Sunday, January 27, 2019

The Talmud - Part II

Part II


M. H.DE HEEKELINGEN, in Israel: Son Passe, Son Avenir: „The former Rabbi Drach, converted to Catholicism, says that the Talmud contains „a large number of musing, utterly ridiculous extravagancies, most revolting indecencies, and, above all, the most horrible blasphemies against everything which the Christian religion holds most sacred and most dear.“


„In the matter of the translation of the Talmud by non-Jews, we have always preferred that of Luzsensky, whose accuracy has been established by the Courts. In 1923, the Public Prosecutor of Hungary caused his Hungarian Talmud to be seized on account of „attack on public morals“ and „pornography.“ In delivering its verdict, the Court declared ‘INTER ALIA:’


„The horrors contained in the translation of Alfred Luzsensky are to be found, without exception, in the Talmud. His translation is correct, in that it renders these passages, which are actually to be found in the original text of the Talmud, after their true meaning.“


The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia states that „The Talmud is the real „bible“ of the Jews and that it supersedes the Old Testament. This volume has been condemned down through the ages for preaching hatred for Christ and all Christians. Read „THE TALMUD UNMASKED“ for the full shocking details.


NESTA WEBSTER, in Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, page 370: „The Jewish conception of the Jews as the Chosen People who must eventually rule the world forms indeed the basis of Rabbinical Judaism... The Jewish religion now takes its stand on the Talmud rather than on the Bible.“


F. TROCASE, in Jewish Austria: „No obstacle discourages them; they persevere throughout the world, throughout the centuries, the unity of their race. The Talmud has given them a powerful organization which modern progress has been unable to change. Deep, ineradicable hatred of everything that is not Jewish stimulates them in war which they wage against Christian Society, which is too divided to be able to fight with the necessary energy.“


GREGORY IX. Condemned the TALMUD as containing „every kind of vileness and blasphemy against Christian doctrine.“


BENEDICT XIII. His Bull on the Jewish issue (1450) declared: „The heresies, vanities and errors of the TALMUD prevent their knowing the truth.“


JULIUS III. Contra Hebreos retinentes libros (1554) ordered the TALMUD burned „everywhere“ and established a strict censorship over Jewish genocidal writings - an order that has never been rescinded and which presumably is still binding upon Catholics.


SOMBART, WERNER. 20th century German economist: „Capitalism was born from the money loan. Money lending contains the root idea of capitalism. Turn to the pages of the TALMUD and you will find that the Jews made an art of lending money. They were taught early to look for their chief happiness in the possession of money. They fathomed all the secrets that lay hid in money. They became Lords of Money and Lords of the World...

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Shakespeare and Democracy: Our Culture is Not Being Passed on to Future Generations


Source: Free Speech – March 1997 – Vol. III, No. 3

by Dr. William L. Pierce

William Shakespeare is out. Maya Angelou, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. DuBois are in. I’m talking about fashion at American universities.

There’s been some discussion in the mass media recently about the fact that American universities are phasing out Shakespeare and the other creators of our European culture and replacing them with non-Whites of various stripes, such as the three Black writers I just named. The impression is left by the media discussion that this is some sort of fad, which, hopefully, will pass soon. The discussion was sparked by a decision on the part of the faculty at Georgetown University, the prestigious Jesuit school in Washington, to drop the requirement that their English majors study the works of at least two authors from among Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. Now Georgetown’s English majors can graduate without ever having read anything by Shakespeare. I’m not talking about Georgetown’s basketball players or her business majors. I’m talking about the students who are seeking degrees in English literature. An acquaintance with Shakespeare is no longer necessary. Nor is an acquaintance with the writings of any other dead White European males, or “dwems,” as they are referred to contemptuously by the Politically Correct elements at our universities these days.

And this is not a fad, nor is it restricted to Georgetown University. After Georgetown made its move, a survey was conducted among the top 70 universities in America by the National Alumni Forum, and it was found that two-thirds of them have made similar moves. Instead of studying Hamlet or Julius Caesar or Macbeth. . . or Milton’s Paradise Lost or Il Penseroso or the works of any other great writers of English literature . . . students of English literature are studying the scribblings of miscellaneous non-White non-entities, or they are taking courses in such pop-culture topics as “The Gangster Film,” which is now offered to English majors at Georgetown in lieu of Shakespeare, or “Melodrama and Soap Opera,” which Duke University offers to its English majors instead of Milton and Chaucer.

Other universities have courses on comic books or checkout-stand tabloids or rap ditties. The ones with real pretensions to seriousness have scraped together English literature courses which actually require the study of books written in the English language, so long as they were not written by a White male — at least, not by a White male who has been dead for a long time. Jewish males, of course, are A-OK, and so the students spend plenty of time with the works of J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Herman Wouk, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and scores of other Jews. Unfortunately, the students are taught that the books of these Jews constitute serious English literature. It was a little harder to convince students of that when they also studied Shakespeare and Milton and could compare their writing with that of the aforementioned Jews. Now it will be easier.

As I said, this is not just a passing fad, something very trendy and liberal to suit the Clinton era. It is the outcome of a campaign which goes back more than 30 years. In the 1960s, when I was a university professor myself, anyone who had suggested that Shakespeare should be phased out of university teaching would have been thought crazy — at least, he would have been thought crazy at the university where I was teaching, which was a bit more conservative than some. But even at my university there were faculty and administration people pushing for more democracy and more “diversity.” They were promoting the idea that universities were too White and too elitist, that we needed more “diversity” among students and professors and that we should give the students more of a say in the running of the university and not leave it all to the professors.

It was really very subtle. It wasn’t until they had established their idea about the need for more democracy and more “diversity” that they moved to the next phase and began suggesting that the traditional courses in history and literature were actually a bit . . . ah . . . racist and needed to be, well . . . cleaned up a bit.

And then a few years ago you had groups of the more trendy students marching around on some campuses and chanting, “Ho, ho, ho, Western culture has got to go.” They wanted the traditional courses in Western civilization to be replaced with courses which treated all cultures equally, instead of focusing primarily on European culture. And, of course, all along Shakespeare was gradually being eased out the door. It’s just now that a few people have noticed it and raised the alarm.

And even now the anti-alarmists are telling us that it’s all much ado about nothing: that English literature students still can study Shakespeare if they want to — and that some universities still require their English literature majors to study Shakespeare — so stop worrying. And, of course, that is true: students still can study Shakespeare if they want to — but there’s no denying the trend. There’s no denying that Shakespeare actually is being eased out the door, and that the curricula at our universities are being filled with courses which at best are worthless and at worst are destructive of the central purpose of a university, which is the training of an elite to carry on and enhance the cultural traditions of our people. Our universities actually have been subverted. They actually are being turned against us and used as weapons to destroy the civilization of which they used to be a part.

How did that happen, and why did it happen? There still are many bright people, as well as honest and well-meaning people, on the faculties of our universities. How could they let anyone subvert their institutions without noticing what was happening and opposing them?

First, I’ll give a very brief answer, and then I’ll go back and explain it in detail.

Our universities were subverted without any effective opposition because, first, the subversion was done very gradually, over a period of more than three decades, and it was done by a very clever group of very determined and very well organized people who already had infiltrated our university faculties and administrations. Second, the people who should have opposed the subversion already had been morally and ideologically disarmed, so that they could only fight tactically, but not strategically. They could oppose the details of the subversion, but they could not oppose the overall campaign of subversion — and in particular, they could not attack the subverters themselves. They were fighting the subversion, in other words, with both hands tied behind their backs.

Now I’ll explain this answer. Before this century, our universities more or less served their two basic purposes, one of which is to train scholars in a technical sense — the mathematicians, the chemists, and the physicists — and the other of which is to instill in a leadership elite of our young people an understanding of and a sense of commitment to our civilization, so that they can maintain that civilization and add to it. The civilization that our universities were a part of was unmistakably and unapologetically Western, which is to say, European — or if you prefer, White.

This fact did not suit some people. In particular, it did not suit the Jews, a people of Semitic origin with quite different traditions and a quite different way of looking at the world. To them our universities were an obstacle which stood in the way of their penetration and domination of our civilization. And so they set about eliminating this obstacle, in their usual very carefully planned way. They were very unobtrusive at first, just infiltrating themselves gradually into university faculties and more or less behaving themselves, trying hard to convince the people at the universities that they were harmless. They worked to get rid of the restrictions the better universities had to limit their numbers, and they very cautiously pushed such ideas as democracy and equality.

It was only after the Second World War that they really came out of the closet and began pushing hard for the changes they wanted in the universities. The Second World War, after all, had been fought for the sake of democracy and equality, we all were told. We had killed millions of people in Europe in the name of democracy and equality and had turned half of Europe over to Bolshevik butchers to kill millions more after the war. After that, how could we oppose democracy and equality in our universities? We needed to open the doors of our universities to everyone, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, national origin, et cetera. We not only needed to open the doors, we needed to reach out and pull in hundreds of thousands of young people who before never would have thought of attending a university.

Of course, there was some opposition to all of this. Some university people expressed concern about the lowering of standards required to accommodate all of the new students, especially the Black students. And they were assured by the proponents of democracy and equality that standards would not be lowered: that the universities could absorb Black students and all sorts of other students without lowering their standards at all. To suggest that they couldn’t was tantamount to racism; it was tantamount to claiming that Black students could not graduate in significant numbers unless standards were lowered. And this was where the people who should have defended our universities against the subverters were stuck. They didn’t want to admit to racism, so they really couldn’t fight effectively to maintain standards that clearly worked to the disadvantage of Blacks. And they didn’t want to admit to anti-Semitism, so they couldn’t really take off the gloves against the ringleaders of the subversion. So they retreated, step by step.

Of course, pretty soon many more people than the original Jews were involved in the subversion. As the number of students at the universities increased enormously, many empires were built and many vested interests established. The salaries of many people at the universities have become dependent on how many students they have. Professors who teach courses in basket-weaving or golf or the-comic-book-as-literature become fiercely defensive and can give you all sorts of reasons why their courses are important. And there has been a growing tendency to cater to the desires of the students: not to teach them what the professors know they ought to be taught, but instead to teach them what they think they want to learn. For young people raised on television and permissiveness, what they often choose are fun courses, trendy courses, trivial courses, and what they often neglect are the serious and more demanding courses. Universities, instead of scholarly institutions, have become to a large extent economic enterprises: that is, commercial institutions selling education, and the customers all too often are assumed to be right. Sometimes when a university offers a huge assortment of Mickey Mouse courses, it’s hard to separate the economic motive of wanting to keep the customers coming in the door and lining up at the cash register, from the ideological motive of wanting to be democratic by having curricula that will be easy enough for everybody.

But despite the economic factors and other factors which have degraded American universities, the motive to destroy our culture and undermine our civilization continues to provide a powerful driving force for subversion. Political Correctness was born at our universities, and it reigns supreme there. University professors must toe the party line on race, on equality, on history, and on matters relating to sex and sexual orientation. And the party line is anti-White, anti-European, anti-Western. It is strongly influenced by the interests of feminists, homosexuals, and Jews.

One factor which obscures the seriousness of this problem is its uneven effects. It has devastated some academic disciplines and left others relatively undamaged. If one wants to become a mathematician, for example, there are many universities which still offer top-quality mathematics curricula. The Red Guards have not yet gotten around to applying the canons of Political Correctness to mathematics. It helps, of course, that most basketball players don’t care much for math.

But if a young person is interested in literature or history, he is likely to be badly shortchanged at most American universities. These are subjects on which the Red Guards have left their mark, and it is easy to understand why.

History is an inherently racist subject, although I can hear the gutless wonders who try to teach it squealing in protest at that verdict. History is racist because, in the first place, it involves the study of what various peoples and individuals have actually done, not what the theorists of democracy and equality would like us to believe they have done. History gives us a continuing proof of the fact that there is no equality in the world. It is a record of heroic accomplishment and outstanding virtue on the part of some, contrasted with chronic ineptitude and appalling iniquity on the part of others.

In the second place it provides the indispensable basis for a sense of peoplehood, a sense of rootedness, a sense of racial identity. It is not something you want spread around when you are trying to reduce a population to a mass of rootless, cosmopolitan, interchangeable human atoms.

Finally, history gives us some very inconvenient truths, especially about the origins and conduct of the two world wars in which we have participated in this century. Perhaps the undergraduates will sit meekly in their classrooms and soak up whatever lies the professor dishes out, but it’s still dangerous because some of the students may develop a real interest in the subject and do some reading or real research on their own, and there’s no telling what sort of Politically Incorrect things they may discover.

And literature . . . well, that’s at least as dangerous as history. Who can read the Iliad without his blood beginning to race and without feeling a connection to those ancient people and events? Who cannot be moved by the same spirit which moved Homer? And that spirit has nothing to do with the sickly spirit of democracy and equality. Dangerous stuff, indeed!

And then there’s Shakespeare! There was never a man who observed the human condition with truer eye than he. He stripped away every pretense and showed us as we are, the good and the bad — but hardly equal! The great danger in literature — in real literature, in great literature — for the democrats and the egalitarians is that it helps us to understand ourselves and to place ourselves in the context of our people. It helps us to complete ourselves and to become whole. It expands our horizons, helps us to see the big picture. It gives us ideals, models — and those ideals, in our literature, are not egalitarian ideals. Nor are the models Politically Correct: in fact, they are much more likely to be heroes than democrats.

And the people who run most of our universities these days are frightened by that prospect. In their view it is much better to feed our young people the sick, Semitic, anti-heroic blather of a Bellow or a Malamud or a Mailer than to let them get carried away with the dangerous, undemocratic ideas of Homer or Shakespeare.

And so our universities have become what they have become. And the people who should have stopped it from happening didn’t, because they were afraid to deal with the fundamental issues. They were afraid to deal radically with the problem.

And now, looking at the situation objectively, it is still possible to study hard and to learn at our universities — at least, in most curricula. That is undeniable. But it also is undeniable that the average graduate of our universities is seriously deficient in the arts of civilization. And that’s the way the subverters of our universities want it.

It’s a serious problem. We have a job to do at our universities someday which will make Hercules’ cleansing of the Augean stables seem like good, clean fun. Let’s hope that we can begin that job before Shakespeare has disappeared completely down the Memory Hole.


Thursday, January 17, 2019

The Untold Story of White Slavery in Europe


Renegade Editor’s Note: This article does not even cover the White slavery in the New World!

The Ottoman penetration into Europe in the 1350s and their capture of Constantinople later in 1453 opened new floodgates for slave-trade from the European front. In their last attempt to overrun Europe in 1683, the Ottoman army, although defeated, returned from the Gates of Vienna with 80,000 captives.874 An immense number of slaves flowed from the Crimea, the Balkans and the steppes of West Asia to Islamic markets. BD Davis laments that the ‘‘Tartars and other Black Sea peoples had sold millions of Ukrainians, Georgians, Circassians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Slavs and Turks,’’ which received little notice.875 Crimean Tatars enslaved and sold some 1,750,000 Ukrainians, Poles and Russian between 1468 and 1694. 876 According to another estimate, between 1450 and 1700, the Crimean Tatars exported some 10,000 slaves, including some Circassians, annually—that is, some 2,500,000 slaves in all, to the Ottoman Empire.877 The Tatar slave-raiding Khans returned with 18,000 slaves from Poland (1463), 100,000 from Lvov (1498), 60,000 from South Russia (1515), 50,000–100,000 from Galicia (1516), during the ‘harvesting of the steppe.’ Numbers from Moscow (1521), 800,000 were taken and from Valynia (1676), 400,000 were taken. 800,000 from Moscow (1521), 200,000 from South Russia (1555), 100,000 from Moscow (1571), 50,000 from Poland (1612), 60,000 from South Russia (1646), 100,000 from Poland (1648), 300,000 from Ukraine (1654), 400,000 from Valynia (1676) and thousands from Poland (1694). Besides these major catches, they made countless more Jihad raids during the same period, which yielded a few to tens of thousands of slaves.878 These figures of enslavement must be considered in the context that the population of the Tatar Khanate was only about 400,000 at the time. (1463-1694) while sources are incomplete, conservative tabulation of the slave raids against the Eastern European population indicate that at least 7 Million European people-men, women, children were enslaved by Muslims.

Sources suggest that in the few years between 1436-1442, some 500,000 people were seized in the Balkans. Many of the captives died in forced marches towards Anatolia (Turkey). Contemporary chronicles note that the Ottomans reduced masses of the inhabitants of Greece, Romania, and the Balkans to slavery eg from Moree (1460)-70,000 and Transylvania (1438) – 60,000-70,000 and 300,000-600,000 from Hungary and 10,000 from Mytilene/Mitilini on Lesbos island (1462) (Bulgaru p 567) and so it continued.

Barbary Slavery

Ohio State University history Professor Robert Davis describes the White Slave Trade as minimized by most modern historians in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan). Davis estimates that 1 million to 1.25 million white Christian Europeans were enslaved in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th, by slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli alone (these numbers do not include the European people which were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast), 16th- and 17th-century customs statistics suggest that Istanbul’s additional slave import from the Black Sea may have totaled around 2.5 million from 1450 to 1700. The markets declined after the loss of the Barbary Wars and finally ended in the 1830s, when the region was conquered by France.

In 1544, the island of Ischia off Naples was ransacked, taking 4,000 inhabitants prisoners, while some 9,000 inhabitants of Lipari Island off the north coast of Sicily were enslaved.870 Turgut Reis, a Turkish pirate chief, ransacked the coastal settlements of Granada (Spain) in 1663 and carried away 4,000 people as slaves.

The barbaric slave-raiding activities of the Muslim pirates had a telling effect on Europe. France, England, and Spain lost thousands of ships, devastating to their sea-borne trade. Long stretches of the coast in Spain and Italy were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants until the nineteenth century. The finishing industry was virtually devastated.

Paul Baepler’s White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives lists a collection of essays by nine American captives held in North Africa. According to his book, there were more than 20,000 white Christian slaves by 1620 in Algiers alone; their number swelled to more than 30,000 men and 2,000 women by the 1630s. There were a minimum of 25,000 white slaves at any time in Sultan Moulay Ismail’s palace, records Ahmed ez-Zayyani; Algiers maintained a population of 25,000 white slaves between 1550 and 1730, and their numbers could double at certain times. During the same period, Tunis and Tripoli each maintained a white slave population of about 7,500. The Barbary pirates enslaved some 5,000 Europeans annually over a period of nearly three centuries.

Saturday, January 12, 2019

Medical Experimentation at Dachau

They All Did It - Those Who Could, at Least


By John Wear
Published: 2018-12-31

The onset and escalation of World War II provided the rationale for most of Germany’s illegal human medical experimentation. Animal experimentation was known to be a poor substitute for experiments on humans. Since only analogous inferences could be drawn from animal experiments, the use of human experimentation during the war was deemed necessary to help in the German war effort. Applications for medical experimentation on humans were usually approved on the grounds that animal tests had taken the research only so far. Better results could be obtained by using humans in the medical experiments.[1]

Inmates at the Dachau Concentration Camp were subjected to medical experimentation involving malaria, high altitudes, freezing and other experiments. Such has been documented in the so-called Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, which opened on December 9, 1946, and ended on July 19, 1947. Also, Dr. Charles P. Larson, an American forensic pathologist, was at Dachau and conducted autopsies, interviews, and a review of the remaining medical records to determine the extent of the medical experimentation at the camp.

Malaria Experiments

The malaria experimentation at Dachau was performed by Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, who was an internationally famous parasitologist. Dr. Schilling was ordered by Heinrich Himmler in 1936 to conduct medical research at Dachau for the purpose of immunizing individuals specifically against malaria. Dr. Schilling admitted to Dr. Larson that between 1936 and 1945 he inoculated some 2,000 prisoners with malaria. The medical supervisor at Dachau would select the people to be inoculated and then send this list of people to Berlin to be approved by a higher authority. Those who were chosen were then turned over to Dr. Schilling to conduct the medical experimentation.[2]

Dr. Schilling at Trial

At the Doctors’ Trial it was determined that Dr. Schilling’s experiments were directly responsible for the deaths of 10 prisoners.[3] Dr. Charles Larson stated in his report concerning Dr. Schilling:

It was very difficult to know where to draw the line as to whether or not Dr. Schilling was a war criminal. Certainly he fell into that category inasmuch as he had subjected people involuntarily to experimental malaria inoculations, which, even though they did not produce many deaths, could very well have produced serious illness in many of the patients. He defended himself by saying he did all this work by order from higher authority; in fact, Himmler himself.

In my report, I wrote: “In view of all he has told me, this man, in my opinion, should be considered a war criminal, but that he should be permitted to write up the results of his experiments and turn them over to Allied medical personnel for what they are worth. Dr. Schilling is an eminent scientist of world-wide renown who has conducted a most important group of experiments; their value cannot properly be ascertained until he has put them into writing for medical authorities to study. The criminal acts have already been committed, and since they have been committed, if it were possible to derive some new knowledge concerning immunity to malaria from these acts, it would yet be another crime not to permit this man to finish documenting the results of his years of research.”

But my attempt to save Dr. Schilling’s life failed. Our High Command felt it had to make a public example of him – most of the other high-ranking Nazis connected with Dachau had already been executed – and made his wife watch the hanging. I did everything I could to stop it. I implored our military government not to pass sentence on him until he’d had a fair hearing, because I was just beginning to win his confidence, and get through to him. Looking back, I am sure that the execution of Dr. Schilling deprived the world of some very valuable scientific information – no matter how distasteful his research and experimentation may have been.[4]

Dr. Larson concluded in regard to Dr. Schilling: “…Dr. Schilling, who was 72 [actually 74], should have lived. He never tried to run. He stayed in Dachau and made a full statement of his work to me; he cooperated in every way, and was the only one who told the truth…”[5]

The defense in the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg submitted evidence of doctors in the United States performing medical experiments on prison inmates and conscientious objectors during the war. The evidence showed that large-scale malaria experiments were performed on 800 American prisoners, many of them black, from federal penitentiaries in Atlanta and state penitentiaries in Illinois and New Jersey. U.S. doctors conducted human experiments with malaria tropica, one of the most dangerous of the malaria strains, to aid the U.S. war effort in Southeast Asia.[6]

Although Dr. Schilling’s malaria experiments were no more dangerous or illegal than the malaria experiments performed by U.S. doctors, Dr. Schilling had to atone for his malaria experiments by being hanged to death while his wife watched. The U.S. doctors who performed malaria experiments on humans were never charged with a crime.

High-Altitude and Hypothermia Experiments

Germany also conducted high-altitude experiments at Dachau. Dr. Sigmund Rascher performed these experiments beginning February 22, 1942 and ending around the beginning of July 1942.[7] The experiments were performed in order to know what happened to air crews after failure of, or ejection from, their pressurized cabins at very high altitudes. In this instance, airmen would be subjected within a few seconds to a drop in pressure and lack of oxygen. The experiments were performed to investigate various possible life-saving methods. To this end a low-pressure chamber was set up at Dachau to observe the reactions of a human being thrown out at extreme altitudes, and to investigate ways of rescuing him.[8] The victims were locked in the chamber, and the pressure in the chamber was then lowered to a level corresponding to very high altitudes. The pressure could be very quickly altered, allowing Dr. Rascher to simulate the conditions which would be experienced by a pilot freefalling from altitude without oxygen.

Dr. Rascher received authority to conduct these high-altitude experiments when he wrote to Heinrich Himmler and was told that prisoners would be placed at his disposal. Dr. Rascher stated in his letter that he knew the experiments could have fatal results. According to Walter Neff, the prisoner who gave testimony at the Doctors’ Trial, approximately 180 to 200 prisoners were used in the high-altitude experiments. Approximately 10 of these prisoners were volunteers, and about 40 of the prisoners were men not condemned to death. According to Neff’s testimony, approximately 70 to 80 prisoners died during these experiments.[9] A film showing the complete sequence of an experiment, including the autopsy, was discovered in Dr. Rascher’s house at Dachau after the war.[10]

Dr. Rascher also conducted freezing experiments at Dachau after the high-altitude experiments were concluded. These freezing experiments were conducted from August 1942 to approximately May 1943.[11] The purpose of these experiments was to determine the best way of warming German pilots who had been forced down in the North Sea and suffered hypothermia.

Dr. Rascher's subjects were forced to remain outdoors naked in freezing weather for up to 14 hours, or the victims were kept in a tank of ice water for three hours. Their pulse and internal temperature were measured through a series of electrodes. Warming of the victims was then attempted by different methods, most usually and successfully by immersion in very hot water. It is estimated that these experiments caused the deaths of 80 to 90 prisoners.[12]

Dr. Charles Larson strongly condemned these freezing experiments. Dr. Larson wrote:

A Dr. Raschau [sic] was in charge of this work and…we found the records of his experiments. They were most inept compared to Dr. Schilling’s, much less scientific. What they would do would be to tie up a prisoner and immerse him in cold water until his body temperature reduced to 28 degrees centigrade (82.4 degrees Fahrenheit), when the poor soul would, of course, die. These experiments were started in August, 1942, but Raschau’s [sic] technique improved. By February, 1943 he was able to report that 30 persons were chilled to 27 and 29 degrees centigrade, their hands and feet frozen white, and their bodies “rewarmed” by a hot bath….

They also dressed the subjects in different types of insulated clothing before putting them in freezing water, to see how long it took them to die.[13]

Dr. Rascher and his hypothermia experiments at Dachau were not well regarded by German medical doctors. In a paper titled “Nazi Science – The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments,” Dr. Robert L. Berger wrote:

Rascher was not well regarded in professional circles…and his superiors repeatedly expressed reservations about his performance. In one encounter, Professor Karl Gebhardt, a general in the SS and Himmler’s personal physician, told Rascher in connection with his experiments on hypothermia through exposure to cold air that “the report was unscientific; if a student of the second term dared submit a treatise of the kind [Gebhardt] would throw him out.” Despite Himmler’s strong support, Rascher was rejected for faculty positions at several universities. A book by German scientists on the accomplishments of German aviation medicine during the war devoted an entire chapter to hypothermia but failed to mention Rascher’s name or his work.[14]

Blood-Clotting Experiments

Dr. Rascher also experimented with the effects of Polygal, a substance made from beet and apple pectin, which aided blood clotting. He predicted that the preventive use of Polygal tablets would reduce bleeding from surgery and from gunshot wounds sustained during combat. Subjects were given a Polygal tablet and were either shot through the neck or chest, or their limbs were amputated without anesthesia. Dr. Rascher published an article on his use of Polygal without detailing the nature of the human trials. Dr. Rascher also set up a company staffed by prisoners to manufacture the substance.[15] Dr. Rascher’s nephew, a Hamburg doctor, testified under oath that he knew of four prisoners who died from Dr. Rascher’s testing Polygal at Dachau.[16]

Obviously, Dr. Rascher’s medical experiments constitute major war crimes. Dr. Rascher was arrested and executed in Dachau by German authorities shortly before the end of the war.[17]

Infectious Diseases, Biopsies and Salt-Water Tests

Phlegmons were also induced in inmates at Dachau by intravenous and intramuscular injection of pus during 1942 and 1943. Various natural, allopathic and biochemical remedies were then tried to cure the resulting infections. The phlegmon experiments were apparently an attempt by National Socialist Germany to find an antibiotic similar to penicillin for infection.[18]

All of the doctors who took part in these phlegmon experiments were dead or had disappeared at the time of the Doctors’ Trial. The only information about the number of prisoners used and the number of victims was provided by an inmate nurse, Heinrich Stöhr, who was a political prisoner at Dachau. Stöhr stated that seven out of a group of 10 German subjects died in one experiment, and that in another experiment 12 out of a group of 40 clergy died.[19]

Official documents and personal testimonies indicate that physicians at Dachau performed many liver biopsies when they were not needed. Dr. Rudolf Brachtl performed liver biopsies on healthy people and on people who had diseases of the stomach and gall bladder. While biopsy of the liver is an accepted and frequently used diagnostic procedure, it should only be performed when definite indications exist and other methods fail. Some physicians at Dachau performed liver biopsies simply to gain experience with its techniques. These Dachau biopsies violated professional standards since they were often conducted in the absence of genuine medical indication.[20]

The Luftwaffe had also been concerned since 1941 with the problem of shot-down airmen who had been reduced to drinking salt water. Sea water experiments were performed at Dachau to develop a method of making sea water drinkable through desalinization. Between July and September 1944, 44 inmates at Dachau were used to test the desirability of using two different processes to make sea water drinkable. The subjects were divided into several groups and given different diets using the two different processes.[21] During the experiments one of the groups received no food whatsoever for five to nine days. Many of the subjects became ill from these experiments, suffering from diarrhea, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and sometimes madness or death.[22]

Most Deaths from Natural Causes

Dr. Charles Larson’s forensic work at Dachau indicated that only a small percentage of the deaths at Dachau were due to medical experimentation on humans. His autopsies showed that most of the victims died from natural causes; that is, of disease brought on by malnutrition and filth caused by wartime conditions. In his depositions to Army lawyers, Dr. Larson made it clear that one could not indict the whole German people for the National Socialist medical crimes. Dr. Larson sincerely believed that although Dachau was only a short ride from Munich, most of the people in Munich had no idea what was going on inside Dachau.[23]

Dr. Larson’s conclusions are reinforced by the book Dachau, 1933-1945: The Official History by Paul Berben. This book states that the total number of people who passed through Dachau during its existence is well in excess of 200,000.[24] The author concludes that while no one will ever know the exact number of deaths at Dachau, the number of deaths is probably several thousand more than the quoted number of 31,951.[25] This book documents that approximately 66% of all deaths at Dachau occurred during the final seven months of the war. 

The increase in deaths at Dachau was caused primarily by a devastating typhus epidemic which, in spite of the efforts made by the medical staff, continued to spread throughout Dachau during the final seven months of the war. The number of deaths at Dachau also includes 2,226 people who died in May 1945 after the Allies had liberated the camp, as well as the deaths of 223 prisoners in March 1944 from Allied aerial attacks on work parties.[26] Thus, while illegal medical experiments were conducted on prisoners at Dachau, Berben’s book clearly shows that the overwhelming majority of deaths of prisoners at Dachau were from natural causes.

Allied Medical Experimentation

Dr. Karl Brandt and the other defendants were infuriated during the Doctors’ Trial at the moral high ground taken by the U.S. prosecution. Evidence showed that the Allies had been engaged in illegal medical experimentation, including poison experiments on condemned prisoners in other countries, and cholera and plague experiments on children.[27]

Dr. Bettina Blome, the wife of the defendant Dr. Kurt Blome, meticulously researched experiments that were conducted by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during the war. In addition to malaria experiments on Terre Haute Federal Prison inmates, she also uncovered Dr. Walter Reed’s 19th-century yellow fever research for the U.S. Army, in which volunteer human test subjects had died. Blome’s research was entered into evidence at the Doctors’ Trial.[28]

Defense attorney Dr. Robert Servatius expanded on the theme of U.S. Army human experimentation. American journalist Annie Jacobsen writes:

Servatius had located a Life magazine article, published in June of 1945, that described how OSRD conducted experiments on 800 U.S. prisoners during the war. Servatius read the entire article, word for word, in the courtroom. None of the American judges was familiar with the article, nor were most members of the prosecution, and its presentation in court clearly caught the Americans off guard. Because the article specifically discussed U.S. Army wartime experiments on prisoners, it was incredibly damaging for the prosecution. “Prison life is ideal for controlled laboratory work with humans,” Servatius read, quoting American doctors who had been interviewed by Life reporters. The idea that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and that both nations had used human test subjects during war, was unsettling. It pushed the core Nazi concept of the Untermenschen to the side. The Nuremberg prosecutors were left looking like hypocrites.[29] 

The U.S. prosecution flew in Dr. Andrew Ivy to explain the differences in medical ethics between German and U.S. medical experiments. Interestingly, Dr. Ivy himself had been involved in malaria experiments on inmates at the Illinois State Penitentiary. When Dr. Ivy mentioned that the United States had specific research standards for medical experimentation on humans, it turned out that these principles were first published on December 28, 1946. Dr. Ivy had to admit that the U.S. principles on medical ethics in human experimentation had been made in anticipation of Dr. Ivy’s testimony at the Doctors’ Trial.[30]


ENDNOTES

1] Kater, Michael H., Doctors under Hitler, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, p. 226.

[2] McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, Wash.: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 64-65.

[3] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945, The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 125.

[4] McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, Wash.: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 66-67.

[5] Ibid., p. 68.

[6] Schmidt, Ulf, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, New York: Continuum Books, 2007, p. 376.

[7] Spitz, Vivien, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans, Boulder, Colo.: Sentient Publications, 2005, p. 74.

[8] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945, The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 126.

[9] Ibid., pp. 127-128.

[10] Ibid., p. 130.

[11] Spitz, Vivien, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans, Boulder, Colo.: Sentient Publications, 2005, p. 85.

[12] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945, The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 133.

[13] McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, Wash.: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 67-68.

[14] Michalczyk, John J., Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues, Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1994, p. 96.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945, The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, pp. 133-134.

[17] Ibid., p. 134. See also Michalczyk, John J., Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues, Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1994, p. 97.

[18] Pasternak, Alfred, Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps, Budapest, Hungary: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2006, p. 149.

[19] Ibid., pp. 134-135.

[20] Ibid., p. 227.

[21] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945, The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, pp. 136-137.

[22] Spitz, Vivien, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans, Boulder, Colo.: Sentient Publications, 2005, p. 173.

[23] McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, Wash.: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, p. 69.

[24] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945, The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 19.

[25] Ibid., p. 202.

[26] Ibid., pp. 95, 281.

[27] Schmidt, Ulf, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, New York: Continuum Books, 2007, p. 376.

[28] Jacobsen, Annie, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014, pp. 273-274.

[29] Ibid., p. 274.

[30] Schmidt, Ulf, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, New York: Continuum Books, 2007, pp. 376-377.