| The Experimental Impulse |
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| doctors could undoubtedly see it primarily as contributing
to the world's learning the truth of Auschwitz. |
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| Removal of Limits |
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There is an additional Auschwitz research function: that
of the camp as a constant source of victims for research done almost anywhere.
Besides the Auschwitz prisoners taken to Strasbourg to be made part of
Professor Hirt’s skeleton collection, there are many other examples: eight
prisoners from Auschwitz sent to Sachsenhausen for experiments with epidemic
hepatitis, in which the possible death of the inmates was an accepted part of
the arrangement; and the notorious sequence of twenty Jewish children, ages
five to twelve, transferred from Auschwitz to Neuengamme in Hamburg, where they
were subjected to injections of virulent tubercular serum and to other
experiments, until they were removed from Neuengamme and secretly murdered just
before the arrival of Allied troops.65
Auschwitz was not just a medicalized death factory but a source of "raw
materials" for everyone's deadly medical experiments.
Prisoner
physicians could speak with bitter accuracy about the specific way in which
their and other inmates’ humanity was negated by Nazi experimenters. One
observed that “man was the cheapest experimental animal …. Cheaper
than a rat.” Another declared that the experiments “had no scientific
basis, and … that the main interest they had for those who performed them
was to give Berlin, in their detailed reports, the illusion of important and
continuous work so that these brave ‘researchers’ might be kept far
from the front in a position of sinecure.”
We know that Nazi
doctors partly justified the experiments by their sense that Jews were in any
case doomed. While prisoner doctors made no such justification, their emotions
were also affected by the Jewish death sentence. Dr. Jacob R. could remember a
feeling that “the experiments were of considerably less import than the
whole inferno I was viewing there.”
The experiments represent,
among other things, a removal of medical limits. Ordinary medical behavior is
predicated upon maintaining life — and refraining from actual or potential
killing or maiming one’s patient in the name of enhancing the life of
one‘s own group or people. Paradoxically, that medical vision of social
cure contributed directly to using medicine to kill or injure. Hence the array
of Auschwitz experiments, and others done elsewhere including artificially
inflicted burns with phosphorous incendiary bombs; experiments on the effects
of drinking sea water; experiments with various forms of poison, by ingestion
as well as in bullets or arrows; widespread experiments on artificially induced
typhus, as well as with epidemic hepatitis and with malaria; experiments in
cold immersion (“in freezing water”) to determine the body’s
reactions and susceptibilities; experiments with mustard gas in order to study
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