Mengele, Auschwitz and Medical Murder: "Angel of Death" or Ordinary Doctor?

good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to tonight's lecture this will be the closing lecture of the first semester lecture series at the institute of jewish studies i'm very grateful to professor steve rasheim for having accepted to turn this lecture which was initially scheduled as an event on campus in spring 2020 into an online format i want thank you also to all the listeners so numerously present here tonight as the situation stands now we will have to continue this online format in the second semester as well so if you are not yet on our mailing list we would be happy to include you so that you will receive our electronic announcements and if you do not wish to receive this announcement you can always ask to be unsubscribed now it is my very special pleasure to introduce steve schein tonight one of the foremost scholars in jewish intellectual history worldwide a veteran of the institute of jewish studies and a friend his groundbreaking research on nietzsche aaron klemperer the frankfurt school and modern german jewish thought has become a primary reference a model and an inspiration for all of us working in this field and others is a field which he has shaped like few others and his repeated lectures and seminars internationally as well as in antwerp at the antwerp institutes institute are memorable moments and it is an honor for the institute that he's presenting his new research on mengele in this now context official introduction steve asheim is emeritus professor of history at the hebrew university of jerusalem where he taught cultural and intellectual history in the department of history since 1982 and held the vigilante chair of european studies he has also acted as the director of the franz forzanspike research center for german literature and cultural history his recent publications include beyond the border the german jewish legacy abroad and at the edges of liberalism junctions of european german and jewish history together with me he edited the volume the german jewish experience revisited and his book of essays fragile spaces forays into jewish memory european history and complex identities was published in 2018. apart from academic journals professor asheim has written for the times literary supplement the new york times the new york times the jewish review of books many other journals and magazines after the lecture there will be time for questions since we are so many please write your questions and comments in the chat box at the bottom of your screen and you can do that also during the lecture i will collect them at the end and i will try to put them together and present them to professor ashin if the floor is yours right thank you very much vivian as always exaggerates but i can take this sort of exaggeration and also it is quite a pleasure although i can't see everybody it's a pleasure to see some faces that are not masked because we've all become used to seeing mass wherever we go and i hope tonight uh partly to do an act of unmasking on a very sensitive topic and quite clearly there is an act of some pretension when historians deal with this kind of problem because we are not doing this out of personal experience and it may be that the personal experience of those who went through this will differ slightly from the perspective of somebody who comes later and looks at it from some distance and hopefully in the discussion should there be this disparity it would be my pleasure and honor to discuss the differences so um this lecture which was supposed to be live and not virtual was supposed to be delivered before we knew about covert 19 and its devastating spread across the world i didn't realize then that reflecting on medical matters ethics and public hygiene would possess the resonance that it clearly has today we've never lived at a time when health consciousness was greater where fears of contagion and suspicion of others as infectious has been greater and i make absolutely no claim that our present plight of covet bears any resemblance to the nazi reality that i'm going to talk about still um there is the health consciousness which i think gives this lecture greater resonance now i'm going to concentrate on a particular historical case which is of course the nazi case but i think given our own situation today it's important to widen our perspective and reflect upon more general questions of medicine public hygiene and ethics and although let me make this also clear although the issue of the building blocks of the nazi genocide have occupied me throughout my professional life and even before i cannot claim to be a specialist of mengele it was only because the new york times asked me to review this book by david by david marwell called mengele unmasking the angel of death that vivian or professor liska suggested that i expand on it and consider not just mengele's special case but also and i think far more centrally the wider contexts and the pertinent implications of mengele and nazi medicine in general but let's start with joseph mengele seeing that that is the title of the lecture and then we will see how his story merges much more generally into a wider field i don't think i need to say this but if anyone embodies the archetype of evil that was auschwitz it is purely mengele he was dubbed by the inmates and survivors of the camp as the angel of death the immaculate doctor who with a slight flick of the finger would casually select those permitted to live and work and those destined to die in the gas chambers amongst those he selected to live were the subjects upon whom he conducted his infamous race inspired medical experiments his post-war escaped to south america and his prolonged successful evasion from capture he was in argentina in paraguay and brazil respectively only reinforced the fear and indeed the mystique of the man popular culture has purpo perpetuated the demonic legend 1963 the deputy featured mengele as a thinly disguised doctor with the statue of what he called absolute evil ira levine's 1967 novel and later in the film the boys from brazil portrayed mengele as cloning hitler another you won't believe this then charlton heston played mengele meeting his confused and ambivalent son rolfe in a 2003 film called my father rua al 555. so mengeles clearly was a stubborn legend even when his death had been definitively established there was a refusal by many to believe that he actually had died for them the only fitting psychological and moral conclusion entailed live confrontation with the man and then subsequent just retribution as with so many perpetrators who committed unthinkable acts very little in mengele's very wealthy respectively conservative catholic background helps to account for his auschwitz career and his reputation as a kind of monster born in 1911 the young bengal's decision to study medicine human genetics and physical anthropology in the 1930s was nevertheless largely in tune with the mood of the time given his driving professional ambition and his increasingly focused predispositions he became a member of the nazi party in 1930 38 at which time he joined the ss he ultimately landed at the frankfurt institute for hereditary biology and racial hygiene a body clearly and obviously aligned with the nazi party it was through this institute's director and his doctoral advisor ottmar von furshaw that after serving from 1940 as a decorated medical officer officer in the buffon ss panzer viking decision division which was made up largely of aryan volunteers mangle mengele was finally posted to auschwitz in may 1943 it was there apart from his infamous selection activity which by the way was also conducted by other ss doctors that mengele perpetrated his often murderous heredity experiments setting up an entire sophisticated research structure devoted to the nature of genetic and racial determinism he variously experimented upon roma and cinti dwarves and most obsessively as everyone knows twins although many of his deeds were indubitably cruel and cavalierly murderous most biography have insisted upon stripping the exaggerated aspects of what they called the mengele legend despite his doubtless innumerable cruel crimes what is known about mengele's time at auschwitz is sometimes quite removed from being accurate his deeds were bad enough that subsequent accounts of his monstrous presence do not really need to outstrip what he actually did for instance some prisoners even claimed that during the time there they had never even heard his name survivor memory occasionally does not always have to be accurate so a few survivors remembered being selected by mengele before his arrival at the camp some reported that he spoke hungarian which he did not others regarded him as tall and blonde in fact he was relatively short and as you saw in the picture before the lecture he was dark head given his feared alleged omnipotence grotesque accusations that he had attempted to create a siamese twin by sewing together two twins or that he'd attempted to make boys into girls and vice versa these were circulated but as it happens in an almost incomprehensible event of this kind it's more complex than that thus contrarily and for some inmates very confusingly he would be kind to some of his subjects not out of kindness but out of a way of guaranteeing some integrity for the research that he was undertaking now there is clearly a very human need to identify individual agents of evil to provide them with a tangible if ugly face but we must remember and this is crucial that mengele formed part of what was a far wider organized system of medicine and public hygiene all in quotes mangala was one of many amongst the whole corps of medical staff doctors pharmacists nurses orderlies all posted in the camp their duties also consisted of what equate quote again ordinary doctors regularly do they were responsible for overall public health the care of ss members of working inmates and preventing the spread of disease such as typhus and they say that mengele was one of those who achieved that indeed there was one hygienic institute that was set up as a kind of haven and in which no selections were made and reasonable conditions applied and in which very tragically and sadly jewish doctors themselves worked but of course and this is central under the ages of scientific racism this was combined with unthinkable medical practices conducted by respectable ordinary in quotes doctors and often competent even distinguished scientific researchers some of the cruelest experiments conducted in auschwitz on mass sterilization on the effects of starvation were carried out not just by mengele but by other camp physicians just to take a few examples this apparently decent citizen doctor edward vert set up and supervised an entire system of the system of selections and medical killings at auschwitz it was verts not mengele who did that apart from mengele fatal phenol injections were administered by men like franz von bordmann friedrich entres joseph clear carl clauberg who was a very respected scientist was the main figure in the sterilization program there performed on several thousand women the brutal horse schumann headed the surgical castration project men like helmut fetter and johan paul crema were involved in numerous pharmacological and starvation experiments dr august hurt was in charge of anthropological research in which skeletons of those guests were collected for experiments after which a museum was to be created to record and display the degenerated characteristics of the exterminated race this was part of what was called the anandber ana naba program so what i'm trying to say is this was the larger context in which mengele worked uniquely enabling him to enthusiastically exercise his albeit racially perverted and ideologically inflected but to his mind legitimate scientific and reach research interests with its valuable human resources auschwitz became an ideal laboratory for him rendering such actions institutionally possible in unprecedented fashion doctors and scientists were provided with unlimited access to what was now seen as raw material liberating them from the restraints of everyday practice and the conventional inhibitions of scientific progress and research it was here often seamlessly and sometimes just with a little difficulty that the line between the ordinary hippocratic doctor and mass murder was crossed mengele in particular though he was far from being alone reveled in the culture that had been created in auschwitz in the opportunities and power it gave him he saw himself as engaged in a putatively cutting-edge scientific endeavor he was quite correct when a remarkable letter to his son he declared that he had not invented auschwitz it already existed but it was in its unparalleled enabling culture that mengele realized himself and as robert j lifton has put it his actions so well articulated the camp's essence throughout the post-war years he expressed no remorse and remained either oblivious to or rationalized the enormity of his crimes he remained a convinced nazi and when pushed he resorted to the time-warned justification that he had to do his duty and simply carry out orders as he told his son rolf he had never harmed anyone personally in any case he argued he couldn't really help anyone on the planet and this i quote his words on the platform for instance what was i to do when the half dead and infected people arrived my job was to clarify only those able to work and those unable to work in fact his son reports mengele argued that he had saved the lives of thousands of people in that way he hadn't ordered the extermination and wasn't personally responsible also he argued the twins upon whom he did research owed their lives to him i hope you get the the irony and the the problematic nature of these words now what other strategies did these so-called ordinary doctors employ to adapt to the killings without defining themselves as murderers there is a clear psychological problem here there is no simple answer to this and the human capacity for rationalization i think we all know it's almost infinite some engaged in an interesting pretence of normality by signing false death certificates citing spurious illnesses others thought that behaving towards their victims with a degree of helplessness helpfulness and concern in a way mitigated their actions for others there was a certain pride in doing one's unpleasant duty but by staying decent by not enriching themselves but of course most importantly these conditions were not only rendered possible but for its practical practitioners imperative by a whole set of legitimizing ideological precepts at hand for physicians at auschwitz was an informing and authoritative and racial nazi vision one that combined combating and destroying enemies of the aryan race above all jews as we know this vision was a total vision one of destroying enemies and one that if you like induced positive steps to preserve and improve the german racial community it was a vision that seamlessly encouraged the corruption of medical ethics the denial of basic humanity and the practice of ruthless experimentation and medicalized killings one auschwitz nazi doctor fritz klein is said to have argued that these murders actually were meant to uphold the hippocratic oath of saving lives i quote i hope it's a bona fide quote but this is what the quote that i find of course i am a doctor and i want to preserve life out of respect for human life i would remove a gangrenous appendix from the diseased body the jew is the gangrenous appendix of the body of mankind now i don't want to go to argue that prior to the third ripe there were no precedents of this kind precedence of sterilization eugenics and medical experiments on hapless subjects hapless and helpless subjects particularly in the united states and in britain in addition from the 18th century on so-called racial science was a common practice and a belief system that liberals not only practiced but in a sense initiated these were amongst the multiple background building blocks prevalent throughout late 19th and early 20th century europe i'll get into that a bit later without them perhaps the nazi project would be less comprehensible there is this thick background informing what is happening later but as bernie and viperman have pointed out national socialist germany became the first state in world history whose official dogma and practice was a racist biomedical vision this presented medical personnel with many new career opportunities relative to other professional groups from the beginning doctors were heavily over-represented in the nazi party they were actively involved in mass murder at all levels as battalion physicians in the east instructing soldiers on the most effective modes of face-to-face killings as architects and virtually the sole practitioners of the sterilization and euthanasia programs and ultimately as we've just heard as key figures at auschwitz valtterd the nazi agrarian ideologist put it this way a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at its center doctors health workers and biological researchers were thus essential to this breeding enterprise for this was a vision and a program characterized i think this is important by a variety of interlinked measures of inclusion and exclusion there were so-called positive aspects of this program typified by various social welfare programs for the folks command shaft the philo generative labensborne program whose goal was raising the birth rate of pure aryan children and providing welfare to its unmarried mothers and mediating adoption of these children by healthy racially pure parents especially ss members similarly himmler's on an ebay ss institution was devoted to the task of promoting superior aryan race doctrine and policy but together with these positive again in quotes and inclusive policies went a series of increasingly radicalized measures purging both abnormal unwanted degenerate and enemy elements total extermination as we all know was reserved only for the jews and quite obviously anti-semitism plays a central indispensable part here an obvious point but i must keep that in mind but it existed within a general eugenic biopolitical framework defined both by its combined regenerative and radically exclusionary and murderous impulses it's this interlinking an entire administrative political and medical framework was set up either to police persecute or mod murder those considered to be degenerate elements within germany in varying ways and jews apart asocials criminals and vagrants roma and cinti mental patients homosexuals were targeted outside of germany the grandiose envisaged shifting 31 million non-germans across eastern europe both to get rid of inferior people but also to facilitate resettlement of folks deutsche as lifton again put it the nazi project was not so much a social darwinist project as a vision of social control over the evolutionary process over the biological future and the medicalization of killing was its very essence this putative massive program of public hygiene of so-called purification and interconnected nullification had numerous faces between 1934 and the beginning of the war the nazis undertook a program of compulsory stellarization performed on about 350 000 per putatively hereditary ill germans 0.5 percent of the population this was a program administered by doctors nurses pharmacists research scientists the same applies to to the t4 euthanasia program the so-called destruction of life not worthy of life life not worthy of life which took place between october 39 and august 41 and took the lives of about 19 93 000 so-called handicapped people and i must say here just to make one point in terms of the internal program of euthanasia there was internal german opposition when it came to what was happening in eastern europe that was barely visible in fact popular pressure in germany was supposed to stop the euthanasia program what in fact happened is that many of the medical functionaries and technicians went from germany and were relocated to the east and were central functionaries in the holocaust you must remember that initially the einsatzgruffen in the framework of axion reinhardt were told not just to kill jews and partisans but also roma and sinti and patience generally in mental asylum it all began in a walkway hospital where gas installations were first used on mental patients and then applied on jews in the death camps so what i'm arguing i'm coming to something i think is more important than this mechanized mass murder was really a continuation of eugenically based ideas of ridding society of its gener degenerate and parasitic elements the shora incarnated a fusion of radical anti-semitism with the medically perverted ethos of the euthanasia program of course there was nothing inevitable about this program after all in the u.s during the 20s and 30s some 30 000 people were forcibly sterilized for eugenic reasons but it didn't culminate in mass extermination and ever more radical bio anti-semite as jews as infectious agents of decomposition was of course the main driving force behind this already in a letter from 1919 september very early hitler wrote that the jews i quote are the racial tuberculosis of the peoples always the discourse nazi discourse here is on health and disease later comparing himself to robert koch on july the 10th 1941 hitler declared i feel that i am like robert koch in politics he discovered the bacillus and therefore ushered medical science onto new paths i discovered the jew as the bacillus and as the fermenting agent of all social decomposition a year later he said the discovery of the jewish virus again the language is that of public hygiene of health and disease the discovery of the jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world now there are multiple ways in which this could be rationalized um what i want to suggest here and it's not often enough noted that the construction of the nazi stereotype of the jew was intimately linked medically and metaphorically to matters of virulent and transmissible disease this operated on numerous level always touching on and triggering the most powerful of emotions and the most powerful emotions surely is discussed at a meta level hitler portrayed the jew as an essentially diseased organ of the german body politic one that had to be removed to purify cure or save the nation it figured this notion of the jewish disease in its extreme propaganda many of you i know will have seen the film de ebigaiuda from 1940 there all the medical stereotypes of disgust were brought to play this is how the notion of jews as parasites as bacillus was resonated jews inhabited ghettos that were dirty and infested by vermin indeed pictures of ghetto jews were juxtaposed with images of rats as rats were the vermin of the animal kingdom jews were vermin of the human race and were said to spread disease and corruption of course cordoning off the word warsaw ghetto as an infected area and these ensuing impossible conditions of poverty starvation and misery created precisely the stereotype that they had wanted this extern this image increasingly made their extermination easier and a necessary matter of public and moral hygiene don't forget that prior to their use on human victims gas was used on rats parenthetically the film made it clear that jews were even more insidious than rats for rats unlike rats they had an uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into and poison their human hosts now of course the nazis had at their disposal centuries of anti-jewish prejudice particularly is a kind of disease upon which uh to build now i want to just say one one thing in between this image of the jew is diseased was so widespread that even some highly intelligent self-rejecting jews similarly internalized this belief i want to quote from the diary of none other than ludwig von wittgenstein who in 1931 wrote that he experienced jews i quote as a sort of disease and an anomaly and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life and no one wants to speak of a disease as if it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes even painful ones mass murder and genocide then didn't come out of nowhere and so what i want to do in the remaining minutes is to identify the deeper building blocks other than anti-semitism that render these atrocities not inevitable but thinkable you have to get first to the question how did the thing become thinkable conceivable it's a remarkably difficult task one that historians and others will continue to argue and struggle perhaps forever so i just want to limit myself to some of the prevalent 19th century discourses on public hygiene health illness and medicine and how that entered into the equation and my phone is ringing so i'll just switch it off so numerous streams can be identified they're separate and sometimes they're melded together even if you just take the social darwinian notion what is the social social darwinian imperative it's called the survival of the fittest so it's un the underlying paradigm is that of health the the healthy of the fitter and strength in a world built upon inevitable biological and ultimate existential conflict you'll excuse me if i bring in a great philosopher but who is problematic in many ways his name was friedrich nietzsche nietzsche provided a suitably selected reservoir of medical bioeugenic advice in pursuit of his project of what he called a re-naturalizing great health and great politics i quote from the genealogy of morals the sick man's greatest danger not the evil other are the danger not the beasts of prey the biblical probe prohibition thou shalt not kill is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadence one must tell decadence thou shalt not procreate life recognizes no solidarity no equal rights between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism one must excise the latter or the whole will perish sympathy for decadence equal rights for the ill-constituted that would be the profoundest immorality immorality that would be anti-nature itself as morality for those so inclined this laban's philosophy that is to say putting life healthy life even irrational life at the center prepared i believe a consciousness that excluded nothing including unimaginable atrocities carried out on a gigantic order the following from echo homo possesses an uncanny resonance for those of us who know what happened under the nazis i quote let us look ahead a century and view the case that my attempt to assassinate two million two millennia of anti-nature and human disfiguration has succeeded that new party of life which would take the greatest of all tasks into its hands the higher breeding of humanity including the merciless extermination of everything degenerating and parasitic would make possible again that excess of life on earth from which the dionysian state will grow again and i know nietzsche can be interpreted in multiple ways but how do you deal with what he says in one place he says wonderful things about the jews but he also says the jews were the most catastrophic people of world history i quote they have radically falsified all nature all naturalness all reality of the whole inner world as the outer out of themselves they created a counter concept to natural conditions they turned religion cult morality psychology into an incurable contradiction to natural values by their after effect they have made my mankind thoroughly false but of course in one way or another nietzsche fitted into a far wider biocultural concept that was rife through 19th and early 20th century europe and what was this this was the discourse which was eugenic phrenological physionomic racial and the psychiatric discourse called degeneration i stress this because so many aspects of nazi policy were based on course conceptions that for years had been made palatable to large publics and were then later taken and radicalized to an extreme keep in mind that apart from culture critics it was above all medical doctors psychiatrists racist theoreticians anthropologists and biological researchers who pursued this discourse called degeneration science and medicine were intricately intertwined with social cultural and political matters given the authoring this is an important point given the authority in ever more secularized societies doctors psychiatrists and public hygiene officials were increasingly regarded as custodians not just of medicine but of morality and normative behavior it was doctors psychiatrists social workers public health officials who decided i have defined those who were healthy and those who were sick or degenerate those who were normal or abnormal those who were sane or inside or insane those who were insiders or outsiders there is always a powerful linked if sometimes implicit connection between health aesthetics and morals between the ideal what is strong beautiful healthy and living in harmony and its opposite the anti-types in this way a racialized concept of health seamlessly justified anti-semitism and plans for terror territorial expansion but what i'm going to say now is also a little controversial these conceptions also fitted into bourgeois notions of productive work order cleanliness aesthetics and manly self-control it's no accident as my teacher george moss has argued that all victims of nazism represented the antitypes the very opposite of these defining bourgeois categories of normalcy and abnormalcy beauty and ugliness energy and idleness manly control and sexual perversion hard work versus nervous mobility and dishonest economic behavior nazi atrocities he argued were expressions of middle class men seeking to maintain the values of manliness cleanliness order hard work honesty against those outsider groups deemed to desecrate those values those bourgeois values who were these outsiders clearly not bourgeois they were the asocials the misfits the vagrants the gypsies or the roma and the center homosexuals the insane the mentally and physically deficient and of course the jews all made to embody the opposite of these norm-setting standards and became in varying degrees of cruelty and thoroughness victims of the nazi biological project the jews as we've straightforward stressword at extreme edge it's extra animus what singled them out was the powerful strand of anti-semitism clear now i i think there's great deal of truth to that but i would also qualify that notion because if the nazis embodied bourgeois morality they also transcended and rebelled against it holocaust killings and other atrocities demanded actions that went way beyond conventional bourgeois forms and norms a kind of niche and deeply transgressive leap that combined ideology with what saul friedlander has called rausch a form of dionysian ecstasy of blood had to take place but that's just my my my issue so before i end and i will end short very shortly i want us to consider a broader issue um it's quite clear that the role played by doctors uh in in this project uh i think i've made the argument and i've also tried to show that this radicalization was interwoven with previous interrelated scientific cultural and political developments what i want to say here however is is a different question when discussing nazi medical and scientific practices there is you this is there's usually the assumption that these constituted an anomaly an aberration within the history of science a good modern society we believe especially in this time of virus and the fame of dr anthony fauci a good modern society is integrally related to good science and good science must necessarily produce politically just and desirable structures bad science in the nazi case must have come from external influences rather than of the dynamics of science itself but is that really so a number of social histories of ancient medicine have indicated that the hippocratic oath was not really a universal norm but an idealized self-legitimizing representation of an emerging profession the distinction between healers and killers one researcher claims is not all that clear cut this is not a matter of doctors unintentional errors or impo incompetence but the problematic yet intimate relationship between healing and the dangers inherent to research or to the social role of medical institutions that incorporate not just healing but as i've suggested throughout this lecture all social control we know today for instance all kinds of problematic experiments continue to be done often without the subject's full understanding of the nature and dangers of the experiments perhaps that's why there's so much skepticism about the vaccine today these typically usually are carried out on vulnerable populations such as prisoners soldiers in armies black and poor populations i'm not for one moment claiming that nazi medicine was in any way normal i hope i've made clear its monstrous nature but what emerges from this analysis is that in particular sociohistorical contexts the interaction between science ambitious doctors and researchers and ideologically driven state power in such a context terrible crimes can ensue science is not a static essence with a fixed good or neutral norm but one which while it embodies an inbuilt form of rationality is also a process an activity that is produced in different ways in different contexts one researcher beer jolie puts it this way we need to be aware of the mechanism through which science and power interact modify and legitimize each other it was after all the assumption that racial hygiene was scientific that lent legitimacy to the experiments the eugenics the euthanasia the sterilization and even the genocide now curiosity is the bread and butter of scientific inquiry and human beings by definition have always been the subjects or the objects of the medical and life sciences even jewish prisoner doctors and scientists variously conducted investigations in the camps and ghettos for instance the psychologist victor frankl and bruno bettelheim later became famous for their observations of behavior under extreme conditions ghetto doctors in poland jewish ghetto doctors in poland systematically stuck studied the effects of starvation on populations and alfred gilbert dreyfus a french underground doctor a relative to the famous dreyfus who was taken to saxonhausen dhaka and other camps he did research on premature aging in the camps so dennis returned to mengele all the evidence we have points to the fact that he saw himself however distortedly as engaged in a putatively cutting-edge scientific endeavor advancing the sum of human knowledge even if that entailed shocking true cruelty as one qualified prisoner the polish anthropologist dr teresa w put it mengele was absolutely capable of doing creative and appropriate scientific work mick lauschen easily i don't know if i'm pronouncing his name work correctly mengele's captive assistant exposed mangala's cruelty to his scientific methodology in fact he even respected his fanatic passion for scientific precision to make things even more ethically complicated and up to our own time take the case of eduard pernkopf's topographic anatomy of an this is reputed to be the best example of anatomical drawings in the world richer in detail and more vivid in color than any other it's no longer in print and the secondhand set of several volumes sell for thousands of dollars or pounds and yet few display it proudly in their clinics this is because the book's findings come from the bodies of hundreds of prisoners murdered by the nazis including gay men lesbians roma political dissidents and jews created by a team of artists representations of their bodies cut up and dissected are strewn over thousands of pages while its origins are ethically very problematic some perfectly respectable currently practicing surgeons find it literally indispensable for their work as rabbi yosef pollock a holocaust survivor and a professor of health law argues the book is the book is a moral enigma because it is derived from real evil but it can be used in the service of good subsequently translated into five languages thousands of copies have been sold across the world it's still being used by nerve surgeons the anatomical representations are surely accurate good science what is questionable are its ethics and its continued use poses a serious question morally as rabbi pollock concluded jewish authorities would allow the use of the images to save human lives at least let it be known though what the history of the atlas is so of course the fundamental question remains and has to do with the shift between scientific curiosity and cruelty and the retention or abandonment of ethical considerations last last paragraph in our deeply infected covert age i want to end on another contemporary and controversial note donald trump's open content for science is well known and deeply reprehensible i suspect that most of us breed the heavy sigh of relief when joe biden emphatically stated that as president he would determinedly follow the science this is patently preferable to trump's line but if this talk can teach us anything it is that science never operates as a pure and separate unworldly essence as david run simon recently pointed out things are more complicated than that max weber argued correctly that politics can never really follow the science and pretending that it can is where the trouble starts political decision making always has to rest on some kind of personal judgment there is no scientific manual telling leaders what to do and what not to do more to this point scientists aren't even well suited to making these decisions they argue the facts speak to themselves for themselves but they never do that's wishful thing facts alone cannot tell us what to do of course we need data but data doesn't dictate politics wherever politics claims scientific enterprise it leaves a vacuum for real politics to fill there will be inevitably be those who say that a higher value must be placed on personal freedom but that's not a scientific concept weber argued that there's nothing unarguable about science in politics even what we are going through today the much heralded vaccine as we see that's not a politically neutral problem decisions are presently having to be made and they are agonizing who will get it first will the vaccine be free or involve payment will it be more elites less third world countries what does one do with the people who refuse to take it all of these are current questions but at least it's a kind of great consolation for these are ethically driven political decisions in a complex time of pandemic very different from the transgressive ideological barbarities that have been the subject of this lecture thank you very much

Channel: Institute of Jewish Studies (University of Antwerp)

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Length: 57min 2sec (3422 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020