kill these kids whenever he wants and then or what he would often do and i know that we're going to talk about eva core in in a little bit there was one time when she was gravely ill and she ended up surviving obviously because she's one of the world's most famous holocaust survivors
she thinks that they were waiting for her to die of the illness that she had and then they were going to murder miriam and then they could do this autopsy between this not natural death but this death by like circumstances of illness and then the the twin that was that was going to be murdered by some other means but again just reinforcing this this point that that was going to be making that
this the incentives for somebody in this field that
had had that switch flicked off that human decency switch flicked off the their eyes must have just been so widened by all of these different scientific opportunities which were fantasy and our fantasy and and always should be fantasy to have this this many like this many victims this much human material in in
quotation work with but it's I think a way for us to try and understand why he did such awful things the the the opportunity was just unbelievable and I've mentioned before that he was able also to create this
team of physicians of medical practitioners like world class because again when he was on that ramp 700,000 people passed by him some of the world's brightest and best and one of them one of the more more famous people is called Miklos Nishi who was a Hungarian forensic scientist and Mengele asked him to step out he had his
documentation with him as well so he was able to prove to Mengele that he would be of use and Mengele was using this man to do autopsies and he has written an account of some of some of the stuff that he's seen after the war I'll read a couple of quotes because um linked to what I was just saying um Miklos Nishi says an event never before experienced in the history of medicine
worldwide is realized here twins die at the same time and there is the possibility of subjecting their corpses to an autopsy where in normal life is there the case bordering on a miracle that twins die in the same place at the same time the comparative autopsy is thus absolutely impossible under normal conditions but
in in Auschwitz camp there are several hundred pairs of twins and their deaths in turn present several hundred opportunities and that's just maybe just another example of what what we call planet Auschwitz this this otherworldly place where normal normal
reality is completely subverted and and he also says on one day I saw two little twins brought in they were about four years old they were frightened of course and clinging to each other after they were measured and had blood drawn they were murdered with an injection to the heart dr mengele then dissected them on my table that
is terrifying and it puts together uh something I had not understood until this moment the comparative autopsy issue is the perfect example of science that can't be done but for the suspension of the normal moral limits and ironically this is because
genes play a smaller role than popular mythology often has it so even two people who share a genome and may share a tremendous amount of their life history will die at separate moments absent them being together in a car wreck or something they will die at separate moments because the differences
in their life history will result in different causes of of death and different moments of death, unless somebody is empowered to cause their death, which is, of course, the unique province of those who are engaged in something like a genocide.
So the most immoral science of all is made possible, but it is also uniquely privileged to discover things that are factually true.
You just can't access them.
Most scientists wouldn't think to access them because the moral breach is so profound that even as a thought experiment, it doesn't leap to mind.
Yeah, we're talking about Dr. Mengel and his experiments, with twins and the gypsy camp in particular.
But of course, these experiments of different kinds were carried out not just at Auschwitz, but throughout many of the concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau and a few others, too.
And they involved more than just twin studies.
They involved, there were an entire series of experiments carried out by Luftwaffe, that is German Air Force doctors, experimenting with high pressure, for example, to see what the human body could withstand at higher levels for flyers who are going really high with their airplanes, or the extent to which the human body could sustain hypothermia.
So they conducted a series of hypothermia experiments using coerced human subjects at Dachau.
It really is.
If you really look into it, like I mentioned with Mengele, the reality is much worse than you think it is.
If you just got an idea of what you think Mengele is and if you've heard about some of the stuff he's been doing to twins, if you learn about all of the things, it's much, much worse than you thought.
And that's the same with what Michael's talking about.
It is unending and it's not like more of the same.
Like Michael was saying, high-altitude experiments and then hypothetical.
And you're not like, okay, it's just, you know, there's all this awful crap.
Each experiment is just so ghastly in its own unique way.
And it like just.
We are working.
But what's interesting is that American intelligence, who moved into Germany in 1944 and 45, as they began to investigate these experiments, they were primarily interested in gleaning the findings for the purposes of American military personnel, because they were very interested in these topics as well.
And only gradually do they develop the sense at a certain point that these experiments involved horrific criminality that should be chargeable in a post-war trial.
That comes much later, of course.
They were primarily interested in seizing the materials for their own usage in 1945.
And if we're talking about the world of Nazi medical human experimentation, the two experiments that you mentioned would be, objectively speaking, the most useful.
I think that the hypothermia experiments in particular were the ones that the Americans, obviously, that it's potentially useful.
A lot of the stuff that the Nazis were doing, especially with blood transfusion, was just maniacal.
Like we already know the different, blood groups were already known and they're transfusing blood between incompatible blood groups.
They're even doing blood transfusions, like injecting people with animal blood as well, almost just out of a kind of curiosity to see what would happen.
You know, you can.
So, you know, I know that this won't do anything good for the victim, but I'm curious to see what will happen if I inject this person with horseblood or like transfuse one twin with the other, although I know the different blood groups and just leading to these excruciating deaths of the victims when there was never going to be any scientific benefit.
So from the entire corpus of Nazi human experimentation, essentially, taking morals and ethics out of the picture, but essentially, in terms of our knowledge, nothing good came from it.
Perhaps like the hypothermia experiments, I think, were seen as potentially useful, as Michael said.
Well, and then like just to kind of build on your point, Johnny, some of the experiments were just so macawber and produced nothing that was of any value to anybody.
They actually had one experimental program at Dachau involving poison bullets.
They wanted to see how quickly a bullet that was dipped in poison could accelerate the death process for somebody who was shot by the bullet.
And this is just so inherently monstrous that it left the Allied investigators almost speechless.
Well, we've talked about the hypothermia.
One of the controls of the hypothermia experiments were get some naked female prisoners and see if it makes any sense, see if it makes any difference if they're what warms this like dying from hypothermia guy up.
Like they were just doing the most like they could.
They were like we've been saying, the switch is off.
When the switch is off and all of this opportune and there's no consequences whatsoever, I always understand it as the balance between incentives and disincentives.
So if you take the disincentives away and then you put the incentives there, if there's no disincentives whatsoever, it's like, well, it's somebody else's responsible for this.
There's no way, you know, I'm being permitted to do this.
And then the incentives are like, basically, I'm interested and the switch is off.
Then you get these utterly perverted, utterly, utterly perverted experiments.
And these experiments are too many to count.
The Ravensbrook rabbits and these, if we do a podcast series on the doctor's trial, this is the kind of thing that will be covered.
They called themselves, these women from Ravensbrook was a woman's camp.
And they called themselves the Ravensbrook rabbits because of how they were experimented on.
And there's this scene at the doctor's trial where this woman lifts her dress up to her knees because they'd wounded her so they could apply gangrene to the wound and then see if and then see how effectively different pharmaceuticals would address this gangrenous wound.
And then, you know, from this, we're branching out into industry and different pharmaceutical companies as well.
It is a bottomless pit of horror and suffering that is, you know, just much worse than you think it might be.
Much worse, but simultaneously, it is again a smaller gap than anyone could be comfortable with.
And I would remind people that in the early history of space exploration, we launched chimpanzees and dogs into space with no plan to return them to Earth.
And this was done, you know, I'm not even saying the argument is wrong, but this was done because it was understood to be for the greater good of humanity.
I don't think being launched into space to die there is inherently worse than what takes place outside of our view in medical experiments.
But nonetheless, this is something that human beings who have embraced a kind of utilitarian view allow themselves to do.
And what's really happened here that is unique is who is in the category that you're allowed to do these things to.
Now, with respect to the many awful experiments, I would point out, and again, I'm the last person on earth who would be defending this.
This is as ghastly or worse than most of us know.
But the scientific method, the first step is observation.
And if you imagine a physics laboratory or a botany laboratory in which there are no moral limits because there's no reason to have them, you can graft any plant to any other plant, billiard balls,
feel no pain, that the idea of trying things that are of low potential from the point of view of yielding anything interesting, but they're also low-cost experiments to run.
And at some point, you will notice something that doesn't add up by the model that you've been handed.
And that will cause you to investigate something higher quality.
What you have are scientifically and medically minded people who have had, as you point out, Johnny, the bar to running certain experiments radically lowered, who are looking for things to do because they don't regard the people that they are experimenting on as people.
And, you know, very interesting to hear what you said earlier about Mangelo's rationalization that effectively these people were dead already, which logically speaking is correct.
It doesn't make their suffering any less.
And some of them did survive the war.
But while I'm not sure how to make the point any clearer, I think the point is scientifically, these things still go on, not with people, but the mental processes are alive and well on Earth today,
and we all are shielded from understanding their implications in animal experiments because we'd be horrified if we weren't.
It's interesting, Brett, that at the Nuremberg Doctors trial, so many of the doctors tried to raise the defense that a lot of the experimental subjects had been convicted of some kind of capital offense and were going to be executed.
So why shouldn't we take advantage of their bodies that would otherwise be wasted?
Why not just put those, kind of exploit those materials because they're going to be executed anyways?
Traditionally, historically, that's where most anatomic specimens come from.
Since the Middle Ages, it was executed people.
They weren't always executed for thought crimes like they were during the Nazi period or just for having a disposition.
Why not exploit the bodies on behalf of improving the condition of the Aryans?
That was always important.
During the euthanasia program, they said to him, how many brains can you take?
And he was like, how many have you got, basically?
And then after the war, very unapologetically, he was saying, why would I have this material discarded when it was already there?
And then, you know, he was never prosecuted whatsoever and you know Veshua never prosecuted whatsoever I find it a little you know if I'm saying if I'm thinking about Hallavorden and Veshua I've got a more definitely more of a problem that Veshua got off scot-free than Hallavorden although to me they're both you know fucking monsters and I wish the worst on both
them but the sure he Mengele was was his research proxy in Auschwitz there was there was that clear and explicit relationship from Mengele's medical degree and then it it's almost
certain that Mengele actually came back to Germany once when he was living in South America and we don't know that he visited Vishwa but he went to like an hour away from where he was but it it's it's it's bad that Vishwa just got away scot-free not just in his lifetime but even now and I think that's why I'm glad that we've at least like brought him a little bit of infamy
with this podcast because hardly anyone knows his name this is a disgusting human being he played an instrumental role in creating one of the worst people that has ever existed on the face of this earth and this person's career and ambition as the architect of
horror and suffering for so many innocent people is
is inextricably linked to the the behavior and the presence of his master so and I think me and Michael have spoken before about the nazi period of these names of of people it's just endless the when you're thinking about perpetrator studies it's just like you learn about a new name and then you look into their background you're like how did I not know about this
guy it just goes on and on and on and on doesn't it Michael I would add to that Johnny that I mean you you express such moral censure and condemnation of these people which is entirely appropriate but I would just hasten to add that people like Haliforden and Fersh were in literally hundreds or even thousands of other prominent doctors and scientists in the third reich were not rogue elements I I think we need to
overcome this this mythos that takes root in the decades after world war ii that this was a perverted kind of science uh no German medicine as I mentioned before was predisposed to becoming an accomplice to the nazis forced crimes and they were acting out of this altered
ethic that took root on beginning really after world war one and found an opportunity for uh as you eloquently put it Johnny taking the brakes off of the scientific investigation during the 30s and especially the 1940s and of course euthanasia is a part of that as well and maybe we're going maybe we're returning back to that question of
why was and this would be interesting for Brett's listeners to try and engage with this question and for us to get a proper answer why were there more physicians and doctors that signed up to the nazi party than any other profession and from our conversation i'm starting to think what that is they had more to gain the opportunities the status personally they had they had so much to gain like
their lives weren't in danger let's let's let's get that out straight away you weren't nobody was coming round like the other 40 percent never joined the nazi depart nazi party i i've who knows what the reason for that was so it's not an existential decision it's a decision it's a decision that's made for your personal
betterment and what that might be is like we've mentioned being elevated in rank and status and then money for your family but also these
incredible research opportunities you know you probably as a medical practitioner you're probably hearing about them or you know so and so has just been given unlimited access to you know corpses you know we haven't talked about the pern cough backless today it's probably not the time for it because it deserves like a thorough explanation but these anatomic drawings that were made from corpses of executed
victims of the nazi nazi state but johnny when we talk about motives right i mean everything that you've said and that bretta said it's true i mean careerism is a major factor here the opportunity for boundless uh exploitation of prisoners who are suddenly placed at the disposal of scientists and doctors was a uh was a beckoning that very few people could resist but let's not overlook a really dismaying reality
which is that many of these people many of these doctors many of these scientists shared the ideology of of
Nazi party in its most extreme forms namely that there are certain groups that could be murdered and initially sterilized and then eventually murdered certain groups who could be done away with using the power of the state in order to purify the folk and to strengthen society and they identified with that that was That was a.
I mean, the Americans were right, and the British were right in the doctor's trial when they, I mean, they weren't right about everything, but one thing they were right about was this view that Nazi medicine was a form of, they called it theanatology.
That was the term that was used by Alexander.
He was one of the medical advisors to Telford Taylor, the lead prosecutor.
And they referred to this as, rather than as medicine, it became theanatology, which was the use of medical science as a way to commit genocide.
And I think that's an accurate description of what we're talking about.
So let's never overlook the ideological function.
And certainly, Brett, you have an interesting take here when you construe it in terms of genetic kinds of almost inadvertent or at least unconscious strategies to advance one's lineage.
And perhaps we could understand it in those terms.
But the ideology was definitely there, and it was something that was shared between so many of these medical criminals we're talking about and the Nazi Party.
And that is very evident, too, in the T4 program and the euthanasia program.
I suppose the age-old question that we keep returning to is how and can we disentangle ideological motives from personal like material motives?
because they seem just to be so intertwined that we can perhaps prize them out to a certain extent, and then it becomes very blurry.
One thing that I did want to mention during this podcast was...
I want to pick up on a couple of points there.
I think, again, I'm discovering what my role is here, which is to point out how small the gap is.
Okay.
So you've got by Michael's report, as the Allies gain access to the materials that the Nazis had collected,
there is initially a fascination with, a drive to collect the information that the Nazis had gleaned, which is very understandable.
These are experiments that you can't normally run.
The Nazis have run them, so they know some things about human physiology that we don't.
But in some sense, that's just one step removed.
And I still don't know what to do with the moral question of what is the status of the information that was immorally gleaned.
It's still information.
On the other hand, to the extent that you profit from it, you are contributing to a justification for the unjustifiable.
But I would also point out that Operation Paperclip, in which Nazi scientists were effectively laundered into service amongst the Allied nations,
has a resemblance to what you described Mengela doing on the platform.
Mengela is finding people who have medical capacity and drafting them into service of the Nazis.
And so all of these things are stratagems for advancement of something.
Sometimes it's the well-being of the individual who has a perverse incentive.
Sometimes it's a nation which decides that although it would be nice to prosecute those who have done evil, they may be able to contribute more to the society by looking past what they did and giving them a new job.
And then, you know, so that's two things.
You've got our, you know, the Allies looking at the data that the Nazis collected with interest.
You've got the legitimizing of criminals into service in the West.
And then you've got another example, the bodies exhibit that has traveled and many of us have seen.
There are a couple of these exhibits.
And so I don't, it's a little hard to know which bodies came from where, but I think it's become quite clear that many of the bodies in at least one of those bodies exhibits were executed prisoners, or at least many of them were.
And the public of the world has legitimized the use of these specimens by paying to go see them.
Yeah, there's a lot that.
But just piggybacking on the last thing that you said, you've just kind of reminded me, I was looking into the current contemporary situation on how anatomical specimens are dealt around America and sometimes around the world.
I don't want to spend a long time on this.
It's truly, truly horrifying.
You don't have to actually have a license.
And what you will, because it's so expensive to bury a loved one or had a loved one cremated, it's always people from like lower class situations that are approached by these companies and told that, you know, we'll take it from here.
We'll just, and they often, because they don't, perhaps they don't read or it's not clear in the contract, they, they, they're not, they're not cognizant that they're handing over the corpse of their loved one.
And this the corpse is then going to be dissected up and sold at a profit.
And you see the prices, you know, a spinal column, like $2,000.
And they'll just take this body for free because this family, you know, they say they're respecting the Hospital, and they can't afford for this dead body to be in the hospital.
You know, I'm grimacing whilst I say this, but these are the things that are happening right now today.
And the FBI have raided a few of these places and found like literally, like, this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff, but the FBI have found heads in fridges, like limbs like frankenstinially stitched onto.
And people are like all over America, as we speak, are making profit from the sale of corpses that they've taken in a dishonest manner.
And then to, anyway, just to leave that out there, I wanted to say, because I think we're drawing to a close, I wanted to say one thing about the Nazi period that we haven't properly emphasized.
So some of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society Institute directors were involved in passing a law.
There was an expert committee that was drawn together in June 1933 called the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy.
And this brought together like Himmler at his career stage at the time, Ernst Rudin, who's the KWI lead for psychology.
And it was organized by the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, and then other intellectuals and prominent geneticists and leading intellectuals in race science.
And they came together and the product of that meeting was a law passed on the 14th of July, 1933, called the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
And this law mandated sterilization for the hereditarily ill.
And I would argue that lots of people know about this law, but I would say that the significance of this law is so underappreciated.
I would say that it's...
Because within the mandate of this law, that's the order for German physicians to go and sterilize the population.
And it's not like coerced sterilization was born at that moment.
But for example, between 1934 and 1935, we've got 80,000 sterilizations performed.
To give some context to that, between 1900 and 1950 in America, 60,000 sterilizations are performed in half a century.
And they do more of that in one year.
And the categorizations for this law, like why are people being sterilized, the number one reason is congenital feeble-mindedness, which is a term that is no longer with us.
And this was a very, and, you know, I've said many time, and me and Brett have talked about this, the elasticity of ideology being its strength.
The term congenital feeble-mindedness could just mean anything.
So if you were, or, you know, if you weren't schizophrenic, if you didn't have hereditary deafness, blindness, like you, you could make a case for anyone being in the category of congenital feeble-mindedness.
Vagrants, prostitutes, people that were just immoral.
Sometimes, you know, the health courts that were put together to enforce this law, there were 200 of these health courts.
Sometimes they'd just be like, yeah, they're really lazy.
And, you know, that's obviously a product of congenital feeble-mindedness.
Let's sterilize them.
So within a week, they'll be sterilized.
And I also want to make the point that we're using the word sterilization.
And it might sound like it was a sterile procedure.
It often was not.
We're doing this on an, and you know, they were doing this on an assembly line fashion.
So thousands and thousands of peoples, and these were in clinics and hospitals around Germany, were being sterilized in the most hastily performed operations.
No real sanitary conditions, no aftercare.
It's thought that 10 to 12% of people died as a direct result of the surgery and then others committed suicide.
And one of the reasons that this is, I think, one of the most consequential laws of the 20th century is because the logic and the system was just shifted to euthanasia.
So all of the categories, the clinics, the perpetrators, and Michael, is this your understanding just like step two?
Yeah, that's how I see it.
That's how a lot of scholars in this field see it.
I mean, you even have the hereditary health courts with the sterilization plan or the sterilization law.
So they set up this set of two doctors and one lawyer, I think, who sat on this hereditary health court that would determine who was eligible for being sterilized coercively.
And then you see by the late 1930s, first the so-called children's euthanasia program, there's a decision made in 1938 to begin a program, a formal program, targeting disabled children under the age of three.
That was the cutoff.
Now, eventually they will override that gap in the 1940s and go after older children and teenagers as well.
But that program then also builds into it another hereditary sort of an expert evaluation process, really, consisting of so-called experts who would review these forms that would report on the identities of the children and then determine which children would be murdered.
The children would then be sent away to one of 30 facilities where they would be injected with overdoses of either scopolamine or morphine, sometimes in any event, lethal cocktails that would kill the child.
And then of course that then provides the essential basis for the adult program, which is carried into effect a year later in the fall of 1939, coinciding, interestingly enough, with the outbreak of the war.
And getting back to Brett's point earlier, here we go again, Brett, the resource scarcity argument, right?
So we're embarking on this war.
Resources are going to be scarce, so we need to carefully husband these resources.
We need to get rid of the useless eaters, Nutzlos Esser, they said in German, the useless eaters who are burdening, like parasites, burdening the German people and preventing them from fully asserting themselves militarily in the war.
So you see the development then of the adult program, which again has another group of experts who would review the forms just like they did with the sterilization program, also with the children's program.
And they even had an appellate authority of sorts.
You had the Gutachter, the experts, but then you had the Obergutachter consisting of three physicians, three psychiatrists who would review the forms to either confirm or overturn the initial determination.
You have two slippery slopes here.
Can I just emphasize this point before we move on?
This was like to the Nazis, this was medicine.
We've convened here to talk about Nazi medicine.
So some of the viewers were like, well, how does euthanasia fit into this?
How does gassing a person fit into the topic of Nazi medicine?
How does leaving a child to starve on a ward fit in with Nazi medicine?
To the Nazis, this was a medical procedure.
Yeah.
You're treating the body of the people.
Yeah.
And the gassings were supposed to...
So you're actually, when you lock an unsuspecting victim, like the first gas chambers were these euthanasia gas chambers, you're actually administering a medical procedure.
And that, I think there's a lesson in that, like, what does this word medicine like mean?
And, you know, if it can be perverted to that extent by one of the world's most advanced countries, then, you know, I think we need to we need to put some thought into what the hell.
Well, that's, I mean, that's, of course, what the Hippocratic Oath is built to prevent.
And I believe your point earlier, Johnny, there are two slippery slopes involved with the euthanasia program.
One involves a panel of experts, as Michael is pointing to, who is in a position to determine who is deserving of this medical execution.
And the other, oh no, the first slippery slope, as you point out, Johnny, is from sterilization to execution, which I would point out the evolutionary interpretation is all too obvious.
A sterilized person is effectively dead from the gene's perspective.
And so it is not hard to see how you make the leap from, well, this person should be sterilized so they don't pass on their ostensibly genetic deformity.
Now we've got the two slippery slopes.
One is, well, if they're not going to be reproductive, what's the point of them being alive?
They are useless eaters, as Michael is.
And then again, they're being assessed like it would be like two brothers.
One of them can crank a handle, the other can't.
So it's not, there's nothing racial about it.
And the one that can't crank a handle is like forced into a gas chamber.
You know, the one that can crank the handle is allowed to live.
Right.
And as soon as you have this cognitive structure, we are entitled to make these decisions.
There are experts who can tell us when somebody is and isn't within the realm.
Then you can extend this to whoever you find you want to put into the useless eater category because they are taking food out of the mouths of somebody who would be more productive or whatever.
So the point is there's no, once you've granted yourself this kind of leeway, there's no natural break to it.
I would also point out, I neglected to mention earlier in response to your description of the women who had been given gangrene in order to test remedies.
This is reminiscent of the Tuskegee experiment, to be certain, in which syphilis was inflicted on people in order to see the progression of the disease.
You know, so there's no comfort to be had there that this was a special defect of the Nazis.
There's the Guatemalan syphilis and gangrene experiments that are straight out of the Nazi playbook.
If you don't know about them, then Jesus Christ.
Yeah, I don't.
But I can infer from what you're saying what those experiments will have been.
And then I would also just add, again, I believe this all comes down to an evolutionary story that we do not, that we hide from.
We do not fault the Inuit for putting elders On ice flows, because I think we intuit that the environment that these populations face is so harsh, and that they do not willingly put their elders on ice flows, but that they are, it is a question of whether or not the population should persist, and the elders themselves have an interest in the population persisting.
So when circumstances call for it, we understand what they do.
But the point is that logic, the logic that renders the Inuit practice understandable at every level, including a moral level,
and the Nazi behavior being absolutely unacceptable in moral terms, but genetically comprehensible, that's the difficult territory that we are forced to grapple with if we really hope to prevent these things from unfolding in the future.
And it comes down to a, again, I think loosely speaking, we all understand that utilitarianism sort of functions day to day, you know, hour to hour, but that in exotic circumstance, exotic circumstances, utilitarianism collapses into the most horrifying kinds of evil.
We see it, I think, clearly in the Nazi examples, but we will find uncomfortable parallels if we look at, as you point out, what's done with bodies of people who can't afford a funeral.
We would find shocking examples if we looked at what doctors and the medical establishment does with respect to organ donation, that the story that we all carry around about the fact that there's a moment at which the brain has died and at that point the organs can provide somebody else life.
That story isn't nearly what we all imagine.
Irrespective of what you think about reproductive rights and abortion, there's certainly a mode of thought in which an unborn child has no rights up until the instant of birth, a position I find preposterous, even if you don't think there's a moral question when you've got a zygote or a blastula or a gastrula.
At some point, you do have a question that is moral, and there are many who don't see it because it serves their interest not to.
So I think across the board, one has to work to find an example that doesn't have an uncomfortable parallel within, you know, outside of the Nazi context.
I think those parallels are all over the place.
And that's a warning to us.
And that only by pretending the Nazis were especially defective people in some way that we've never defined, do we escape responsibility for understanding the banality of evil, the fact that they were ordinary men, this hint that keeps returning through historical investigation.
And I think that perfectly articulates the reason that I feel we need a proper investigation into the doctor's trial.
And then in the way that I conceive it is that the final episode or the final episodes would be us coming to terms with what we've learned over the course of like 10 episodes.
So this is going to be my little pitch and I've pitched it to both of you already.
But the podcast series would be about, because to do it meaningfully, would be about 10 episodes long.
Incredibly, the transcripts from this trial, these trials, have survived because revolutionary transcription technology had just been introduced at the IMT, the Nuremberg, the main Nuremberg trial, and this was the first of 11 other trials that came after it, each focusing on a different aspect of the Nazi system, either Nazi industrialists, etc.
This was definitely the most consequential post-IMT trial.
And maybe, again, like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to argue that the law for the prevention of hereditary offspring was the most consequential law of the 20th century.
I will also put it out there that I think the doctor's trial was more consequential than the IMT.
The technology that was used to capture every single word that was said in that courtroom is quite brilliant.
So there'd be people, it was immediate, instantaneously using IBM technology translated into four different languages, English, French, German and Russian.
So like, say you've got Nazi perpetrators, say you've got Karl Brandt takes the stand.
Instantaneously, you've got people like vocally translating his testimony into four languages.
And then you've got people that are writing in shorthand and they're capturing every single word that was said inside that courtroom, which is just an amazing effort preserving historical sources for posterity.
And these, I contacted Harvard Law School and they've got its many, many thousands of pages long.
So I've chosen 10 different parts of that.
And the proposition is that me and you and Michael For each episode, go away, and it might be 70 pages, it might be 200 pages, but we engage with this primary source material for different aspects of this trial.
So, it might be the hypothermia experiments, it might be the high-altitude experiments, it might be the testament of a victim like Ugen Kojen.
It might be Leo Alexander, who was one of the main lawyers of the trial.
It might be like his prosecution statements.
Or later on, we get to how are the defense trying to defend these people as well, which is just fascinating.
Like, I've looked through like this, these thousands and thousands of pages of primary source material and just like picked out moments.
Any way you pick, it's just absolutely fascinating.
And I think it'd be really interesting for three people to engage with this primary source material and then come back and discuss, okay, what did you find in it?
Well, not only that, Johnny, not only that, but you also have the prosecutor's theory of the case, which was completely at odds with the defense theory of the case.
And then the results of that for decade after decade after the trial was over, because the defendant's position is the one that really, to a large extent, molded the post-war consensus in Germany up until the 1970s and 80s.
And then, yeah, I would have Michael Bryant, I would have Ritt Weinstein, and then we'd have a little old me in the middle.
But I think it would be an unbelievably fascinating project, and I would look forward to it.
Like, just it'd just be like going back to school for me.
So that's the proposition.
If people want to see it, like Brett said, we'll do it, or at least do a few episodes of it.
I'd like to read.
So I came across one of the opening statements on this doctor's trial of Telford Taylor.
And Michael, obviously, you'll know Telford Taylor.
Of course.
He was at the International Military Tribunal.
He was like playing second fiddle to Robert Jackson.
So Robert Jackson was the chief counsel for basically the whole trial, but for America.
And he retired straight after the IMT.
So Telford Taylor, his understudy, like takes charge for the doctor's trial as chief counsel and chief prosecutor.
So this is a massive moment in this guy's life.
Just if you think about just the history and he's doing this, you know, there's the, I think it's, is it 23, you know, it's a murderous row of awful Nazis in the courtroom.
The moment must have just been incredible.
And it's him like stepping out of the shadows of Robert Jackson for the first time.
So I just find, and I'll, it's all of its brilliant, like incredible literature, his speech, but I'll just read a little bit of it just to kind of whet people's appetite for this trial.
And just to mention, I came across this whilst doing my reading for this podcast, whilst I was sat in a children's playground because life happens and you've got all of these different things that you have to do.
And it just felt so strange, like the juxtaposition between like the Nazi doctors trial and kids like gleefully playing in my surroundings was just so weird that it's kind of just reminded me whilst I'm just going to read this.
So Telford Taylor steps up and he says, The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science.
The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundred of thousands.
A handful only are still alive.
A few of the survivors appear in this courtroom.
Most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected.
For the most part, they are nameless dead.
To their murderers, these wretched people were not even individuals at all.
They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.
They were 200 Jews in good physical condition, 50 gypsies, 500 tubercular Poles, or a thousand Russians.
The victims of these crimes are numbered among the anonymous millions who met their death at the hands of the Nazis and whose fate is a hideous blot on the page of modern history.
The charges against these defendants are brought in the name of the United States of America.
They are being tried by a court of American judges.
The responsibilities thus imposed upon the representatives of the United States prosecutors and judges alike are grave and unusual.
They are owed not only to the victims and to the parents and children of the victims, that just punishment be imposed on the guilty, and not only to the defendants, that they be accorded a fair hearing and decision.
Such responsibilities are the ordinary burden of any tribunal.
Far wider are the duties which we must fulfil here.
We have still other responsibilities here.
The defendants in the dock are charged with murder, but this is no mere murder trial.
We cannot rest content when we have shown the crimes were committed and the persons responsible for them have been identified.
To kill, to maim and to torture is criminal under all modern systems of law.
These defendants did not kill in hot blood, nor for personal enrichment.
Some of them may be sadists who killed and tortured for sport, but they are not all perverts.
They are not ignorant men.
Most of them are trained physicians and some of them are distinguished scientists.
Yet these defendants, all of whom were fully able to comprehend the nature of their acts and most of whom were exceptionally qualified to form a moral and professional judgment in this respect, are responsible for wholesale murder and unspeakably cruel tortures.
They must not become a spreading cancer in the breast of humanity.
They must be cut out and exposed for the reasons so well stated by Mr. Justice Jackson in this courtroom a year ago.
And then he finally quotes Robert Jackson.
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.
I just find...
I just find that so, so powerful and inspiring.
It's amazing how many of the themes that we've been discussing over the last two and a half hours here are in that speech, so eloquently put.
Yeah, it's honestly, it's such a timely event, the doctor's trial.
And, you know, I hope to be able to explore it with you too, because I'm sure that I'll learn so much.
And whether we like it or not, the Nazi period is a reference point that we use to understand the world that we live in.
Yes.
And it's a case of there, but for the grace of God, go we.
I think we have to do this in order that we understand the lesson correctly and not the cartoon lesson that so many of us have been handed, because really that's where the hope rests that we can prevent this in the future.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
All right.
Well, you know, we're going to struggle with this at the end of each of these episodes.
I can't really say it's been a pleasure, but it has been an honor to navigate these issues with you both.
I can't think of two more responsible, decent, and insightful people to be going through this terrifying material with.
So thank you both.
And I'm thinking we will be picking up the doctor's trial in earnest soon.
