by Edwin Black
PART THREE
Newgenics
CHAPTER 18
From Ashes to Aftermath
On January 17, 1945, as the Russian army approached Auschwitz, Mengele went from office to office methodically gathering his research materials. “He came into my office without a word,” recounted pathologist Martina Puzyna. “He took all my papers, put them into two boxes, and had them taken outside to a waiting car.” Mengele and the documents fled first to Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and then into Czechoslovakia. There he joined up with Hans Kahler, a close friend, coauthor and one of Verschuer’s twins researchers. The Russians liberated Auschwitz on January 27, at about 3 P.M., and Mengele’s horrors were quickly discovered. International commissions listed him as a war criminal. But Mengele slipped through the Allied manhunt and eventually escaped to South America.1
Even as the Allies closed in, Verschuer still hoped he and Hitler’s Reich would prevail in its war against the Jews. Just months before Mengele abandoned Auschwitz, Verschuer published part of a lecture proclaiming, “The present war is also called a war of races when one considers the fight with World Jewry…. The political demand of our time is the new total solution [Gesamtlosung] of the Jewish problem.” By the beginning of 1945, the Reich was collapsing. On February 15,1945, amid the chaos of Berlin’s last stand, Verschuer found two trucks with which to ship his lab equipment, library, and several boxes of records to his family home in Solz.2
Nazi eugenicists continued their cover-up, in progress since the Normandy invasion. On March 12, 1945, Hans Nachtsheim, assistant director at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, wrote Verschuer in Solz. “A mass of documents have been left here which should be or have to be destroyed should the enemy ever come close to here…. We should not choose a moment… too late to destroy them.”3
In the first days of May, the Reich was reduced to rubble and der Führer had killed himself.4 Nazism and its eugenics were defeated. But now its architects and adherents would reinvent its past.
In April of 1946, the military occupation newspaper in Berlin, Die Neue Zeitung, published an article on various doctors who had fled Germany, and followed it up on May 3 with specific accusations against Verschuer. In the article, Robert Havemann, a communist and chemist who had resisted the Nazis, expressed out loud what many knew. He openly accused Verschuer of using Mengele in Auschwitz to obtain blood samples and eyeballs from whole murdered families.5
A nervous Verschuer reacted at once. He sent a sworn statement to Otto Hahn, the occupation-appointed administrator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, insisting that he had always opposed racial concepts. “Even before 1933,” averred Verschuer, “but also after, I took personal risks and attacked, as a scientist, in speeches and in writing, the race concept of the Nazis…. I argued against attributing values to races, I warned against the high estimation of the Nordic race, and I condemned the misuse of the results of anthropology and genetics to support a materialistic and racial point of view of life and history.”6
He went on to concede his relationship with Mengele, referring to him only as “Dr. M.,” and insisting it was totally innocent. Verschuer stated, “A post-doc of my former Frankfurt Institute, Dr. M., was sent against his will to the hospital of the concentration camp in Auschwitz. All who knew him learned from him how unhappy he was about this, and how he tried over and over again to be sent to the front, unfortunately without success. Of his work we learned that he tried to be a physician and help the sick….7.
“After I went to Berlin [from Frankfurt],” Verschuer continued, “I began research on the individual specificity of the serum proteins and the question of their heredity…. For these experiments I needed blood samples of people of different geographic background…. At that time my former post-doc Dr. M. visited me and offered to obtain such blood samples for me within the context of his medical activity in the camp Auschwitz. In this manner I received-during this time, certainly not regularly-a few parcels of 20-30 blood samples of 5-10 mls.”8
Verschuer then asked Hahn to give him a character reference, and even drafted a statement for Hahn to sign: “Professor von Verschuer is an internationally known scientist who has kept away from all political activity…. Professor von Verschuer had nothing to do with the errors and misuses of the Nazis, by which his scientific field was particularly hit. He kept his distance from them and, whenever he was confronted by them, he criticized them courageously.” Hahn would not sign such a document.9
So Verschuer sought support from his allies in American eugenics. Shortly after Havemann’s expose, Verschuer wrote to Paul Popenoe in Los Angeles, hoping to reestablish cooperative ties. On July 25, Popenoe wrote back, “It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany…. I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?” Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenic luminaries and then sent various eugenic publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.10
Verschuer wrote back, “Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation.” Seeking American bona fides, Verschuer tried to make sure his membership in the American Eugenics Society was still active. “In 1940, I was invited to become a member of the American Eugenics Society,” Verschuer wrote. “Now that this calamitous war has ended, I hope that this membership can be continued. I would be grateful if you might make a gesture in this matter. In this context, I would like to mention that in recent months a former employee, a person devoid of character, has made extremely defamatory statements about me, which have also found their way into the American press. Therefore, it is possible that persons who do not know me better might have formed a wrong opinion of me. You will surely understand that it is important to me that any damage to my reputation be repaired and I would be very grateful for your kind help in doing so.”11
Verschuer wrote again at the end of September 1946, requesting Popenoe’s help. Because Verschuer was considered part of the Nazi medical murder apparatus, the Americans had halted his further work. “Since I wrote you,” said Verschuer, “I have learned that the American military government does not intend to permit the continuation of my scientific work. This attitude can only be due to the spread of false information about me and my work. I have regularly sent you all of my scientific publications and you have known me for many years through correspondence. Therefore, may I ask for two things? 1. For a letter of recommendation from yourself and other American scientists who know me, stating that you know me as a serious scientific researcher and that you value my continued scientific work; 2. I ask you and other American geneticists and eugenicists who know me to undertake steps with the American military government in Germany to bring about the granting of permission for me to continue my life’s work as a scientific researcher. It is my urgent wish that I be able to rebuild genetic and eugenic science from the ruins we stand upon in every area in Germany, a science that-free of the misuse of past years-may again attain international renown.”12
Popenoe, who had also been corresponding with Lenz, was eager to be helpful, but uncomfortable standing up for an accused Nazi doctor. “I am distressed to hear that you may not be allowed to go ahead with your scientific work,” Popenoe replied to Verschuer on November 7, 1946, “but it is hard for me to see how any of us over here could give any evidence that would be of value to you, even if we knew where to send it. Of course we could all testify that your scientific work before the war was objective and maintained very high standards. But if you have been ‘denazified,’ as I take to be the case from what you say, it was certainly not for that work, which is the only work I know about. None of us over here knows anything about what was going on in Germany from about 1939 onwards, but I suppose the
action taken against you is due to your prominence in public life, as the successor of Eugen Fischer (who has been attacked bitterly in this country), etc. I could say nothing that would be pertinent, because I don’t know anything about it. I am being perfectly frank with you, as you see…. But as it stands now, all I could say is: ‘All his work that I saw before the war was of high quality,’ and the authorities would presumably reply, ‘That has nothing to do with it.”‘13
Correspondence bounced back and forth between the two until Popenoe finally sent a brief letter of endorsement, limited to the prewar years. Verschuer then asked if he could be invited to join the faculty of an American university. “I have inquired from some leaders in American genetics,” Popenoe replied, “and they all feel that it will be a long time before any university here is ready to offer a position to any German scientist who occupied an important position in Germany during the war years. As you perhaps know, our army brought over a number of physicists and other specialists, and their presence in this country has led to many protests and recriminations. I think it is out of the question, therefore, for you to look forward to any scientific activity here in the next few years-much as I myself should like to have a visit from you.”14
Throughout late 1947 and 1948, Verschuer continued corresponding with leading eugenicists and geneticists at American institutions, seeking to reestablish academic exchanges and professional standing. He submitted one of his older books for a new review by the American Eugenics Society. Popenoe promptly assured he would review it in a new eugenic publication called Family Life, and then bemoaned the loss of German eugenic publications. “It is sad to think,” Popenoe wrote, “that the scientific journals, and even the publishing houses that produced them no longer exist!” Verschuer also began exchanges with scientists at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota. These were received with goodwill and even enthusiasm. When Nazi agitator C. M. Goethe of California received Verschuer’s letter, he replied that he was “thrilled.”15
While Verschuer was busy reestablishing his support in America, he was rehabilitating himself in occupied Germany as well. After making his accusations public, Havemann organized a committee of Kaiser WIlhelm Institute scientists to examine the evidence against Verschuer. They ruled that Verschuer indeed had engaged in despicable acts in concert with Mengele at Auschwitz, but their report was kept secret for fifteen years. In 1949, while the first report remained under lock and key, a second board of inquiry was urged to reexamine the issue. This second board unanimously ruled that he had committed no transgressions involving Auschwitz, and indeed that “Verschuer has all the qualities which qualify him to be a researcher and teacher of academic youth.” Virtually comparing Verschuer to Christ being crucified, the esteemed panel of German scientists declared they could not sit in judgment of him as “Pharisees” (Pharisiierhaft).16
Soon, Verschuer once again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists. Hermann Joseph Muller of Texas, a Rockefeller fellow who had worked at the Kaiser WIlhelm Institute for Brain Research during 1932, served as the first president of the American Society of Human Genetics.17
In the fall of 1950, the University of Munster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. At about that time he helped found the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, which later published his books, including one on cancer. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.18
A later president of the American Society of Human Genetics, Kurt Hirschhorn, remembered his own encounter with Verschuer in about 1958. An Austrian Jew, Hirschhorn had come to the United States as a refugee during the Hitler era. Hirschhorn became a genetic researcher and, while on a fellowship to Europe, he had visited Verschuer at the University of Munster. “Verschuer was partly responsible for the whole extermination,” Hirschhorn related emphatically during a February 2003 interview. “He was the one that gave the Nazis the pseudo-genetic rationale to destroy the Jews and Gypsies. He was part of the organization [American Society of Human Genetics] in 1949 because in those days… it was all covered up. No one really knew. But I’ll never forget. I was sitting in his university office in Münster as a young man, and he asked a lot of personal questions about my background, and so forth, until he found out I was Jewish. I knew who he was by that time. I took a great deal of pleasure in telling him that I came to the United States from Austria, and when I turned eighteen, I enlisted in the army and went over there and fought the Nazis-and went right through Münster. He was taken aback.”19
In the 1960s, Frankfurt prosecutors were obliged by international pressure to continue their hunt for Nazis. The same prosecutors who investigated Mengele examined his relationship to Verschuer but concluded there was no connection between the two. Benno Muller-Hill, a German geneticist, later investigated Verschuer’s activities. Muller-Hill reviewed Verschuer’s many written defenses, including the one in which Verschuer claimed that while in Auschwitz, Mengele “tried to be a physician and help the sick.” Writing in the journal History and Philosophy of Science, Muller-Hill described Verschuer’s account as “Lies, lies, lies.”20
Verschuer was never prosecuted. In 1969, he was killed in an automobile accident. But the legacy of his torturous medicine, twisted eugenics and conscious war crimes lives on.
* * *
As the ashes of Jews and Gypsies wafted into the air of Europe and were dumped into the Vistula River coursing through the heart of Europe, so their victimization flowed into the mainstream of modern medical literature. Medical literature evolves from decade to decade. As American eugenic pseudoscience thoroughly infused the scientific journals of the first three decades of the twentieth century, Nazi-era eugenics placed its unmistakable stamp on the medical literature of the twenties, thirties and forties.
The writings of Nazi doctors not only permeated the spectrum of German medical journals, they also appeared prominently in American medical literature. These writings included the results of war crime experimentation at concentration camps. Verschuer’s own bibliographies, circa 1939, enumerated a long list of Nazi scientific discoveries, authored by him, his colleagues and assistants, including Mengele. Such scientific publication continued right through the last days of the Third Reich. The topics included everything from rheumatism, heart disease, eye pathology, blood studies, brain function, tuberculosis, and the gastric system to endless permutations of hereditary pathology.21 Much of it was sham science. Some of it was astute. Both types found their way into the medical literature of the fifties and sixties. Hence, Nazi victimization contributed significantly to many of the modem medical advances of the postwar period.
For example, the Nazis at Dachau, using ice water tests, were the first to experimentally lower human body temperature to 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit-this to discover the best means of reviving Luftwaffe pilots downed over the North Sea. Nazi scientists learned that the most effective method was rapid rewarming in hot water. Nuremberg testimony revealed that Dr. Sigmund Rascher, who oversaw these heinous hypothermia tests, prominently reported his breakthroughs at a 1942 medical symposium with a paper entitled “Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter.”22
After the war, Rascher’s conclusions were gleaned from Nazi reports and reluctantly adopted by British and American air-sea rescue services. A Nuremberg war crimes report on Nazi medicine summed up the extreme discomfort of Allied military doctors: “Dr. Rascher, although he wallowed in blood… and in obscenity… nevertheless appears to have settled the question of what to do for people in shock from exposure to cold…. The method of rapid and intensive rewarming in hot water… should be immediately adopted as the treatment of choice by the Air
-Sea Rescue Services of the United States Armed Forces.”23
Rascher reported to Hubertus Strughold, director of the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine. Strughold attended the Berlin medical conference that reviewed Rascher’s revelations. A Nazi scientist wrote at the time that there were no “objections whatsoever to the experiments requested by the Chief of the Medical Service of the Luftwaffe to be conducted at the Rascher experimental station in the Dachau concentration camp. If possible, Jews or prisoners held in quarantine are to be used.”24
After the war, Strughold was smuggled into the United States under the infamous Operation Paperclip project, which offered Nazi scientists refuge and immunity in exchange for their scientific expertise. Once in the U.S., Strughold became the leader in American aviation medicine. His work was directly and indirectly responsible for numerous aeromedical advances, including the ability to walk effortlessly in a pressurized air cabin-now taken for granted-but which was also developed as a result of Dachau experiments. He was called “the father of U.S. Space Medicine,” and Brooks Air Force Base in Texas named its Aeromedical Library in his honor. A celebratory mural picturing Strughold was commissioned by Ohio State University. When Jewish and Holocaust-survivor groups, led by the Anti-Defamation League, discovered the honors extended to Strughold, they objected. Ohio State University removed its mural in 1993. The U.S. Air Force changed its library’s name in 1995.25
In 2003, the state of New Mexico still listed Strughold as a member of its International Space Hall of Fame. But on February 13,2003, when this reporter asked about their honoree’s Nazi connection, a startled museum official declared, “If he was doing experiments at Dachau, it would give one pause why anyone would ever nominate him in the first place.” Museum officials added they would immediately look into removing his name.26
