Science and the Swastika : Hitler's Biological Soldiers

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

[Music] [Applause] [Music] the glass woman was designed and built in Dresden in 1936 the transparent model demonstrated both the technological genius of its German creators and their desire to reveal the hidden mysteries of human biology the glass woman was exhibited around the world and came to symbolize the Nazi dream of perfecting the Aryan race through the application of science Nazi Germany was the first of the 20th century totalitarian regimes to co-opt scientists and medical practitioners the involvement of scientists in Nazi policies made it possible the Nazis were special in the way they use doctors because they assign them a biological mission of purifying Germany the world and in that sense the doctors were much more central to the Nazi vision and that's why Hitler said at one point that the the medical profession is more important to the Nazi regime than almost any other by 1945 Germany was in ruins its leading doctors and scientists had fled or stood accused of crimes against humanity what had happened to science under the Nazis [Music] this is the story of the Nazis favorite science human biology the German hygiene museum was one of many renowned scientific institutes which enthusiastically cooperated with the Nazi dictatorship The Dresden Museum played an active role in the Third Reich propaganda machine it made films which told German citizens that it was their duty to become the fittest nation on earth noise - Roger Houdini Museum Montana namitha yep Alan Hodgkin awesome for album defeat does he do his own pain - indeed aliens filmed and cannon listen government funding for biology research increased tenfold during the Nazi years doctors soon made up the largest professional group amongst SS officers the doctors in turn became instruments of state oppression long before Hitler waged a war on the world German physicians went into battle against their fellow citizens Hitler the up sister it was hitless intention to breed a new absolutely cure race of Nordic Germans always blue-eyed and blond as possible and a one flee assume that many doctors were somehow inspired by this idea in 20 long was supporting it and anyone who did not fit into this grand scheme had to be destroyed Oh lifted even prevented from of coming into being destroyed fine long gone [Music] the Nazi biological revolution was not forced by politicians on to scientists rather an elite group of eugenicist had inspired it in the first place eugenics was at the heart of Nazi policy like gene therapy today the science of eugenics proposed that by selective breeding mankind could wipe out diseases and produce a fitter people eugenics was an enthusiasm which swept through scientific and medical circles from 1900 onwards and it was global in the sense that they were eugenic enthusiasts in North America in India Japan China as well as most of Western Europe and it was also entirely cross-party political in the sense that there are as many left-wing eugenicist s-- as they were right in the genesis eugenics greatest champion in the 1920s was the wealthy amateur research scientist dr. alfred plorts he gave eugenics a new name and a racial aspect when he introduced the new science to Germany the armor father had this Watterson again and my father invented the term racial hygiene because he believed that the race this eternal life stream of mankind that this needed a certain hygiene that in order that all the defects in humanity's genetic inheritance would not go on reproducing themselves does it Dini vitae fermion ironically it was the American eugenicist who came up with a radical solution forced sterilization in over 20 states sterilization was legalized by the beginning of the 1930s some 15,000 Americans had been sterilized in prisons and mental institutions German u Genesis looked on in envy adult Hitler read the most fashionable German eugenics textbook while he was writing his political manifesto Mein Kampf the German state must see to it that only the healthy beget children here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future it must put the most modern medical means in the service of this insight those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children his whole political vision was part of a biological truth that biological truth was that the Nordic race had been suppressed and rendered ill by inferior races and notably the Jews it had to be released from the influence of the Jews and other inferior races in order to become strong benefit itself and benefit the world when the Nazis came to power in 1933 they set their sights on left-wingers and Jews who were systematically purged from all areas of state employment from March 1933 no one the regime defined as Jewish could work in schools universities or state-run hospitals many young scientists who came from Jewish families decided to leave one of them was Max Perutz it was the anti-semitic legislation in Germany which came as a shock at the university as a tree shirking student here and that only the risk of your life because it was infested by the Nazi gangs one day that Nazi gang came into this seminar and picked out and in the Queen will it handicapped Jewish student and beat him up [Music] Germany at that time was the leading scientific country and had been for some years particularly in subjects like chemistry and medicine if you want to be a medical research worker you had to go and study after qualified in Germany just like nowadays you nearly always have to go and study in America for all time there's a student I went Frankfurt and that was a very interesting experience because it was after the Nazis had come to power and I went to one lecture given by radio therapist who was an active Nazi and he gave us a lecture on radio therapy and he showed a slide which is stuck in my memory ever since because I think it was just about the first thing I can remember having seen he showed a slide of x-rays damaging cancer cells and the x-rays were illustrated by having Nazi storm troopers to have seated on the Ray and the cancer cells would use and I think this is about the most powerful night we certainly know foul he had overheard the lecture the effect of anti-semitic legislation was immediate and dramatic in Berlin University 42% of the doctors were Jewish according to the Nazi definition so 42% of doctors were kicked out of the professors were kicked out and and as a Centon they're kicked out and this meant that of course for the junior people there was a tremendous chance of getting a job yeah 42% you know and and of course some of them being also the whole full medical faculty rejuvenated became young again and that is of course always wonderful if you can say no it finally all these old parcels out and we are now a young faculty and so on and so on I think the physicians joined the Nazi party's a very large scale because of several reasons most importance are they came back from the first world war they were unemployed and there was a high rate of unemployment amongst physicians noticed were promising jobs they were promising posts in clinics for free physicians in the town in the cities dr. Eric Hassler is one of the few living witnesses to that time he was a 34 year old junior pediatrician in Leipzig in 1933 an active Nazi Party member Hessler suddenly found himself promoted to head his department when his Jewish colleagues were forced to emigrate he easily the Leipzig Children's Clinic was simply known as the Jews clinic and I must stress that in those days on average every other pediatrician was a Jew I'm not saying they were bad doctors but they took the jobs it was a struggle for jobs a struggle for existence if the scientist had had united and said that we are not going to accept the drops of those who have been kicked out then the whole thing would not have worked but it's completely impossible because only one person did that and nobody had the cart nobody else at the college and and the decency to do so everybody else was just enchanted you know it was kind of bad taste but still you know you do it here and you get this wonderful job so why should you do it here taking the jobs of their Jewish colleagues was just the beginning of a pact between German doctors and the Nazi regime it was the first step in a journey that would turn physicians into killers [Music] after the 1933 takeover by the Nazis anyone in Germany who worked in the state-run medical system had to become a member of one of several Nazi health organizations these organizations excluded anyone of Jewish descent Hitler's propaganda claimed that Jewish people threatened the health of the Aryan population for scientific evidence he looked to eugenics or racial hygiene Hitler's basic that I was anti-semitism but of course in this continent respect the scientists the biologists were very useful they were no particular anti-semitic but they could give them reasons for anti-semitism and they got all the money and all the support from the Nazis because by pushing a racial hygiene they also pushed anti-semitism and gave anti-semitism what they claimed and the scientific basis one of the strongest propagandists for racial hygiene was dr. Alfred plorts as a Nordic supremacist he agreed fully with Hitler a vine and hanger Durga banished NASA our my father was a supporter of the Germanic race the ones for example when I was a little boy he took the globe and said to me look here this is where law and order and modern civilization predominate deal and a stallion and he showed me the countries on the globe from New Zealand Australia northern Italy northern France England Scandinavia Germany and North America had that really kept me off shore and of course as an impressionable young man that made me feel that the Nordic race the Germanic race was the salt of the earth Shawn decides desire the day scientists embraced a Nazi regime of what they would call the national socialist revolution they were enthusiastic supporters because they saw as some of them indicated publicly in Hitler his movement the first politicians who fully understood and supported eugenics financed by the Nazi regime eugenicist sat out on a nationwide mission their aim was to record scientifically what exactly it was about the so-called Aryan people which made them so superior racial hygiene had become definitively racist germán eugenicist s-- wanted to prove that other people such as Jews and Gypsies were statistically more prone to disease clearly there are hereditary diseases I mean this isn't fiction what is fiction is the notion that there is an Aryan race with its roots deep in ancient history which is superior in its qualities to other races and it's completely bogus to say that this superiority is being eroded by the racial tuberculosis of intermarriage or sexual relations with other races inferior races particularly the Jews new laws forbade relationships between Jews or gypsies and Arian Germans local government forced gypsies into makeshift camps but these minority populations were not the only targets of racial hygiene in Nazi Germany the so-called Aryan population was investigated for hereditary diseases a vast research campaign took place led by one of Germany's top genetic psychiatrists dr. Ernst Rudin Rudin benefited from the Nazi regimes passion for eugenics as his daughter remembers he hoped for a financial support and after 1933 additional money came from the Ministry of Interior from the German emergency font of sciences and from the Reichskanzler and all in all the region had much more money after history for his disposal after 1933 than before [Music] and sorry she's late his gift to the his own time Tegra zone Plan B was absently in remission a plow from Arabic and fanatical volume 50 kazoom had K he and perform there was a positive side to eugenics which Nazi propaganda was keen to stress the healthy people would be the only ones fit to breed the master race a national campaign was put into place to screen the population for disease I deployed skeleton solid for invention she uncommon Nana gave infect suits fella fish cider here country money was poured into a nationwide health program the aim was to breed a new generation of super fit Germans Esther father on the is idling Easter on the motors or Langevin Mary Sue stealin miss Dianna's on the latest film D'Amato there were large financial rewards for women who had lots of children and there were fines for childless couples the result was a baby boom during Hitler's first 5 years in power the Health Ministry boasted that 1 million more children had been born because of the Nazi breeding policy one of the images I always have in my mind when I think of Nazi Germany is of girls in swimsuits throwing beach balls around or jumping through hoops this is not some great Nazi health club everybody has just joined you are doing it to make sure that the women produce as many Hitler users as possible are are fit reproductive machines but it was not enough just to increase the birthrate hand in hand with the baby boom went what was known as negative eugenics doctors began to play God instructing their patients on correct genetic policy the iron ore nizamiah who meet Adam delete the mention Stanley specimen Suzanne please leave one stock kinder hub out when king Gazette's man developed a meaty thousand son Allison designed via for the mention here wen Tao is the swifty that's man lana Carafa awesome interact isn't hype ruthless propaganda films made it look as if people could still make choices in reality doctors exercised more power over their patients than ever before new Nazi legislation meant doctors could force sterilization on their patients Germany's leading eugenicist dr. Ernst Troodon welcomed the new law first he was absolutely in favor of voluntary sterilization but then in the course of time but it took a long time he got convinced that this wouldn't work and he supported a compulsory sterilization the law for the Prevention of genetically ill offspring was passed in July 1933 to put the law into practice the authorities used evidence of inherited disease which had been gathered by the eugenicist s-- the methodology used by the eugenicists was certainly acceptable in its time and probably as well as could be done on the biological level their conclusions could not really be disproved until the later 1930s and especially after World War Two was the discovery of DNA and other advances in the hard sciences of genetics from now on confidential medical files could be used against every German citizen many of them had reason to fear a visit to their GP on the shores of the lake 90 kilometers north of Berlin is an hour band [Music] indistinct a Vulcan Kirk knows it's dark history in 1935 the Fuehrer school or the leadership school was opened here by Hitler's right-hand man Rudolf Hess thousands of Nazi doctors midwives and nurses were trained here on special secret courses z-coordinate v Alisa deathly agging in men's a Nazi war day couldn't simply volunteer for these courses the NSDAP they were specially selected by the Nazi Party and by the SS organizations and especially by the party health organizations in formats yone it is very telling that all the information about these training courses was published in all German doctors journals until the Year 1937 funda from then on nothing more was reported about the content of these courses only the dates and the closer it came to war the more secretive everything became here buzu your home is full of ordered us Alice died lifting the Nazis built a new campus complete with lecture halls laboratory and dormitories doctors nurses and midwives were sent to the leadership school here they were trained to perform some of the worst crimes in Nazi medical history some went on to carry out experiments on human beings in the concentration camps the lessons taught at alt razor were hidden from the German people they were told it was a center for training sports doctors and an Olympic Stadium was built as part of that deception physicians were trained in leadership one of the places were where this took place it was al Drazen our campus for the education of physicians more than 30 thousands in leadership as a physician in my opinion any education in leadership for physicians is combined with a lack of humanity the doctors and nurses who attended the leadership school had to prove their own athletic superiority on the sports field but more importantly in their genetics classes they were indoctrinated with the Nazi idea that the Jews were a diseased people and that the disabled were lives unworthy of life doctors were taught how to sterilize and eradicate the unfit the medical profession had been widely trusted in the past but Nazi doctors and nurses abandoned the Hippocratic oath first do no harm I don't get the feeling that ethical training was particularly important to any any form of medical education and that it was a type of bolt-on wishy washy extra and that once these people were actually actually practicing medicine the Hippocratic oath was just something that you hung on the wall rather like your medical degree certificates and didn't pay much attention to it at al tracer German doctors embraced their new role they were taking part in a great social experiment they were to become the creators of the master race you've got to look at Nazi behavior in the medical profession and elsewhere as a mixture of idealism and terror we know about the terror we often neglect the elements of idealism we don't like to hear about that but the Nazis held out to German doctors the idea of being biological soldiers cultivators of the genes physicians to the folk all these being very ideal the idea of doing great work for the people in general that transcends the selfishness of a one-to-one doctor-patient relationship doctors cease being just concerned with with a sick individual he might not actually be able to do very much for and you take on this grand redemptive racial biological mission where you are part of the elite expert group the regime was offering the doctors the chance to become godlike figures presiding over the nation's genetic health [Music] after the war doctors and scientists pleaded that they were only following orders dr. Kirk does not accept these excuses isn't either of it's often claimed today that it was the National Socialists who forced or persuaded German doctors to take up genetic biology and racial hygiene that is simply untrue it was not the doctors who were persuaded by the National Socialists it was the other way round [Music] under the Nazis 1933 sterilization law German doctors had the power to hunt down those they believed to be genetically unfit they made films to warn the public to be on the alert for hereditary illnesses in their family for nine kingdoms in Europe via ghost Govardhan spy a human when time each in star encode cinta Ananda and if 3d field vehicle his output is Deborah her long ago they wanted to seek out abnormality wherever it might be in one of the most grotesque examples is that the school children were asked to draw up trees of their own family members family trees and the teachers would then be able to identify the fact that there was something wrong would say uncle fritz uncle fritz would then be reported to public health authorities who might well put in an application to have uncle fritz compulsorily sterilized via cleans II arrived EFI Hindon de famille solid Sharma V isn't solid in suka missed me and even some gesund ant in the name even karma funk is an livestock Yoga Center in Stein who - meter which dusty not zone for grains and lows and eland parable where father line is there is teacher who to piss the device in desert loiter bother you my father was a utopian idealist like most people of that kind and you do need utopians to get things done at all at any rate my father must have thought in the end thank God at least a few hundred thousand idiots and people who would never have been able to find happiness in their lives because they are inadequate would at least be prevented from reproducing themselves and bringing new inadequate children into this world [Music] we have I'm dish and a burner yogurt actually I had a very nice childhood you know it's not there were so many nice children in our street with whom I got on very well and we had a lot of fun playing together and really until the Nazi period began and it was all very nice then when in 1933 the Hitler Youth was formed all of a sudden all of my friends vanished they all joined the Hitler Youth one the other in dear Hitler you were young and suddenly I was very alone tamesha a lion when Ralph Torme was 16 his teacher reported him to the genetic health authorities he had been born with deformed hands and feet which made him a candidate for sterilization his parents were ordered to bring their son to the hereditary health court in the Torme's hometown in July 1937 they brought all their family's health records with them for the sterilization hearing in the courthouse yeah this is goodbye de frontier here and this very building the formal hearing took place that was a state medical official during the Nazi years no one in my family had a similar disability like me neither on my mother's nor my father's side but nevertheless the medical official insisted that my condition was a hereditary illness so the outcome was that had to be sterilized it was the ability of the una Roth tome had been reported on by doctors and sentenced by doctors doctors not only acted as medical experts but the Nazi legal system turned them into all-powerful judges physicians sentenced their fellow citizens to sterilization in over a hundred such courts in Germany in Germany to make it a fast procedure not to burden the court system special courts were established so-called health courts staffed not by judges but by a majority of physicians however they were of course a camouflage for what really was a state mandated medical invasion on the privacy and the person of those condemned to sterilization it was to be more than 60 years before Roth Torme found a doctor who confirmed the injustice of the Nazis sterilization court habeas people don't know later on after Germany's reunification the doctors certified that my condition is never hereditary it's a mutation gene but it's never hereditary as a geneticist dr. Ernst Rudin knew that other factors could cause birth defects he was aware that he did not always have enough evidence to justify sterilization on genetic grounds my father did know that heredity was not completely clear and most of the illnesses with a hereditary factor did not depend on a single gene be it recessive or dominant but on a combination four of genes and environmental factors a multifactorial but he thought there is no time to wait till more know which is available one must act he was a very active man and so he thought it's time for action as an expert witness and judge in the higher genetic health courts dr. Ernst Rudin was personally responsible for the sterilization of almost 500 people they thought the ends justified the means and that they would be able to improve the genetic health of the German race as they saw it and therefore they were prepared to ignore what evidence there was and there was quite a lot of it that what they were doing had no scientific basis whatsoever Germany under the Nazi regime with a kind of Teutonic determination that inconsistency that was the hallmark in many ways of the Nazi regime sterilized almost 300 thousands of their fellow German citizens [Music] sterilization was carried out in Germany on a huge scale in every medical school surgical sterilization was taught as a standard procedure medical students watched films of operations and were taught to perform vasectomies and tubal ligations as if they were just routine surgery [Music] I think most catastrophic result of these Nazi eugenic policies was first of all that about 3,000 people died as a result of post-operative complications having been sterilized secondly that an enormous amount of psychological damage was done to the people who were sterilized and thirdly in perhaps not least that it compromised the medical profession and that nobody was going to trust their own doctors at the time was the death rate quite high amongst women who were sterilized was it patterned butter they say no it wasn't very high but at best I could look it up but at present I can't tell you how it was it was right if now I should make an estimate about perhaps 2 percent at least but I think it was lower [Music] the Nazis aim was to wipe out all inherited physical diseases such as the ones portrayed in these medical casts of real-life victims but increasingly Nazi doctors also targeted psychiatric patients and people with learning difficulties this resulted in fierce arguments among the Nazi elite over what they called hereditary feeble-mindedness since the decision to sterilize people was often made on the basis of crude intelligent tests Nazi Party leaders from some of the backward rural areas worried that their brown shirted farm boys would not be able to answer questions like who was Christopher Columbus and therefore might actually be sterilized and as a result of that on the quiet Nazi Party members were exempted from these sterilization measures sterilization was authorized for such conditions as schizophrenia alcoholism manic depression and feeble-mindedness geneticists had no scientific evidence that these conditions were hereditary and the day they applied it to diseases which are not clearly transmitted passingly genes such as schizophrenia I mean the child of a schizophrenic patient was not necessarily a schizophrenia but doctors had long given up requiring hereditary evidence increasingly they authorized compulsory sterilization on purely social or moral grounds there are schizophrenic patients especially who urgently want a child because they think their marriage would be better when a child was there and who thought as a child would give them new new toy in life and improvement and then the result was the marriage was rotten anyway and the patient was very unhappy because the child was loud and needed help and patience and support and they are very often they were unable to give some financial support to the family and so after some time many patients who had wished the child did regret it there was no justification whatever for sterilizing these people and I think geneticist so medical people in Germany must have misled the regime in claiming that this is really three conditions the sterilization law had been based on the idea that diseases are passed directly from one generation to the next but even by the 1930s German geneticists were aware that many conditions like dormant for generations to eradicate them all would take centuries this was very known and in fact even hit on you if you read mine Kumpf you find the statement that this program will take at least 600 years to to to to give a result but I think again this the sounds I may sound terribly attractive you are you are now involved in a project which is really a huge project which we which goes down in the next the next thousand years yeah wonderful was your father right that sterilization would improve the human race was he correct but if it had gone on long enough that's very difficult to answer I think at that time he was right in some way because there were no safe means of contraception abortion was forbidden and so this was the only mean to prevent the birth of of disabled persons I'm quite convinced that they knew that it was on a very shaky scientific footing as was pointed out at the time by very very distinguished scientists in several countries but they pressed ahead regardless because essentially they were taking making a gigantic leap of faith but selective breeding alone was not achieving the obliteration of the disabled from the German population Hitler turned to another idea proposed by German eugenicist s' the notion that in the name of genetic perfection it was right to kill the sick and the disabled Hitler had been talking about killing chronically ill people in his inner circle since about 1935 sometime in late 38 or early 39 Hitler and call brought his favorite doctor who became really the head of Nazi medicine came upon the idea of inviting inviting requests for mercy deaths Hitler entrusted Karl Brandt his personal physician in close confidant to handle the hunt for a suitable test case [Music] among the babies at the Leipzig clinic there was a possible candidate in the case of the dour baby tapped into their lap in 1938 the parents were as members of the SS and staunch party people who shall was indeed born with severe disabilities and was housed in the Leipzig clinic dr. Eric Hassler was working as a pediatrician at the Leipzig clinic when the deformed baby was born oh it happened during a home birth a child was born without limbs the mother was so horrified when the Midwife held the child up that she screamed the child has no arms and no legs so the father took the child from the Midwife took it to the Children's Hospital and said we will not take the child back under any circumstances so now it was in the hospital [Music] the Chancellor he brought this case to Hitler who send his traveling physician car brand to Lightsey to investigate and if he is convinced of the seriousness of the disability to order the killing of the baby [Music] the discussion over what to do with the child was top secret but doctor Hassler was the deputy chief of the hospital he knows what happened when dr. Brandt saw the baby when there is he and as soon as Brandt had seen the child he left word for the chief surgeon that whatever measures he took there would not be any court proceedings so Hitler gave the permission to perform euthanasia but it did not give a written order the deformed baby was murdered in July 1939 dr. Karl Brandt was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1948 it's a big jump from trying to get rid of all bad genes through sterilization so that the bad genes wouldn't be reproduced between that and actually killing people because they're incurable are too much of a burden on society economically it was a jump that doctors were willing to make by 1939 German physicians had made the remarkable transition from healers to killers murdering the disabled was rationalized by the Nazis as a way to eliminate what they called lives unworthy of life perhaps it's difficult for people in Liberal Britain or North America in the 21st century to understand this because we're brought up to think that one must care for people who are sick or distressed or homeless or whatever but the doctors and nurses were operating within an altered moral framework where they were being told that these groups of people were essentially despicable and perhaps not fully human and that it was entirely right to feel disgust towards them who insisted easy but fundamentally euthanasia is murder but in Grave times of need exceptional individual cases can occur and this I cannot condemn besides it's like this total idiot children can't be educated they don't develop they don't know any words they only scream they have to be force-fed somehow and they'll never be clean they are often doubly incontinent sometimes they smell urine and feces around if they are not tied down anything you give to them as a toy they'll tear apart these children are idiots that's the kind of children we are talking about inglis vom almost 5000 children were killed by German medical staff during the war years although Hitler never passed a law regarding the so called child euthanasia he personally authorized a committee to decide which children should be killed every doctor and Midwife in the country had to notify hitler's committee when a disabled child was born the killing program was secretly extended to adults the Nazis built the first gas chambers in Germany to murder almost 100,000 disabled people and psychiatric patients eugenics which had begun as a utopian scientists promise to improve all of mankind became the Nazis rationale for mass murder the gassing technology would later be used to kill millions in the death camps [Music] you [Music] you [Music]

Info

Channel: David DM

Views: 1,426,485

Rating: 4.4079909 out of 5

Keywords: nazism, hitler, shoah, reich, experiment, holocaust, germany, jews, sterilization, eugenics

Id: pQAdwjYc_VE

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2013

Reddit Comments

Conspiracy bullshit

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Flak-Fire88 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=763anDaYF1U

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/5ept 📅︎︎ Aug 04 2019 🗫︎ replies