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A NEW DOCUMENTARY about the scale of Nazi medical experiments has reopened old wounds in France as one of the country’s leading universities investigates whether its stores still contain the remains of some Jewish victims.
Dr Michel Cymes, the star of a French television medical advice programme, believes that the remains of some of the 86 Jews tortured and mutilated by SS doctor August Hirt may still be in the anatomy collection of the University of Strasbourg.
He first raised the theory in his 2015 bestseller, Hippocrates in Hell, and repeated the claim in a new film of the same name shown on French TV this week.
The documentary, which trended on Twitter after it was broadcast, raised awkward questions about how part of the “Jewish skeleton collection” Hirt assembled at the university during the war may have survived in its stores.
The remains of Jews on which Hirt tested mustard gas at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near the Alastian city were supposed to have been buried after it was liberated in 1944.
But after Cymes’ claims, the university is now conducting an inquiry using outside experts into the contents of 20 boxes found in its collection which bear Hirt’s name.
‘One of worst Nazi figures’
The Swiss-born anatomist was “one of the worst Nazi figures”, according to Dr Raphael Toledano, a specialist on Nazi medical experiments.
He was convinced that the Jewish race was on the point of extinction and wanted to study the skulls of “Judeo-Bolsheviks”.
Cymes, both of whose Polish-born grandfathers perished at Auschwitz, said he had little idea how extensive Nazi medical experiments had been until he started his own investigation.
“I knew about doctors like Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg and I thought they were two or three others like that, but then I discovered how vast the phenomenon was,” he told AFP.
His eyes were opened when he began looking in detail at the Nuremberg trials of 23 doctors which began in 1946, and in particular a postwar account of the Nazis’ activities by the French naval physician, Francois Bayle.
His now almost forgotten book was a “mine of information”, Cymes said. “He noted down everything he heard, it’s encyclopaedic, an enormous piece of work”.
When he came to write his own book Cymes said he tried to use his medical knowledge to “describe what the victims would have felt so that people would realise the suffering of these (human) guinea pigs”.
Ethics turned upside down
Nearly 70% of German doctors were members of the Nazi party, according to Cymes’ documentary.
From 1933 onwards when Hitler came to power, medical ethics “were turned upside down”, Cymes said. “The individual was nothing, the people was everything.”
The small number of doctors tried for war crimes at Nuremberg either worked in concentration camps or used prisoners for medical experiments of “unspeakable cruelty”, said Telford Taylor, the prosecutor at the trials.
Others took part in the “Aktion T4″ programme to “eliminate people were considered to carry hereditary illnesses”, said Sorbonne historian Johann Chapoutot, who reckons that between 70,000 and 200,000 died in the push between 1941 and 1945.
In the film, Cymes used testimony from experts such as Evelyne Shuster, of the University of Pennsylvania, and the surgeon and historian Yves Ternon from the University of Montpellier to show the scale of the cruelty and slaughter.
He concentrated on the atrocities committed by Karl Gebhardt, the personal physician of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and his assistant Dr Herta Oberheuser.
But he also noted how the head of the “Aktion T4″ programme, Viktor Brack, wanted to sterilise all Jews using X-rays, which he thought “be good value for money”, writing to Himmler that it could be “carried out on several thousand subjects in a very short time”.
While Sigmund Rascher, the SS doctor at the Dachau camp near Munich, tested how the body stood up to the cold and a lack of oxygen.
Cymes said that the documentary and the investigation into Hirt will not be the end of his inquiries.
“The subject is very personal for me and even though it is psychologically hard maybe I will continue digging for other films,” he said.
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Interesting that some of the arguments for abortion being legalized in this country has connotations around eliminating the possibility of children being born with conditions that society finds undesirable. Has anyone studied the pain of aborting an unborn on the unborn, or is this being also sanitized to make the procedure palatable for our comfortable society? The Nazis did it to the born, is society about to legalize doing it to the unborn in this country? It revolves around the right to life and the right to live.
@Micheal S. O’ Ceilleachair: If you did your research you’d there is no developed nervous system till week 23 which is why that’s a cut off point.
Big difference in the right to life of an independent sentient person and that of a foetus that is in a woman’s body affecting her physical, emotional and physiology wellbeing while using her circulatory and pulmonary systems.
@Ciara Ni Mhurchu: Just wondering Ciara, if a baby is born premature, requires an incubator and medical intervention to keep the baby alive would you be ok with the parents having a choice to kill the baby if they decided they no longer wanted it? I’m just trying to understand your point using that logic. So what you are saying is that the unborn has no value due to the level of dependency it has on the Mother? I’m not sure if your aware but all babies are still dependent on its mother when they are born. They may not rely on their circulatory and pulmonary systems when they are born but they still solely rely on the parents to survive.
Will the pain ever cease for the Jewish community, time and time again the past horrors rise from the shallow grave of nazi horrors.. Time to answer and end the endless questions, may they rest in peace
@David Dineen: only the jews? Slavs and Roma didn’t fare too well at the hands of the nazis, Armenians suffered greatly at the hands of the turks, Ukrainians under the Russians, even us in the mid 19th century at the hands of the British. All attempted genocides in Europe in recent history, but only the one perpetrated against the jews seems to exist in an oft referenced shallow grave, why is that?
@Liam Doyle: @Liam Doyle: Liam, you answered your own question but you’re too thick to see it. It’s because the regimes that carried out the atrocities, Turks, Russians and British, are still in power and control their history – and in particular how it is taught in school. Guess – go on Liam, try and guess – which regime fell and was held accountable? And the stories of atrocities keep coming out because no matter how deep the bones are buried, they eventually rise to the surface. You can read books about all this stuff – it’s called ‘history’.
@Fiona Brown: when I said Russians I was obviously referring to the soviets. When I said turks I was obviously referring to the ottomans. But I’m sorry, you were saying something about me being too stupid to realise that these regimes remain in power. Do they?
See what the Japanese did in Unit 731
@The Bull McCabe: yes, I remember when I first stumbled over this stuff. It was more unnerving than Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, Daleks, Cybermen and any other monsters you can think of, either mythical or actual, rolled into one. The Spanish Inquisition, even, would have been petrified. In all seriousness, I had to leave the light on to get to sleep after reading what went on in the “facility” – if that’s the right word, in Harbin, Manchuria. The real sting in the tail is the Americans letting the Japanese off with a slap or two on the wrist if they surrendered their findings on the phenomenon of “experimental surgery without anaesthetic.” And then set up the surviving directors in top level positions with “Green Cross” medical research. “The (good) doctor will see you now…”
These fine doctors must’ve been homeopathic Doctors surely?
Modern dive tables used by scuba divers have their origins in data that was captured by allied forces after the war and the data was a result of pressure tests on Jews, not by any means condoning what was done but it’s an example of how the atrocities have spread into society.
Didn’t know anything about the Natzweiler-Struthof camp until recently,a lot of history ignored.
Why anyone would want to align their beliefs with the s(um that committed such atrocities on other humans all in the name of national identity?
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