Illustration: Pelin Timoçin

The monstrous Nazi experimentation on Romani children was not the work of ‘mad scientists’ but something even more frightening: scientists who were quite sane.

In the season four finale of the British television show Sherlock, Dr. John Watson comments that the series of nightmarish tasks set up to analyze human emotions by Sherlock’s sister, Eurus, is a form of torture, to which Sherlock responds: “This isn't torture, this is vivisection. We're experiencing science from the perspective of lab rats.” Granted, the scientist-subject dynamic is complicated by the fact that Sherlock and Eurus are (estranged) siblings, but the episode may very well leave a viewer wondering: how far would a scientist go if it appeared they had the immunity to conduct experiments using human subjects?

Unfortunately, history provides us no shortage of answers to this question — answers which are deeply terrifying. 

The Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler, of course, had no moral qualms about conducting potentially or assuredly lethal experiments on human beings. While the Third Reich is notorious for its relentless antisemitism, fascist conquests, and use of gas chambers, few are aware of the chilling experiments carried out by the Nazis on human test subjects in the pursuit of science, from poisonings to incendiary bombings. Yet this cruel application of the scientific method ought to be far from shocking; like their counterparts in the military and political spheres, Nazi scientists very much espoused and enforced the state ideology of racial supremacy and Social Darwinism that relegated entire groups of people to the status of subhumans (Untermenschen). As bioethicist Jonathan Steinberg has pointed out, “either [science] responds to political ideologies or regards political infiltration as a destruction of science. During WWII, the Nazi physicians embraced the former definition, and shaped the German medical program to emphasize and support the skewed political beliefs of the Nazi party.” In Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, Edith Sheffer exposed even Hans Asperger, the Austrian doctor after whom Asperger syndrome is named, as an individual who was complicit in the Reich’s child euthanasia program. And, as we are about to see, it is not by chance that the favorite metaphor of the Nazi genocidaires equated their human victims to rats, the most famous of all laboratory animals.

Porajmos, the Forgotten Genocide

The children of Roma, or Romani people, were brutally targeted by the Nazis in general and medical officials in particular. An ethnic group whose roots lie in India and who arrived in Europe during the late Middle Ages, the Romani were and still are the subject of virulently racist oppression throughout the continent. They comprise the largest ethnic minority population in Europe yet continue to be targeted as perennial outsiders to European society due to, inter alia, their assumed nomadic culture. Mark Oliver summarizes how the path to the Porajmos, the Roma Holocaust, was paved with explicit apartheid:

From 1899 through the Nazis' ascension in 1933, German legislators introduced law after law to restrict the rights of the Roma by surveilling them, keeping them out of public areas, and limiting the places where they could settle. Laws forbade them from entering many swimming pools or parks and whole sections of the country were off-limits for them. Police even had the right to arrest virtually any Roma they wanted without cause.

Anti-Roma discrimination violently expanded following the NSDAP’s rise to power. Gina Benevento notes that “an office to combat what SS chief Heinrich Himmler called ‘the G*psy nuisance’ opened in Munich in 1936. And five months before Kristallnacht, Roma were rounded up in what was called ‘G*psy Clean-Up Week.’” Although there was initially disagreement within Nazi circles on the solution to the  ‘G*psy Question,’ as well as Himmler himself believing that a handful could be ‘pure-blooded’ due to Romani people being of the Indo-Aryan ethnic groups that comprise most of northern, western, and eastern India, the Nazi regime ultimately decided that the Roma were ‘as inferior as Jews’ and ordered their transfer from segregated ghettos to extermination camps. 

The Porajmos did not stop at the borders of Germany; certainly, that would have been antithetical to Hitler’s dream of an ever-expanding Nazi empire and the endless genocide to accompany it. According to RomArchive, 95% of Estonia’s Roma population was murdered during the German occupation. In October 1941, every Roma in the Serbian capital of Belgrade was arrested and executed. Josip Joka Nikolić, one of the few survivors of the slaughter of Roma in the fascist Independent State of Croatia, was deported with his relatives to a camp where his “his wife, child, parents, brothers, sister-in-law, nieces, and nephews [...] were shot in front of freshly dug pits.” 

It is estimated that the Nazi regime and its allies systematically exterminated up to 75% of the Roma population in Europe by the end of the Second World War.

‘Onkel Mengele’: The Angel of Death

The lack of a unified political body to advocate for Roma rights combined with the community’s comparative illiteracy due to continued exclusion from European societies has made it difficult to document the Porajmos with the same level of detail as the Jewish Holocaust. Yet the rich and often neglected oral tradition of the Romani people contains many important anecdotes and testimonies that underline the centuries of persecution they have endured at the hands of Nazis and other oppressive forces. Moreover, the available written material still provides plenty of evidence of anti-Roma atrocities perpetrated by the Reich — especially the terror inflicted on Roma children by Nazi scientists.

One of the most prominent of these scientists was the physician and SS officer Josef Mengele, appointed by Himmler as the chief doctor of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in Poland. Perhaps best known as the man who led the selection of incoming prisoners for either slave labour or immediate slaughter, Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, also directed extensive experimentation on Roma and other minorities. His experiments included but were not limited to drug tests, amputations, and attempts to change eye colour through chemical injections. Karl Höllenreiner, one of the few survivors of the Nazi saltwater experiments conducted on Roma and Sinti as well as a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial, noted years later that during the experiments, he “suffered terrible thirst and at the end had fever” and still suffers today “from the consequences of the experiments.” Mengele’s experimentation on Roma children was particularly gruesome. A Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Vera Alexander, recalls the horror she witnessed while looking after 50 pairs of Roma twins: 

One pair of twins called Guido and Nina was barely older than four. Mengele picked them up and brought them back mutilated in a perverse way. They had been sewn together at the back like Siamese twins. Mengele had also connected their veins. Their wounds were suppurating, they cried day and night. Their mother, I remember that she was called Stella, had somehow been able to get hold of some morphine and used it to put an end to the suffering of her children.

There was no light at the end of this tunnel; most Roma children who did manage to come out alive of a Nazi experiment were subsequently killed by phenol injection and dissected to have their organs autopsied and analyzed. According to witnesses, Roma children at Auschwitz heartbreakingly nicknamed their tormentor “Onkel Mengele” (Uncle Mengele) since he would give the kids sweets and toys to gain their trust before experimenting on them. When Nazi political officials gave the order to immediately annihilate 4,000 Romani inhabitants of the camp, SS scientists actively participated in leading the prisoners to their deaths. Mengele in particular played such a dedicated role in following this genocidal command that many of the prisoners assumed he himself was the one who had ordered the extermination. He abused the Roma children’s misplaced faith in him to escort them to their deaths; one child’s innocent plea to Mengele that day, recollected by another doctor, has been documented in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert J. Lifton:

Mengele arrived at around eight o'clock or seven-thirty. It was day­light. He came, and then the children. . . A G*psy girl of eleven, twelve, . . . the oldest [child] of a whole family— maybe thirteen, with malnutrition sometimes they grow less. ‘Onkel Mengele [she calls], my little brother cries himself to death. We do not know where our mother is. He cries himself to death, Onkel Mengele!’ Where did she go to complain? To Mengele— to the one she loves and knows she is loved by, because he loved them. His answer: ‘Willst du die Schnauze halten!’... He said it in a common, vulgar way. . .but. . .with a sort of tenderness: . . . ‘Why don’t you shut your little trap!’

The Jewish Virtual Library states that Mengele took the documentation of his experiments with him on the day he fled from Auschwitz to South America because, in his misplaced sense of righteousness, “he still imagined that they would bring him scientific honour.” Such was the level of Mengele’s dedication to his inhumane research; he could not bear to leave the findings of his experiments behind even when fleeing halfway across the world.

The Strange Case of the Nuremberg Doctors

The abuses committed by Mengele and his colleagues on those deemed ‘racially inferior’ were so extensive and inhumane that an entire body of regulations on scientific research, known as the Nuremberg Code of 1947, was established following Germany’s defeat. “The Holocaust differs from other instances of genocide in that it involved the active participation of medicine and science,” emphasizes Arthur L. Caplan in Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research. “The Nazis turned to biomedicine specifically for help in carrying out genocide after their early experience using specially trained troops to murder in Poland and the Soviet Union proved impractical.” Medical historian Volker Roelcke explains further:

After the Nazi takeover in 1933, medical scientists, particularly geneticists, expected improved conditions in various research endeavours. Many in the discipline, such as Fritz Lenz and Ernst Rüdin, hoped to see the practical application of the results of their scientific work, thereby contributing to rebuilding society according to the laws of biology. [...] State and party institutions, in turn, were seeking scientific legitimation for their health and racial policies.

It is easy to dismiss the Nazi experimentation on Roma and other persecuted groups as pure nonsense conducted by mad scientists or incompetent doctors. Such a belief, after all, entails no reckoning with the sheer extent to which racial supremacist notions could be found in Germany’s scientific community at the time; it allows the crucial question posed by Franklin Littell (“What kind of a medical school trained Mengele and his associates?”) to be swept under the rug. It is far more difficult to acknowledge that many, if not most, of the German scientists conducting human experiments were sane and competent individuals who chose to act on an evil ideology because, in their twisted minds, it was the moral and rational thing to do in the pursuit of science. “The prisoners at Buchenwald who were shot with poisoned bullets were not guinea pigs to test an antidote for the poison,” prosecuting attorney General Telford Taylor declared at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial. “Their murderers really wanted to know how quickly the poison would kill.”

Indeed, not a single German scientist at the Nuremberg Trial pleaded for mercy on the grounds of insanity. The continued unwillingness to address how the Nazis gave so much life to thanatology, christened then as the science of producing death, is largely the reason why there is little mention in bioethics literature of what truly motivated the likes of Mengele despite the importance of the Nuremberg Code in scientific history. Instead of being the focus of extensive analysis and discussion, the fact that Nazi scientists caused untold suffering believing that they were morally right has been insufficiently addressed out of discomfort and naïveté. In the words of Caplan, “rather than see Nazi biomedicine as morally bad, the field of bioethics has generally accepted the myth that Nazi biomedicine was either inept, mad, or coerced.” Why? Precisely because “those who teach bioethics often presume, if only tacitly, that those who know what is ethical will not behave in immoral ways.” This line of thinking, however, runs counter to the reality exposed by Taylor during the trial:

These defendants did not kill in hot blood, nor for personal enrichment. Some of them may be sadists, who killed and tortured for sport, but they are not all perverts. They are not ignorant men. Most of them are trained physicians and some of them are distinguished scientists. Yet these defendants, all of whom were fully able to comprehend the nature of their acts, and most of whom were exceptionally qualified to form a moral and professional judgment in this respect, are responsible for wholesale murder and unspeakably cruel tortures.

In this regard, the most ardent Nazi doctors should neither be reduced to cartoonish mad scientists, nor compared to Shakespearean villains, but rather to an infamous figure from their own ranks: Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading organizers of the Holocaust. “Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too,” the former Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote. “The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” Within the Nazi ideological framework, the pursuit of certain scientific knowledge merged with the logic of genocide. The Nazi scientists found themselves in an environment that not only left their darker research ideas unchallenged but ideologically encouraged and rewarded them. The societal elimination of any ethical boundaries allowed them to rationalise their monstrous crimes and thoughtlessly devote themselves to their ‘studies.’ Keeping this insight in mind, consider what Hannah Arendt reported about the multiple psychiatric examinations of Eichmann in a New Yorker article published in 1963:

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified Eichmann as ‘normal.’ ‘More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,’ one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that Eichmann’s whole psychological outlook, including his relationship with his wife and children, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters and friends, was ‘not only normal but most desirable.’

What does this diagnosis suggest about the motivations of Nazi officials, whether political, military, or medical? Most likely something Arendt termed “the banality of evil” after hearing Eichmann’s testimony in Jerusalem, something far more disturbing and difficult to address than individual lunacy or idiocy. Ada Ushpiz aptly summarizes this concept as encapsulating “the totality of evil’s strategies to penetrate into the world and present itself as acceptable, logical, as the voice of the majority, as a mission.” The question at the heart of Arendt's inquiry is: “What needs to happen in a society for some majority to transform evil into morality?” It is up to the individual to take a moral and critical stand against creeping evil in society and not to surrender oneself to thoughtless collaboration. Ultimately, “the battle against evil must be waged in the recesses of the individual’s morality and of thought, which by definition constantly challenges and questions consensual world orders.”

The Nazi scientists may be an even better example of the banality of evil - the “absolute and thoughtless symbiosis with the Nazi world” -  than Eichmann. The depravity they exhibited was, in certain respects, arguably worse than that of Nazi politicians or soldiers. Unlike the orders given by Himmler, the carrying out of which occurred at some distance (such as executions by firing squads), the cruelty Mengele personally inflicted on Roma children cannot be attributed to a significant physical or psychic space between the perpetrator and victim. Killing from afar, as Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has elaborated, makes it “possible to be a pilot delivering the bomb to Hiroshima or to Dresden, to excel in the duties assigned at a guided missile base, to design ever more devastating specimens of nuclear warheads - and all this without detracting from one's moral integrity and coming anywhere near moral collapse.” But distance does not explain how Nazi scientists were able to conduct brutal experiments on fellow humans so directly and closely. After all, their victims were not unseen — neither specks viewed from the sky nor dominoes in a line — and their individual suffering was more than visible, right in front of the experimenter’s eyes. That is, far from being an undesirable obstacle, the visibility of the victim was actually integral to the Nazi human experiments; for how can a scientist gather data if not by intimately observing the test subject? The explanation for the crimes of Nazi scientists can instead be found in a particular exchange from the Medical Trial:

Q: Now, witness, is it or is it not the duty of a true and moral scientist to determine for himself what the conditions of the experiments are which he carries out and whether or not the persons upon whom he is experimenting are volunteers? 

A: Under normal circumstances it had to be expected, certainly, but I, naturally, am not acquainted with the milieu which was in the concentration camp of Dachau at the time. However, I know from my own experience that a camp has a system of its own, and it can affect you, and the barbed wire with which you are surrounded has a tendency to change human beings and has a tendency to change your character, and I think when entering a camp, you are captivated by certain conditions and a certain number of your principles are changed that way.

These ideologically-charged conditions that rendered extermination camps, caged in by barbed wire, a solid ground for experimentation in the eyes of many German scientists had similar variations throughout Nazi Germany. Just as the visibly dehumanized state of camp prisoners encouraged Nazi doctors to actually test the most inhumane of their scientific curiosities (which at that point had only been dark seeds in their minds), the social atmosphere incubated by the Nazis resulted in even ordinary Germans choosing to act on their harbored prejudices and condemn their Jewish and Romani neighbours to certain death. Do recall that by the end of 1920 the NSDAP had only a few thousand members. By 1945, the party’s membership numbered over eight million. Neither madness nor stupidity could have maintained the fervour with which so many German citizens from all walks of life willingly subjugated themselves and the rest of Europe to one of the worst tyrants the world has ever seen, and for so many years at that. George Orwell keenly explored this apparent paradox of how countless ordinary Germans could embrace the Hitlerian vision of “a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.” In a 1940 review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Orwell concluded:

However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. […] Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. […] Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

Thus, rather than existing in their own stratum of society or operating solely based on independent modes of thought, Nazi scientists amplified the very worst of a nation consumed by fascist ideology. From their perspective, they were victors as opposed to victims of their circumstances, since the rise of Nazism provided the scientific community with an ideological justification to undertake novel ‘research opportunities.’ Captivated, not compelled or confused, was the word chosen by a trial witness to describe the reaction of Nazi scientists to the prospect of using a concentration camp as an experimental laboratory. 

Towards a New Ethic in Science

The unethical and immoral nature of the human experimentation conducted by Nazi scientists has put the modern scientific community in quite a dilemma with regards to using findings from these experiments. “Many scholars are now discovering in reputable medical literature multiple references to Nazi experiments, or republished works of former SS doctors. These studies and references frequently bear no disclaimer as to how the data was obtained,” explains Baruch C. Cohen. “Several scientists who have sought to use the Nazi research have stirred soul-searching about the social responsibility and potential abuses of science.”

Is it ethical to use unethically obtained data? 

Biology professor Dr. John Hayward posited that it could be the lesser of two evils. His research focused on hypothermia and the testing of cold-water survival suits to help search-and-rescue teams save capsized boaters; towards this end, Hayward used Nazi-obtained data on the cooling curve of the human body and stated the following regarding his decision: “I don't want to have to use the Nazi data, but there is no other and will be no other in an ethical world. I've rationalized it a bit. But not to use it would be equally bad. I'm trying to make something constructive out of it. I use it with my guard up, but it's useful.” 

The editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Arnold Relman, would have disagreed. Relman flat out rejected a plan by Dr. Robert Pozos, who was researching methods of rewarming frozen victims, to republish Nazi data in the medical journal (Nazi scientists had conducted extensive hypothermia experiments at the Dachau concentration camp). “It could advance my work in that it takes human subjects farther than we’re willing,” Pozos had remarked. He could have been right, but the fact of the matter remains that any data from Nazi experiments will always be soaked in the blood of countless innocents.

Perhaps the silver lining of the Nazi human experiments was the aforementioned Nuremberg Code, a milestone in bioethics. After all, the Code does mandate, among other things, that human test subjects must only participate out of their own free will. However, this rule is often manipulated by researchers by enlisting those known as ‘vulnerable populations,’ such as prisoners, migrants, and youths. People in the Global South, especially those living in slums or villages, are at a high risk of being exploited by researchers as well. Multiple Nigerian children died in a trial testing the Pfizer drug Trovan. Thousands of HIV-positive pregnant women around the world, who were not fully informed about the procedure, were used as subjects to test AZT (an AIDS medication) by American physicians in a clinical trial that the executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell, described as a “retreat from ethical principles.” Many governments become accomplices to unethical experiments by deliberately reducing the regulations on medical research to court Western pharmaceutical companies, as fewer restrictions means a lower chance of a legal battle.

The Nuremberg Code also requires an experiment involving humans to be based on and preceded by equivalent animal testing. The acceptance of the Code is one of the main historical events that, as stated in The Laboratory Rat, “lead to current concepts in animal use in toxicology, including the concept of humane endpoints and the use of alternatives.” However, despite its popularity, animal experimentation still comes with significant issues of its own. The abuse of animal test subjects by human scientists is a depressing reality in many laboratories, and the effects of something on an animal can be extremely different from its effects on people, rendering the results of such experiments less applicable than desired. Moreover, experimentation on animals does not necessarily ensure that subsequent testing on humans will abide by ethical standards; in the Abdullahi v. Pfizer, Inc. case, researchers chose to test the Trovan drug on children in Nigeria even after animal testing of the drug had already shown “that it might cause damaging side effects in children, such as joint disease, abnormal cartilage growth, and liver damage.”

Fortunately, there could be a way to acquire detailed data without excessively experimenting on any living being or relying on those who did. Because of the concerns with both human and animal testing, in addition to general technological advancements, the development of in silico computer simulations of biological experiments has accelerated in recent years. Many of us involved in computational sciences are interested in computer-based approaches to experimentation precisely because the current ethical standards (or lack thereof) in the scientific world are too often unsatisfactory in practice. Although computer modeling is not yet sophisticated enough to replace testing on living creatures, computational toxicology especially has a lot of potential thanks to three key factors: “high-information-content data streams (e.g., from microarray or in vitro high-throughput screening experiments), novel biostatistical methods, and the computational power to analyze these data.”

We can derive infinitely important lessons from the horrors of the Nazi human experiments — namely, that scientists are not immune to absorbing violent ideologies and fusing them with their research. No code of ethics would prevent the next round of human testing akin to Mengele’s experiments on Roma children if a new version of the Nazi-era German scientific community were to arise; the Nuremberg Code, though well-intentioned, cannot even prevent opportunistic researchers from using the Global South as a testing ground today. To reduce the risk of more scientific nightmares or ‘Angels of Death’ in the future, it is imperative to seek alternatives to human experimentation which are less susceptible to abuse, yet still produce comprehensive data. Otherwise, the world may be fated to once again witness how quickly science without ethics can descend into unspeakable cruelty, and future scientists may once again find themselves in the predicament of trying to ethicize the unethical.