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Doctors from Hell
The very fact that Hitler’s Third Reich resorted to this act termed the "Final Solution" (the extermination of others who were not of the Aryan stock and thus of what they termed sub-culture) is in itself testimony to how barbaric humans can become with their fellow beings, and how a people can become complacent and resigned to when human rights, dignity and self-respect of the vanquished is trampled upon in the name of medicinal advancement and national interest. The book is a telling account of the trials by a Military Tribunal presided over by Walter B. Beals, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Washington that went on in a bombed-out German city for over two years, and which convicted and sent to the gallows many who had carried out crimes against humanity that Vivien makes us privy to, and an event that finally resulted in the formulation of the Nuremberg Code which spells out clearly guidelines for medical research where human beings are involved. That doctors who are enjoined to save a patient’s life in the Hippocratic Oath could maim, drown, inject with poisonous medicines never before tested or severe off a whole leg from the hip joint of living inmates of these terror camps, raises the terrifying prospect of what the free world might have had to endure had Hitler ever won the Great War. Spitz, on return to America in 1948 after duty in Germany, started having nightmares that would haunt her as she remembered the trial where the unrepentant Nazi doctors went to the gallows free of any remorse or regret till the very end. Long after the war had ended, quite surprisingly there were some who called the Holocaust a big Holohoax, and it was then Vivien decided that she had to write this book to tell the world how humanity had suffered. Six million Jews and five million non-Jews were exterminated by sterilisation with high dosage radiation, inhaling of mustard gas, oxygen denial experiments carried out at varying altitudes, Phenol injection on the ‘subjects’, and burns caused on naked flesh by incendiary bombs. Life for the camp inmates had turned into one big living hell here on earth itself. Block 46 in the camp was the building where the worst of the experiments on the guinea pigs were carried out and from where no one ever returned alive to see the light of day. Vivien writes about these prisons where humans were shorn of all hope and dignity, "Human beings entered these camps and became unidentified ashes carried up tall chimneys; making wreathes in the sky above and floating back onto earth, falling on everyone and everything nearby". Equally to blame for this carnage were those who stood by silently in the Third Reich and other Germans in powerful business circles and who could have raised their voice against racial cleansing. Bob Dylan’s song "Blowin’ in the Wind" said: "How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?" Vivien opines that many Bishops would likely have spoken out "if Pope Pius himself had done so or had encouraged them to do so". The 20 German doctors and three medical assistants who faced trial had to answer four charges of common design or conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership of organisations dubbed criminal. Of these seven were hanged, nine were sentenced to life and varying years in prison and seven were released after being found not guilty. The common defence of many was that they were carrying out the orders issued from Berlin but the senior doctors amongst them genuinely believed that they were working for the cause of the Fatherland. How much can human beings sink down to? The book carries black and white photos of the time from archives, which in themselves depict the savagery and torture that the inmates were subjected to. This book is a grim reminder for humanity to beware of power drunken leaders driven by disruptive and insane ideologies, complying administrators and generals out to please the master, and doctors who have forgotten their oath and noble profession. Vivien Spitz has done singular service to mankind and deserves to be read with all seriousness. I will leave the readers to ponder over Waffen SS member Kurt Gerstein’s deposition on the mass gassing of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ that was carried out. After the gassing in constricted cubicles what came out was described thus: "The dead were still standing like stone statues, there having been no room for them to fall or bend over." And a little later he said: "It was difficult to separate them in order to clear the chamber for the next load."
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POSSIBLY
one of the most difficult book reviews that this reviewer has done in
the last three decades, has to be court reporter Vivien Spitz’s
horrifying and nerve chilling account of the Nuremberg War Crimes trial
of Nazi doctors who willingly carried out murderous experiments on Jews,
Gypsies, and Polish and Russian PoWs during WW2 in the name of service
to the fatherland and medical research.