The Nuremberg trials are regarded as models of postwar justice, but the Mauthausen trial was the norm and reveals the troubling face of American military proceedings. This rough justice, with its lax ...rules of evidence and questionable interrogations, compromised legal standards in order to guarantee that guilty people did not walk free.
Dachau and the SS Dillon, Christopher
2015, 2015-01-29, 2015-02-12, 2016-11-10
eBook
Dachau was the most enduring and important of the concentration camps set up in the first months of Hitler’s rule. It was a bastion of the Nazi ‘revolution’ and a key springboard for the ascent of ...Heinrich Himmler and the SS to control of the Third Reich’s terror and policing apparatus. Throughout the pre-war era of Nazi Germany, Dachau functioned as a national academy of violence where SS concentration camp personnel were schooled in steely resolution and the techniques of terror. An international symbol of Nazi depredation, Dachau was the cradle of a new and terrible spirit of destruction. Combining new research on the pre-war history of Dachau with theoretical insights from studies of perpetrator violence, this book offers the first systematic study of the ‘Dachau School’. It critiques assumptions about concentration camp violence being the linear product of individual pathologies—whether of ideological zealots or mindless sadists—by exploring the backgrounds and socialization of thousands of often very young men in the camp. The book analyses recruitment to the Dachau SS and evaluates the contribution of indoctrination, training, masculinity, and social psychology to the conduct and subsequent careers of concentration camp guards. Graduates of the Dachau School would go on to play a central role in the wartime criminality of the Third Reich, particularly at Auschwitz. The book makes an original contribution to understanding both the pre-history of the Holocaust, and the social and institutional organization of violence.
The US Army 7708 War Crimes Group investigated atrocities committed in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These young Americans - many barely out of their teens - gathered ...evidence, interviewed witnesses, apprehended suspects and prosecuted defendants at trials held at Dachau. This book tells the story of the WCG.
The article aims to analyze the situation of religious prisoners in the Nazism concentration camps and specifically in Dachau. Also to make known the figure of Ignacio Cruchaga, in all probability ...the only Spanish religious prisoner in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Among studies of deportation in Spain, the deportation of men and women linked to exile after the Civil War has been analyzed. The analysis of the figure of the "lasallian religious" has gone unnoticed.
Dachau concentration camp was set up in March 1933. During the twelve years of its existence, more than 200,000 prisoners from over 40 nations were imprisoned here and in its sub-camps. At least ...41,500 people died there from hunger, disease, torture, murder, and the consequences of their imprisonment. In her introduction, Kerstin Schwenke describes the history of the camp and the memorial site. The head of the Education Department at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial also explains the educational approach used there. This is followed by a discussion with her and other members of the Education Department as well as U.S. public historian Marty Blatt on the educational work, graphic novels as well as politics of remembrance.
Dull as Dachau kavoori, anandam
Cultural studies, critical methodologies,
02/2021, Volume:
21, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Dull as Dachau is a reflexive, autoethnographic account of the contrived engagement of American undergraduates (from a privileged background) of a class-mandated visit to the Dachau Concentration ...Camp, near Munich, Germany. Written as a poem, with commentary/contextual referencing in end notes, the essay explores the transactional nature of dark tourism and offers a critique of such pedagogical engagements with history, especially in the context of American undergraduate education and the study abroad enterprise.
My Life with Holocaust Death Langer, Lawrence L.
The Journal of Holocaust Research,
10/2020, Volume:
34, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The essay offers a chronological account of my introduction to Holocaust reality, beginning with visits to Dachau in 1955, Mauthausen in 1963 and the main camp at Auschwitz and Auschwitz/Birkenau in ...1964, at a time when little was known about the concentration camps and the gassing procedures in the deathcamps. The sites would not become tourist destinations for many years, and in fact at Dachau there were only two other visitors present and at Mauthausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau none. Such a sense of desolation is unrecapturable today, and I was forced to deal with the knowledge that I was standing alone on some of the largest cemeteries in Europe. I focus on how I slowly learned to absorb the magnitude of the catastrophe we call the Holocaust, especially the murder of European Jewry. Viewing the crematorium and small (unused) gas chamber at Dachau, standing inside the used one at Mauthausen, and contemplating the ruins of crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau quickly teaches one the value and the limitations of the imagination in trying to conjure up the fate of the victims and the cruelty of their killers. I was helped in this endeavor by attending the war crimes trials in the summer of 1964 of SS General Karl Wolff in Munich and an array of Auschwitz personnel at their prolonged trial in Frankfurt. Listening to testimony from shattered survivors while sitting no more than fifty feet away from their tormentors, remorseless creatures like Oswald Kaduk and Wilhelm Boger, left me much to reflect on, and these comprise a large part of the essay. History was made more personal for me by these experiences, and they became an unforgettable foundation for what would eventually become a lifelong effort to find ways of challenging the validity of what still today is often referred to as an unimaginable experience.
While abhorrent by any standard, the Nazi medical experimentation has become a core illustration of unethically collected data currently being used in scientific research.1-4 Due to the extremes ...achieved – near-to sub-zero temperatures in investigating hypothermia and its effect on the body – some medical and scientific researchers have claimed it imperative to use the records in order to help individuals in the future.5 This justification is not limited to otherwise unachievable scientific boundaries either; there are calls that the data is just data, the seemingly cold, impersonal collection of numbers and words, while others have oppositely stated that its use not only serves as a reminder of the suffering and injustice endured by those victims, but a way to do good from evil. But this reasoning is wrong. Any loss of knowledge is miniscule compared to the loss in the medical profession if such data is used. By understanding the function of a physician through a Kantian perspective on the Hippocratic Oath, determining the fundamental scientific failures in the Dachau hypothermia experiments, and realizing the moral transgressions under a principlistic paradigm, one can contextualize these bioethical fallacies and work towards creating a morally responsible research framework. The Oath and its Implications The Hippocratic Oath serves as prima facie foundation of physician’s morals. As among the first deontological treatises, the Oath expands on a physician’s relation to a patient. Rather than serve a mere mechanical role, the physician, “will use treatment to help the sick according to their ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing.”6 Thus while there is an immediacy to patients as a function of their career, to be a physician is not limited to that function. Instead a physician must transcend this direct professionalism by entirely supporting the beneficial healthcare of a person, whomever they may be. Yet what constitutes healing instead of harming, helping instead of hurting, and doing good instead of bad? While no answers are directly provided, the Oath places stress on a physician’s disposition to differentiate between right and wrong. 6 But with different cultural backgrounds, societal expectations, and a whole gamut of other variables that a physician must tightrope in their daily life, physicians may differ in their comprehension of good. What is perceived to be beneficent care by one person’s standards may be considered horrendous by another – a gap which the Oath does not elaborate on. A Kantian consideration can null this ambiguity. By providing an a priori principle that is applicable to all physicians in all circumstances at all times, a Kantian reading can define the rough guidelines of a physician’s obligation to a patient. In accordance with Kant’s first formulation, doctors should, “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”7 Doctors who stand firm to this maxim cannot see patients as a means to an end, but rather as an end in themselves.8 Whether through research, clinical studies, or direct surgical care, patients are the reason for the profession, not the consequential baggage from it. This does not mean that the sick are merely subjective ends, however. Rather in the construction of a binding categorical imperative, those that are ill are objective ends with no other alternative than care. One cannot probe or prod unless ensuring it is for the well being of the patient. Thus a true physician acts as though they were treating themselves and operating in a way that would be universally advantageous to all. They consider the individual, even, and perhaps especially, if their research is pertinent to a larger whole. There is no other option. For in following these Kantian dimensions, doctors act wholly human, and in doing so they see the humanity of others reflected in themselves. The Nazi Political Machine The Nazi experiments, from chemical castration to phosgene gassing, poison this egalitarian interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath. Key to Nazi Germany was the conception of an unquestioning and unwavering political machine. All individuals were subjected to the eugenically informed policies as a means to “strengthen a biological group on the basis of ostensible hereditary worth despite evolutionary claims.”9 In fact, Hitler was resolute that in order for “the state to act as the guardian of a millennial future…It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.”9 A physician’s care was not immune to these intrusions; it instead became the pivot of Nazi biocracy. Through endless appeals to supposedly airtight biology, the romanticism of severe biomedical aspirations, and the unyielding power that doctors were granted in the political sphere, physicians became the veins and arteries of the Nazi lifeblood.10 Approximately 11% of the physician population joined the S.S. compared to 1% of the general German population. Rudolf Ramm of the Medical Faculty of the University of Berlin went so far to propose that, “each doctor was to be no longer merely a caretaker of the sick but was to become a ‘cultivator of genes’ and a ‘ biological solider’”.9 This politically charged personage changed the role of the doctor. From caregiver to care-insurer, physicians acted as both vanguards and mediums for the legitimization of the Nazi medical ethos. Under these eugenic boundaries, no longer was there just a consideration of single individuals; instead a whole population was under a physician’s purview. The function of the physician as implicated in a Kantian reading of the Hippocratic Oath was thus eschewed.9,10In the aftermath, doctors became blind biological barbarians with moral vulnerabilities exposed, moral philosophies skewed, and whose concern was the health of a subjectively chosen population – the Volk – rather than a person and their particular sickness. Dachau Hypothermia Experiments This dichotomy in the conceptualization of a Nazi doctor from the one deduced here is important to note, particularly in understanding the ethics behind the research data complied by the Nazi doctors. If physicians are bound to the Hippocratic Oath as it was defined in Kantian terms, then the doctors and medicinal researchers of the Nazi era were anything but physicians. They failed to ensure that the care they provided was care they themselves would want to undergo. Claims of utilizing the most up-to-date science – eugenics – are beside the point. Not because they do not necessarily apply, but because their basis in scientific reasoning is, and was, hackneyed, the progression of racially corrupted thoughts and no more.10 Thus in furthering the analysis of the ethics behind the data collected by these doctors in-name-only, one must understand that what was on display in Nazi Germany was how a profession can fail so completely. It was from this broken philosophy that the Dachau hypothermia experiments were born. Due to the limited knowledge of the physiological effects of the cold and the frequency at which German pilots often succumbed to it, a national interest into the mechanism of, as well as ways to avoid death from, hypothermia became prevalent.1,2 To satisfy this need, concentration camp prisoners from a wide variety of backgrounds, age groups, and physical conditions were submerged in tubs of freezing temperatures. Many variables were tested.4,5 Rectal, skin, and gastric temperatures were recorded; blood sugar, concentration of chloride, sedimentation rate, red cell count, plasma proteins, among other blood incidences, were charted; even urinalysis, including the nonprotein nitrogen, viscosity, albumin, sodium, was utilized in the experiments. Additionally, different types of warming methods were developed, from body-to-body contact, warm baths, and candle burning, all of which had varied conclusions. Ethics in War While these multitudes of experimental conditions suggest the making of a sound scientific study, the goals of the inquiry must be understood. In Dachau, the experiments were not simply done to satiate experimental curiosity. It was not a progression of knowledge, a dismantling of earlier theories, or an honest, careful probing at the Universe. Instead it was a politically clouded agenda honed in the time of war and littered with theories of racial superiority and inferiority. This purpose, then, could have skewed results for a fixed objective with military weight was the end goal, as opposed to an open interpretation and possibility of alternate hypotheses in a dataset. This potential for slipshod stringency of the results is only furthered by the suspension of ethics in wartime. While it is easy to decry the Nazi regime for their obvious moral decrepitude, the utility of any data, even if unethically determined, can be viewed in simple terms: will it help win the war; or alternatively stated, if these ends are not pursued, even if they may be malicious, will the war be lost? To answer the moral dilemma presented, one must refer back to the depiction of the Oath. Only a physician who acts in accordance with it can be rightfully called as such. This means that respect for the patient’s autonomy is guaranteed. Otherwise, the use of a patient in medicinal studies can be seen as nothing more than a banal conclusion in a longwinded study. A non-deontological reading reduces them from human beings who were experimented on to punctuation or a mere footnote of cold insignificance. Thus a physician can never under any circumstance – even if war – perform such inhumane actions. While unsettling because it may mean the loss of a war, and thus, the loss of even more lives, including the physicians themselves, this is the physician’s moral obligation. Consider a secondary thought experiment: chemical warfare. Military doctors may be interested of the effects of a new, improvised chem
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