The Nazi Anatomists

[MountainLaurel]

Fascinating piece...

In 1941, Charlotte Pommer graduated from medical school at the University of Berlin and went to work for Hermann Stieve, head of the school’s Institute of Anatomy. The daughter of a bookseller, Pommer had grown up in Germany’s capital city as Hitler rose to power. But she didn’t appreciate what the Nazis meant for her chosen field until Dec. 22, 1942. What she saw in Stieve’s laboratory that day changed the course of her life—and led her to a singular act of protest.

Stieve got his “material,” as he called the bodies he used for research, from nearby Plötzensee Prison, where the courts sent defendants for execution after sentencing them to die. In the years following the war, Stieve would claim that he dissected the corpses of only “dangerous criminals.” But on that day, Pommer saw in his laboratory the bodies of political dissidents. She recognized these people. She knew them.

snip

This history matters for its own sake. It also matters for debates that remain unresolved—about how anatomists get bodies and what to do with research that is scientifically valuable but morally disturbing.

Then there’s this eerie relevance: Stieve’s work was the source of an explosive controversy in the 2012 U.S. elections. It’s the basis for a claim that Republicans in Congress threw like a piece of dynamite into the abortion debate: The idea that women rarely or never get pregnant from rape.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2013/11/nazi_anatomy_history_the_origins_of_conservatives_anti_abortion_claims_that.html

[Brickbat]

1. This is a haunting and very important piece. Riveting reading.

[sharp_stick]

2. Plötzensee would

have been able to produce a lot for him too. Wiki shows an estimated 3,000 executions there during the Nazi years.

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, MountainLaurel.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

4. No more morally objectionable than people viewing "Bodies" exhibits around the US

many of those bodies are thought to be people executed by Chinese officials including dissidents.

[riverwalker]

5. the Mayo brothers

of the now famous Mayo clinic, dissected to bodies of the 38 native americans hanged in Mankato in 1862, the largest mass hanging in US history.

frontier doctors, including the father of the famous Mayo Brothers, spent the night pulling out the dead Indians and taking them away to their surgeries so that they might be flayed and dissected and displayed like so many animals.

http://www.nickcolemanmn.com/?p=3124

Carley also recounted how doctors, "quick to seize the rare opportunity to obtain subjects for anatomical study," dug up the bodies after the mass execution at Mankato. "Dr. William Mayo drew that of Cut Nose, and later his sons learned osteology from the Indian's skeleton."
His body was taken to Le Sueur, where it was dissected by William Mayo in the presence of other doctors, and the skeleton "was cleaned and articulated for the doctor's permanent use."

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/071700/nat_071700027.shtml

[jakeXT]

6. I don't know if the hypothermia experiments were worse

But not all Nazi science efforts have been rejected, including the rocketry incorporated in the U.S. space effort after the war.

In the hypothermia experiments, the Nazis had a practical reason for wanting accurate results to help save German pilots shot down over the North Sea. And so, at Dachau concentration camp, between 100 to 300 inmates, including Jews, gypsies, priests and political prisoners, were placed naked in vats of ice water for two hours, five hours and more, and their bodily functions were monitored as their temperatures fell.

Some were frozen to death. Others were brought to the point of death and then various methods of recovery were tried, including warm baths, alcohol and heat from the bodies of other prisoners forced to hold them to try to warm them.

After the war an American officer, Maj. Leo Alexander, looked at the data, interviewed witnesses and wrote a description of the experiments and their results. His paper, ``The Treatment of Shock from Prolonged Exposure to Cold, Especially in Water,`` was published in 1946 by the U.S. Department of Commerce and is still available through the Library of Congress and a few libraries.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-06-07/news/8801050519_1_nazi-leo-alexander-hypothermia