Os anatomistas nazistas Parte I

The Nazi Anatomists How the corpses of Hitler's victims are still haunting modern science—and American abortion politics. By Emily Bazelon 1 “Sources of Material” 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. Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen Courtesy of Kelisi/Creative Commons On one table lay Libertas Schulze-Boysen, granddaughter of a Prussian prince. She’d been raised in the family castle, gone to finishing school in Switzerland, and worked as the Berlin press officer for the Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She joined the Nazi Party in 1933. On a hunting party, she flirted with Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. But in 1937 Schulze-Boysen joined the resistance with her husband, Harro, a Luftwaffe lieutenant. They helped form a small rebel group the Nazis called the Red Orchestra. When Libertas started working for Hitler’s movie empire in 1941, she gathered photos of atrocities from the front for a secret archive. Harro was transferred to Göring’s command center and with other dissidents started passing to the Soviets detailed information about Hitler’s plan to invade Russia. The Gestapo decoded their radio messages in 1942 and arrested Harro at the end of August. They came for Libertas eight days later. Both she and her husband were sentenced to death for espionage and treason. Now Harro’s body lay on another table in the lab. Pommer could see that he had been hanged and Libertas had been decapitated by guillotine. On a third table, Pommer identified Arvid Harnack, another member of the Red Orchestra who had been a key informant for the American Embassy as well as the Soviets. In the 1920s, Harnack had studied economics as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, where he wandered into a literature class by mistake and met a young American teaching assistant named Mildred Fish. They traded English and German lessons and got married on her brother’s farm. After the couple moved to Germany, Mildred also helped the resistance effort by carrying messages and trailing her husband to meetings to make sure he wasn’t being followed. They were caught in the same Gestapo operation that ensnared the Schulze-Boysens. "Can you remember Picnic Point, when we got engaged?” Arvid asked his wife in his final letter to her from prison. “And before that our first serious talk at lunch in a restaurant in State Street? That talk became my guiding star.” At the time, Mildred was serving a six-year sentence for her part in the Red Orchestra. Before he was executed, Arvid wrote to his family about his joy that her life had been spared. But Hitler refused to accept the sentence, and Mildred, too, would be beheaded on his order two months later.* “I was paralyzed,” Pommer later wrote of the sight of the bodies. “I could hardly perform my task as an assistant to Professor Stieve, who did his scientific study as always with the greatest diligence. I could barely follow.” Pommer was 28. Libertas Schulze-Boysen was 29 when she died. In her last letter to her mother, she said she’d asked for her body to go to her family. “Don’t fret about things that possibly could have been done, this or the other,” she wrote. “If you can, bury me in a beautiful place amid sunny nature.” Pommer stopped working for Stieve—and left the field of anatomy—because of what she saw that day in his laboratory. She went on to help resist the Nazis herself, by hiding the child of a man who participated in the “July Plot” to assassinate Hitler in 1944. In the spring of 1945, just before the war’s end, Pommer was herself sent to prison. By that time, German anatomists had accepted the bodies of thousands of people killed by Hitler’s regime. Beginning in 1933, all 31 anatomy departments in the territory the Third Reich occupied—including Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic as well as Germany—accepted these corpses. “Charlotte Pommer is the only one we know of who left this work because of what she learned about the bodies,” says Sabine Hildebrandt, a historian and anatomist at Harvard Medical School. Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research—along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims—their cell and bone and tissue—in university collections that still exist today. 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. To take a step back for a moment, in one sense, the use of executed prisoners for science isn’t surprising. For centuries, anatomists around the globe struggled to find an adequate supply of bodies. The need was keen—without corpses, there could be no dissection for research and medical training. In France, the bodies of poor people who died in hospitals were used widely in the 1700s. An 1832 law in Britain permitted access to the unclaimed bodies of anyone who died in a prison or workhouse. In the United States, medical students robbed graves, often of African-Americans. ‘‘In Baltimore the bodies of colored people exclusively are taken for dissection because the whites do not like it, and the colored people cannot resist,’’ a British travel writer observed in 1838. When paupers were the target of body snatching, the practice was justified by their poverty. “Why would those who have made war on society or have been a burden to it be permitted to say what shall be done with their remains?” the Washington Post asked in an 1877 editorial. “Why should they not be compelled to be of some use after death, having failed to be of value to the world during life?” Plötzensee Prison in 2012 Courtesy of Ahle, Fischer & Co. Bau GmbH/Creative Commons Before Hitler, German anatomists had complained to the government for decades about the lack of supply. They had the right to claim the bodies of the executed, but few death sentences were carried out. That changed as the Nazi courts ordered dozens and then hundreds of civilian executions each year, for an estimated total of 12,000 to 16,000 from 1933 to 1945. (The 6 million who were killed in concentration camps are counted separately, as are the many millions more who were otherwise mass-murdered.) Plötzensee and other prisons delivered to anatomists a sudden abundance. In the mid-1930s, British anatomists described with envy the “valuable sources of material” their German counterparts had. The “sources of material” included many people the Nazis sentenced to death for minor crimes, such as looting, and many convicted for political crimes that particularly incensed the regime, ranging from treason to the vague offense of “defeatism.” The victims included political protesters like the Schulze-Boysens and the Harnacks, who would one day be seen as heroes. By refusing them graves, anatomists such as Stieve humiliated the victims’ families and disturbed the peace of the dead. A few of these anatomists followed the Nazis further down their twisted path: They committed or acceded to acts of mass killing, in the name of science and from inside the halls of academe. 2 Dr. Stieve and “Legitimate Rape” Stieve had a taste for the theatrical: He liked to wear his long black academic robe to give lectures. At the age of 35, he became the youngest doctor to chair a German medical department. That was in 1921, soon after Stieve backed a coup that would have knocked out the Weimar Republic in favor of authoritarian rule. Stieve was a nationalist about language, too: He supported a drive to replace Anglified words like April and Mai with Germanic alternatives. Stieve welcomed Hitler for his promise to restore the country’s pride, although he did not join the Nazi Party. Like most academics, Stieve did not protest when the Nazis began to expel Jews from universities in 1933. Charlotte Pommer is the only one we know of who left this work because of what she learned about the bodies. Sabine Hildebrandt Stieve’s main research interest, throughout his career, was the effect of stress and other environmental conditions on the female reproductive system. He studied whether hens would lay eggs with a caged fox nearby, and he set up conditions of stress for newts. Stieve studied human uteruses and ovaries when he could get them from accident victims or from gynecologists who’d removed the organs in the course of an operation. Before the Nazis, the access that German anatomists had to the bodies of executed prisoners was of less use to Stieve. During the Weimar Republic, no women received death sentences. The Third Reich and the war changed that. At Plötzensee alone the Nazis executed 3,000 people. Stieve agreed to take all these bodies off the hands of the prison officials—many more than he needed for his research. By accommodating Plötzensee, he won concessions that aided his work on the “unprecedented number of women” now available to him, as the German anatomist and historian Andreas Winkelmann puts it. In 1942, when the prison shifted the time of executions to the evening, Stieve visited the prison and got the time moved back to the morning so he could continue to process organs and tissues on the same day. He also got details of the women’s medical histories before they died, including information about their menstrual cycles, their reactions to the prison environment, and the impact of receiving a death sentence. We know this because Stieve kept a list. The official record of the bodies he received was lost when the Institute of Anatomy’s registry was destroyed in 1945, either deliberately or in a bombing. But a Protestant minister who tended to the Plötzensee prisoners during the war helped search for and record information about them afterward. He reported that in 1946, Stieve handed him a typed list of names—the people whose bodies he had used. It was located decades later in German government archives, with handwritten additions. There were 182 names: 174 women and eight men. Their ages ranged from 18 to 68, with most of reproductive age. Two of the women were pregnant when they were killed. The majority were executed for political reasons. They came from Germany, for the most part, and seven other countries. Libertas Schulze-Boysen is No. 37 on Stieve’s list. Mildred Harnack is No. 87. Mildred Harnack's Red Orchestra Counterintelligence Corps file, circa 1947 Courtesy of National Archives, College Park, Md. Stieve published 230 anatomical papers. With the data he gathered pre-execution, as well as the tissues and organs he harvested and studied, he could chart the effect of an impending execution on ovulation. Stieve found that women living with a looming death sentence ovulated less predictably and sometimes experienced what he called “shock bleedings.” In a book published after the war, Stieve included an illustration of the left ovary of a 22-year-old woman, noting that she “had not menstruated for 157 days due to nervous agitation.” Stieve drew two conclusions that continue to be cited (for the most part, uncritically). He figured out that the rhythm method doesn’t effectively prevent pregnancy. (He got the physiological details wrong but the conclusion right.) And he discovered that chronic stress—awaiting execution—affects the female reproductive system. In August 2012, then–Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri said that women can prevent themselves from getting pregnant after a “legitimate rape.” Following an uproar, Akin lost his bid for a Senate seat.* Still, a few other Republicans have followed along, arguing that rape rarely results in pregnancy, to explain why they oppose an exception for rape victims in laws that restrict access to abortion. Whether they know it or not, Stieve’s work is the source for their discredited claim. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warned that saying rape victims rarely get pregnant was “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” But the anti-abortion doctor Jack Willke, former head of the National Right to Life Committee, insisted otherwise. "This goes back 30 and 40 years,” he told the Los Angeles Times in the midst of the Akin furor. “When a woman is assaulted and raped, there's a tremendous amount of emotional upset within her body." Willke has written that "one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant” is “physical trauma." Where did he get this idea? In 1972, another anti-abortion doctor, Fred Mecklenburg, wrote an essay in a book financed by the group Americans United for Life in which he asserted that women rarely get pregnant from rape. Mecklenburg said that: The Nazis tested the hypothesis that stress inhibits ovulation by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock killing, to see what effects this had on their ovulatory pattern. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate. Mecklenburg got his facts wrong. Plötzensee Prison wasn’t the gas chamber. And the prolonged trauma of anticipating execution isn’t the same as the shock of rape. But when Hildebrandt, the Harvard historian and anatomist, read about Mecklenburg’s rationale after I wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine and Slate, she recognized the handiwork of Stieve. Mecklenburg had quoted a presentation on a “Nazi experiment” by another obstetrician, from Georgetown University, at a 1967 Washington, D.C., conference on abortion. That doctor had to be talking about Stieve, Hildebrandt says, since “there is no other ‘Nazi experiment’ like this.” It was another link in the chain from Stieve to Mecklenburg to Willke to today’s anti-abortion Republicans. Hildebrandt wrote to me about Stieve, and that’s how I learned about her work. She is 55 and was born in Germany; her parents were children during the Third Reich. “It was always around us,” she said. “I had no Jewish neighbors. I went to an elementary school named after a member of the German resistance.” Hildebrandt came to live in the United States in 2002. Her interest in the history of anatomy is recent. “In many ways it was helpful for me to formulate my first ideas all by myself, with physical distance from Germany,” she said. “I didn’t have to worry about treading on anyone’s toes. I’m not a brave person.” Hermann Stieve lecturing on anatomy, 1943 Courtesy of Privatbesitz/Creative Commons By contrast, Hildebrandt says that Stieve “never doubted himself.” She thinks he refused to see that the ethics of how he procured bodies shifted under the Nazis. “He knew better, but he didn’t want to realize it, because this was a great opportunity for him,” she says. “He really could do the work that he always wanted to do.” When I asked to learn more about Stieve, Hildebrandt sent me to Winkelmann, the German doctor and lecturer in anatomy at Charité, the major university hospital in Berlin. Born in 1963, Winkelmann is also of the “grandchildren generation,” as he put it when we spoke by phone. I asked him how he got interested in Stieve, and he said, “Stieve was a Berlin anatomist like me. He is part of my history. He worked in the same building that we work in today.” Winkelmann has helped make the ethical case against Stieve. “His research cannot be validated without justifying, at least to some extent, the entire Nazi justice system, which was instead one of injustice,” he argued in a 2009 article, co-written with Udo Schagen, a medical historian at Charité. Stieve abetted the Nazis with his willingness to accept far more bodies than he needed for research, and he kept his supply line quiet. And Winkelmann pointed out that Stieve’s “use of the terror of death row as a sober scientific variable is undoubtedly callous.” But Winkelmann has also pleaded for a kind of mercy for Stieve—or at least for nuance. “People tend to forget that it was only in the 1950s and ’60s that body donation programs were invented,” he said. “Stieve thought using the bodies of executed prisoners was something normal to do. He didn’t do research to prove some people were subhuman, as some doctors did. I don’t think that vindicates what he did, but you could say, at least he didn’t do that.” In 1944, Stieve dissected one of his own friends. Winkelmann has also pushed back against two allegations that turn Stieve into a monster. William Seidelman, a University of Toronto medical professor who has written extensively on medicine in the Third Reich, thinks Stieve allowed SS officers to rape women on his list before they were executed, so he could study the migration of sperm. Seidelman’s allegation is based on a 1997 letter from a former student of Stieve. Winkelmann’s co-author, Schagen, spoke to the former student, and they think he was repeating a rumor or misinterpreting Stieve’s remarks about his work. None of Stieve’s papers discuss sperm migration. The former student has since died, and Seidelman stands by his accusation. Winkelmann calls it “far-fetched.” But he adds, “I can understand how Seidelman would think it’s true, because whenever you look into Nazi medicine, you find that the very worst things—they have happened.” Case in point: There is a rumor that Stieve’s lab made soap from the remains of the victims. Winkelmann has refuted that one, too. “But another anatomist named Spanner did make bodies into soap,” he told me. Rudolf Spanner was director of the Danzig Anatomical Institute. He didn’t go into mass production—“Professor Spanner’s Soap Factory” is a myth. But the remains of 147 unidentified people were found in Spanner’s institute after the war, and “during several interrogations Spanner conceded the production of small amounts of soap for anatomical purposes but was not prosecuted,” Hildebrandt writes. After the war, Stieve falsely insisted that he hadn’t conducted research with the bodies of political prisoners. The anatomist, he argued, “only tries to retrieve results from those incidents that belong to the saddest experiences known in the history of mankind.” He continued to see himself as a man of science. “In no way do I need to be ashamed of the fact that I was able to reveal new data from the bodies of the executed, facts that were unknown before and are now recognized by the whole world.” Like almost every other anatomist of his time, Stieve was never professionally penalized or prosecuted for conducting research on the corpses of murdered prisoners. He continued to direct his university’s Institute of Anatomy until his death from a stroke in 1952. Stieve’s obituaries didn’t describe his negotiations with Plötzensee Prison over the timing of executions to ensure the daily delivery of fresh bodies. They lauded him as a highly respected scientist who loved hunting and mountaineering. Winkelmann told me a strange story that supports his interpretation of Stieve as blinded by science, not ideology. In 1944, Stieve dissected one of his own friends. Walter Arndt was a doctor and zoologist who converted to Judaism in 1931. He was executed after being convicted for criticizing the Nazis. “Stieve took out his heart and kept it,” Winkelmann told me. “Stieve wanted to donate his own body to science when he died,” he continued. “But his wife objected. So in the end, he was buried.” 3 “A Few Perverted Psychopaths” With the war’s end came an early chance for investigation. The occupying military governments operating after the war tried to find the bodies of political dissidents and foreign nationals. And families looking for their loved ones started visiting Germany’s anatomical institutes. The procurement of bodies had been an open secret. “Thus, anatomists were asked about the identity and fate of the bodies remaining in their institutes’ storage spaces,” Hildebrandt writes. Often, however, identification was out of reach—documents had been lost, dissected bodies rendered unrecognizable. At the Nuremberg trials, 23 doctors faced charges. But those few charged with crimes were the physicians at the Nazi forefront: the ones who experimented on live subjects in the concentration camps, not the much larger number of academics who stayed in the universities. “Many people in the medical profession who played leading roles during the Third Reich retained power after the war—especially in the academy,” Seidelman told me. “They were able to keep the lid on things.” Exhibition entitled “Physical and Emotional Appearance of the Jews,” which opened at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna in 1939 Courtesy of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna Half of Germany’s doctors had joined the Nazi Party. Despite the denazification that followed the war, almost all of them continued practicing. “People didn’t want to know,” said Arthur Caplan, a New York University bioethicist and author of When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust. “Who would be the doctors if not the doctors from before the war? Who else would staff the universities? The German establishment wasn’t looking to weed out all the doctors who’d done bad things.”