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SoSe 17: Medicine and Power: Medical Experiemts during World War II and Survivors' Memories

Sevasti Trubeta

Comments

Human experiments were not isolated to the Nazi era. Especially from the late 19th century onwards, they were conducted in diverse contexts, including colonialism and regimes of slavery. This period coincided with the takeover of medical expertise in which, as Nikolas Rose notes, “the human being was not only to be known, but to be the subject of calculated regimes of reform and transformation”. However, in the National Socialist regime and especially during WWII, human experiments reached an inflated extent when they were applied on a massive scale and justified by the state ideology. After a short introduction to provide the general context in which medicine operated as a powerful science with ethical ambivalences, the seminar will focus on human experiments during the Nazi era and WWII, encompassing as well the collaboration of German medical experts with their counterparts in other countries. This subject will be framed with regard to historiographical approaches, the research questions that have been raised, and the sources which have been used. The actors, their relationship to the power apparatus, and the remembrance of the experiments will occupy a central position. Besides secondary literature, the seminar will draw on the memoirs of witnesses, oral testimonies (Shoah Foundation Archives, accessible at the Free University) and public forms of remembering. Furthermore, the case studies to be discussed will be joined in thematic clusters, such as gender, i.e. women as perpetrators and/or victims of human experiments, and homosexuals; minorities, especially Roma and Jews; dwarfs; etc. A specific emphasis will be placed on the active involvement in the experiments of detained physicians and the contested memories of those who survived and were perceived either as witnesses and victims or as collaborators. close