The German Genius

into three of the old companies, Bayer, BASF, and Höchst. In 1955, Friedrich Jaehne, who had been sentenced to a year and half at Nuremberg, was elected chairman of Höchst. A year later, Fritz ter Meer, also convicted of plunder and slavery at Nuremberg, was elected chairman of the supervisory board of Bayer. The Auschwitz plant continues to this day.
    Part of the chemists’ job was to investigate and systematize the science of mass murder—the design of ovens, the invention of more “efficient” gases, the ordered disposal of the “remains.” Eleven million Jews, according to Adolf Eichmann, were killed in the death camps, though a more widely accepted figure is six million. Kurt Prüfer, an engineer who designed furnaces for Topf and Son of Erfurt, was an important figure here.
     
     
    Though the sheer numbers of people gassed still have the power to astound us, it is the actions of the biologists that, even after all this time, must count as the greatest betrayal of the long tradition of German genius. Using newly opened archives in Berlin and Potsdam, Ute Deichman and others have shown that some 350 qualified doctors or university professors of medicine were involved in concentration camp experiments. *
    Professor Heinrich Berning of the University of Hamburg used Soviet prisoners of war for famine experiments, carefully noting what happened as they starved to death. At the Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, experiments were carried out on cooling, using inmates from Dachau. The ostensible reason for this research was to study the effects of recovery of humans who suffered frostbite, and to examine how well humans adapted to the cold; some 8,300 inmates died during the course of these “researches.” In the experiments on yellow cross, otherwise known as mustard gas, so many people were killed that after a while no more “volunteers” could be found with the promise of being released afterward. August Hirt, who carried out these “investigations,” was allowed to murder 115 Jewish inmates of Auschwitz at his own discretion to establish a “typology of Jewish skeletons.” Homosexuals were injected with hormones to see if their behavior was changed. 22
    Among the eminent scientists who are now known to have conducted unethical research (to put it no more strongly) are Konrad Lorenz, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, and Hans Nachtsheim, a member of the notorious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Genetics in Berlin. Lorenz’s best-known work before the war was in helping to found ethology, the comparative study of animal and human behavior, where he discovered an activity he named “imprinting.” In his most famous experiment he found that young goslings fixated on whatever image they first encountered at a certain stage of their development. Lorenz had read Spengler’s Decline of the West and was not unsympathetic to the Nazis. 23 In that climate he began to conceive of imprinting as a disorder of the domestication of animals and drew a parallel between that and civilization in humans: in both cases, he thought, there was “degeneration.” In September 1940, at the instigation of the Party and over the objections of the faculty, he became professor and director of the Institute for Comparative Psychology at the University of Königsberg, and from then until 1943 Lorenz’s studies were all designed to reinforce Nazi ideology. He claimed, for instance, that people could be classified into those of “full value” ( vollwertig ) and those of “inferior value” ( minderwertig ). 24
    Conferences were held to broadcast the findings of research carried out on concentration camp inmates, including one where 1,200 people in Dachau were deliberately exposed to mosquitoes (with a small box containing the insects strapped to their hands), or else injected with the glands of mosquitoes, to study the effects of malaria, then said to be threatening German troops in Africa. These experiments were carried out under the direction of Dr. Klaus Schilling, emeritus professor of parasitology at Berlin and at one time director of the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations. At least thirty people died as a direct result of these experiments.
    The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics was founded in 1927 at Berlin-Dahlem on the occasion of the Fifth International Congress for Genetics, held in the German capital. The