Science and Technology

Maus is an oral history of one individual’s experience during the Holocaust, a central reality of World War II. More than any other previous war, World War II saw incredible advances in science and technology. Both the Axis and the Allied Powers were engaged in a race to acquire weaponry that would defeat the enemy. Yet, the Germans wasted energy creating more efficient methods for exterminating their own civilians and ejected some of their best scientists in the name of racial purity. These scientists then went to work for the Allies to defeat what they saw as an immediate threat to civilization. This conflict saw the invention of radar, the jet engine, and of course, the atomic bomb. To the people involved, humankind’s very survival now depended on mathematical and scientific invention.

George McCormack

The Nazi Doctors

In Maus II, there are two references (pp. 58 and 59) to “Dr. Mengele” at Auschwitz, where he is portrayed as sending workers who show signs of imperfection (a skin rash, for example) to the gas chambers. Who was Dr. Josef Mengele?

German medicine before and during World War II adopted a view that people who were not of “pure” German heritage or who were disabled physically or mentally should be eliminated from society. During World War II, doctors supervised the death camps, often making the decision about who should live or die. “Research” was carried out before people were killed. For example, studies of the brain were carried out by opening up inmates' skulls without anesthesia, and “experimenting” on a living subject. Study of human metabolism featured observing what happened to people as they were frozen to death, or gradually deprived of oxygen until they died. Study of infectious disease involved injecting inmates with germs of various kinds, and then administering untested substances to see if they had any effect on the disease. Dr. Mengele had a special interest in children, and even more so in twins. One survivor (Susan Vigorito) reported that Mengele kept her and her three-and-a-half-year-old twin sister in a small cage in his office for a year. He repeatedly scraped at the bone of her sister's leg without anesthesia, keeping the wound open to see the result. Her twin eventually died after receiving injections of some substance into her spine.

Whether any of this can be considered science rather than merely sadistic torture is doubtful.

After World War II, a few of the dozens of doctors who participated in “research” in the death camps were put on trial at Nuremberg. The problem for the prosecutors was that there were no laws regarding abuses of medical research, even in the U.S. Even so, sixteen doctors were found guilty; seven of them were hanged. A set of regulations to cover medical research called the Nuremberg Code was developed to provide the basis and standard for prosecuting the Nazi doctors.

In the U.S., researchers had often used groups of people with limited rights, such as prisoners or mentally retarded people living in institutions, as subjects for their experiments. The Nuremberg Code called such experiments into question. One notorious government sponsored experiment that was revealed in the 1970s is the one at Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s and 1940s, where poor African-American men with syphilis were used as a control group and allowed to infect others and die even after the discovery of penicillin. In 1997 the American government apologized to the families of the men for exploiting them so horribly. Further study of guidelines for research, such as the Belmont Report outlined the steps that researchers must take in order to humanely conduct research.

See the links below to learn more about the Nazi doctors, and about the rules that researchers must follow today. Concentration-camp atrocities by medical doctors alerted the world to the dangers that unregulated research could pose, especially to vulnerable populations.
A debate is underway as to whether data from the Nazi doctors' research should be used as part of valid research. It is suggested by some that since nobody will ever fatally deprive people of oxygen again, there may be unique information in the death camp experiments. Others oppose this, arguing that torture should not be considered
serious science.

Lorence A. Long

Some questions for discussion:

What do you think? Could using the records of these concentration-camp doctors lead to useful discoveries, or would recognizing the work of the Nazi doctors legitimize torture and serve as a dangerous precedent, perhaps leading us to further abuses?

People often believe that education makes people more moral and humane. The Nazi doctors were very highly educated. Why didn't education have the expected effect on them?

Even before world war II, many German doctors killed disabled children at the request of their parents. Later, they considered the killing of people with developmental disabilities or a mental illness a good idea, and assisted in bringing these deaths about. Is this different from the “assisted suicide” practiced in the State of Oregon, in which doctors may provide deadly medications at the request of those who are terminally ill? If so, how?

The first principle of The Nuremberg Code is that research with humans can only be done when the people who are the subjects of the research consent to it. Are there times when this principle should be set aside, so that research can continue?

Links:

Cohen, Baruch (2003). “The Ethics of Using Medical Data from Nazi Experiments.“ In Jewish Law. http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/NaziMedEx.html

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a web site that provides some excerpts from documents from the Nuremberg trials. http://www.ushmm.org/research/doctors/

The English Christian Medical Fellowship offers a web site with a brief history of the ideas that helped German doctors to justify using medical means for eliminating unwanted segments of the population. http://www.cmf.org.uk/literature/contebnt/asp?context=article&id=1606

The web site of the Office of Human Subjects Research of the National Institutes of Health contains the most important documents showing the development of ethical principles covering research, including the Nuremberg Code, The Belmont Report, the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association, and 45 CFR 46, the chapter of the Code of Federal Regulations governing research funded by the Federal government. Click on the following link, and then choose “Ethical Guidelines.”
http://ohsr.od.nih.gov

These NPR and PBS sites tell the sad story of the Tuskegee experiment and the U.S. government's role in it.
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/jul/tuskegee/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/may97/tuskegee_5-16a.html