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Use argument supported by evidence for how the body is a system of interacting subsystems composed of groups of cells.

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This standard is used to establish the connections between human body systems. Infectious disease is a great way to show how various systems of the body work together and study one of the toughest and most important body systems--the immune system. Students can learn about how various infectious diseases affect the body and how these diseases played a major role in the Holocaust. Epidemics of infectious disease ran rampant in the concentration camps due to poor conditions and treatment of prisoners. Epidemics outside of concentration camps also contributed to an "indirect extermination" of certain groups that were targeted by Nazis. Making this connection aids students in understanding science of the body and the horrific conditions of the Holocaust. This can lead into discussions of present-day healthcare access and social justice in terms of public health for marginalized groups across the world.

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This Hyperdoc can be used for remote learning for 7th grade life science using the 5E model, a best practice for teaching and learning in science education. Students use multimodal online text (informational text, visual data displays, videos, simulations) to learn about infectious diseases and how those diseases were perpetuated by poor treatment of prisoners in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Students will analyze information and data from WHO and other science-based organizations to learn about pandemics that existed within the camps.

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A fantastic exploration of Infectious Disease using websites from the CDC and WHO. Holocaust research is linked to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. How are Infectious Disease and the Holocaust related? Your students will find out. :)

Google Drive + Hyperdoc = Editable.

++This HyperDoc is 75% Infectious Disease and 25% Holocaust. It could easily be edited to balance both topics equally.

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Infectious Disease and the Holocaust HyperDoc: Distance Learning

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A fantastic exploration of Infectious Disease using websites from the CDC and WHO. Holocaust research is linked to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. How are Infectious Disease and the Holocaust related? Your students will find out. :)Google Drive + Hyperdoc = Editable. ++This HyperDoc i...

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Teachers can use differentiated literacy strategies to engage students with this reading on epidemics and the Holocaust, making connections between the science of infectious disease and the poor conditions and lack of empathy for prisoners in concentration camps.

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The overall conditions of camp life ensured that many people fell sick from the very first months, and their numbers rose steadily over time. Physical harassment of the prisoners resulted in numerous broken limbs and suppurating sores on the buttocks, usually after flogging.

The winter, and also late fall and early spring, saw numerous cases of colds, pneumonia, and frostbite which developed not infrequently into gangrene. The dreadful sanitation conditions caused skin diseases, and above all scabies.

Almost all prisoners suffered from boils, rashes, and abscesses that resulted mostly from vitamin deficiency and infections.

1942-1943 (and especially 1942) went down in the history of the camp as a period of raging epidemics, and especially typhus, which claimed the greatest number of lives. Many prisoners suffered from tuberculosis, ague (malaria), meningitis, pemphigus, dysentery, and Durchfall, a disorder of the digestive system caused by improper and inadequate food.

In camp conditions, all these illnesses were highly acute. A characteristic camp illness was starvation sickness. It was usually accompanied by diarrhea (often bloody), swollen legs, impaired vision and hearing, memory loss, nervous breakdown and, above all, exhaustion to the point of collapse. The majority of prisoners suffered from several medical conditions simultaneously.

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The overall conditions of camp life ensured that many people fell sick from the very first months, and their numbers rose steadily over time. Physical harassment of the prisoners resulted in numerous broken limbs and suppurating sores on the buttocks, usually after flogging.

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Nazis believed that Jews were the bearers of disease. Diseases ran rampant in established ghettos, which actually aided in the Nazis' mission to exterminate--so called "indirect extermination" (Stone, et.al, 2020). Teachers can use this scientific article to help make connections between the overall culture of Nazi-occupied areas outside of the concentration camps, and how epidemics of disease aided in extermination without the infamous camps.

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Extraordinary curtailment of massive typhus epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto

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The highly dependent interplay of disease, famine, war, and society is examined based on an extreme period during World War II. Using mathematical modeling, we reassess events during the Holocaust that led to the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto (1941-1942), with the eventual goal of deliberately killing ~450,000, mostly Jewish residents, many through widespread starvation and a large-scale typhus epidemic.

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Gather and synthesize information about the technologies that have changed the way humans influence the inheritance of desired traits in organisms.

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Adolf Hitler notoriously manipulated biology to create one of the worst eugenics’ programs in human history. Hitler used biological characteristics such as physical attributes and traits to selectively breed a superior Aryan race (“Eugenics”, 2019). He bred out disease and undesirable traits by killing those outside of his desired race in order to end inheritance of those traits in future generations. Students will learn about genetics and the process of artificial selection. Students will learn about the ethics associated with artificial selection, especially in the context of applying this concept to humans using the Holocaust as a warning about how this type of genetic manipulation can go horribly wrong.

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Teachers can have students use differentiated literacy strategies to make connections between Darwin and his theory of evolution and the rise of eugenics.

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Eugenics, as it was implemented in the Province of Alberta in the 20th century, was a form of artificial selection or selective breeding similar to what is often applied to improve stocks of domestic animals. Prior to the widespread acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution, many people thought that humans were fundamentally different from other animals.

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In this reading, students can learn about eugenics and connect this to the idea of artificial selection.

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Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by "breeding out" disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool.

Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so-called healthy, superior stock to reproduce and discouraged reproduction of the mentally challenged or anyone who fell outside the social norm. Eugenics was popular in America during much of the first half of the twentieth century, yet it earned its negative association mainly from Adolf Hitler's obsessive attempts to create a superior Aryan race.

Modern eugenics, more often called human genetic engineering, has come a long way-scientifically and ethically-and offers hope for treating many devastating genetic illnesses. Even so, it remains controversial.

Francis Galton

Eugenics literally means "good creation." The ancient Greek philosopher Plato may have been the first person to promote the idea, although the term "eugenics" didn't come on the scene until British scholar Sir Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

In one of Plato's best-known literary works, The Republic, he wrote about creating a superior society by procreating high-class people together and discouraging coupling between the lower classes. He also suggested a variety of mating rules to help create an optimal society.

For instance, men should only have relations with a woman when arranged by their ruler, and incestuous relationships between parents and children were forbidden but not between brother and sister. While Plato's ideas may be considered a form of ancient eugenics, he received little credit from Galton.

Eugenics in America

In the late 19th century, Galton-whose cousin was Charles Darwin -hoped to better humankind through the propagation of the British elite. His plan never really took hold in his own country, but in America it was more widely embraced.

Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were "feeble-minded" to marry. In 1903, the American Breeder's Association was created to study eugenics.

John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg cereal fame, organized the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and established a "pedigree registry." The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915 and 1928.

As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits, claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities or poor.

The Eugenics Record Office also maintained there was clear evidence that supposed negative family traits were caused by bad genes, not racism, economics or the social views of the time.

Forced Sterilizations

Eugenics in America took a dark turn in the early 20th century, led by California. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions under the guise of protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness.

Many sterilizations were forced and performed on minorities. Thirty-three states would eventually allow involuntary sterilization in whomever lawmakers deemed unworthy to procreate.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of the handicapped does not violate the U.S. Constitution. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, "...three generations of imbeciles are enough." In 1942, the ruling was overturned, but not before thousands of people underwent the procedure.

In the 1930s, the governor of Puerto Rico, Menendez Ramos, implemented sterilization programs for Puerto Rican women. Ramos claimed the action was needed to battle rampant poverty and economic strife; however, it may have also been a way to prevent the so-called superior Aryan gene pool from becoming tainted with Latino blood.

According to a 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation, between 25 and 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized between 1970 and 1976. It's thought some sterilizations happened without consent during other surgical procedures such as an appendectomy.

In some cases, health care for living children was denied unless their mothers agreed to sterilization.

Adolf Hitler and Eugenics

As horrific as forced sterilization in America was, nothing compared to Adolf Hitler's eugenic experiments leading up to and during World War II. And Hitler didn't come up with the concept of a superior Aryan race all on his own. In fact, he referred to American eugenics in his 1934 book, Mein Kampf.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler declares non-Aryan races such as Jews and gypsies as inferior. He believed Germans should do everything possible, including genocide, to make sure their gene pool stayed pure. And in 1933, the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations.

By 1940, Hitler's master-race mania took a terrible turn as hundreds of thousands of Germans with mental or physical disabilities were euthanized by gas or lethal injection.

Josef Mengele

During World War II, concentration camp prisoners endured horrific medical tests under the guise of helping Hitler create the perfect race. Josef Mengele, an SS doctor at Auschwitz, oversaw many experiments on both adult and child twins.

He used chemical eyedrops to try and create blue eyes, injected prisoners with devastating diseases and performed surgery without anesthesia. Many of his "patients" died or suffered permanent disability, and his gruesome experiments earned him the nickname, "Angel of Death."

In all, it's estimated eleven million people died during the Holocaust, most of them because they didn't fit Hitler's definition of a superior race.

Genetic Engineering

Thanks to the unspeakable atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, eugenics lost momentum in after World War II, although forced sterilizations still happened. But as medical technology advanced, a new form of eugenics came on the scene.

Modern eugenics, better known as human genetic engineering, changes or removes genes to prevent disease, cure disease or improve your body in some significant way. The potential health benefits of human gene therapy are staggering since many devastating or life-threatening illnesses could be cured.

But modern genetic engineering also comes with a potential cost. As technology advances, people could routinely weed-out what they consider undesirable traits in their offspring. Genetic testing already allows parents to identify some diseases in their child in utero which may cause them to terminate the pregnancy.

This is controversial since what exactly constitutes "negative traits" is open to interpretation, and many people feel that all humans have the right to be born regardless of disease, or that the laws of nature shouldn't be tampered with.

Much of America's historical eugenics efforts such as forced sterilizations have gone unpunished, although some states offered reparations to victims or their survivors. For the most part, though, it's a largely unknown stain on America's history. And no amount of money can ever repair the devastation of Hitler's eugenics programs.

As scientists embark on a new eugenics frontier, past failings can serve as a warning to approach modern genetic research with care and compassion.

Sources

American Breeder's Association. University of Missouri.
Charles Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office. University of Missouri.
Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies. The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.
Greek Theories on Eugenics. Journal of Medical Ethics.
Josef Mengele. Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Latina Women: Forced Sterilization. University of Michigan.
Modern Eugenics: Building a Better Person? Helix.
Nazi Medical Experiments. Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Plato. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States. PBS.

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Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by "breeding out" disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population.

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MS-LS4-5. Gather and synthesize information about the technologies that have changed the way humans influence the inheritance of desired traits in organisms.

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Students must also explore the various heinous experiments that Nazi doctors performed on those victims brought to concentrations camps but not killed. This will continue the conversation of ethics and science.

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This chapter from HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR explores the technologies and experimentation performed by Nazi doctors. This resource comes with an excerpt from an interview with a Nazi doctor, which serves as a sort of primary document for students. The resources all comes with discussion questions that can enhance discourse and collaboration in the classroom while making connections between science and the Holocaust.

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In 1945, Germany's boundaries were redrawn, and the country was divided into four "zones of occupation." Each zone was governed by one of the Allied powers: the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. After the first trial at Nuremberg, each Allied power continued holding trials for former Nazis and their collaborators in their own zones of occupation.

Doctors who had carried out medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, as well as engineers and technicians who helped to create the technology of mass death, were among those tried by the Allies. Leo Alexander, a psychiatrist who was a consultant to the Office of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes in Nuremberg, summarized his findings about Nazi medical research:

A large part of [German] research was devoted to the science of destroying and preventing life. . . . In the course of this . . . research, methods of mass killing and mass sterilization were investigated and developed for use against non-German peoples or Germans who were considered useless.

. . . A rapid method developed for sterilization of females, which could be accomplished in the course of a regular health examination, was the intra-uterine injection of various chemicals. . . . The injections were extremely painful, and a number of women died in the course of the experiments. Professor Karl Clauberg reported that he had developed a method at the Auschwitz concentration camp by which he could sterilize 1,000 women in a day. . . .

The development of methods for rapid and inconspicuous individual execution was the objective of another large part of . . . research. . . . Poisons were the subject of many of these experiments. A research team at the Buchenwald concentration camp, consisting of Drs. Joachim Mrugowsky, Erwin Ding-Schuler and Waldemar Hoven, developed one of the most widely used means of individual execution under the guise of medication treatment-namely, the intravenous injection of phenol [a toxic chemical] or gasoline.

Engineers worked to develop the technology for mass death. When the Soviets entered Auschwitz-Birkenau, they found records that detailed the construction of the crematoria, including precise information about costs as well as calculations of how many corpses each furnace could incinerate in a single day. The Russians captured four of the engineers who had designed and built the furnaces for a company called Topf and Sons and interrogated all four men. The interrogation of Kurt Prüfer, one of the four, included the following exchange:

Q. How often and with what aim did you visit Auschwitz?

A. Five times. The first time [was] at the beginning of 1943, to receive the orders of the SS Command, where the "Kremas" were to be built. The second time was in spring 1943 to inspect the building site. The third time was in autumn 1943 to inspect a fault in the construction of a "Krema" chimney. The fourth time [was] at the beginning of 1944 to inspect the repaired chimney. The fifth time [was] in September-October 1944 when I visited Auschwitz in connection with the intended relocation [from Auschwitz] of the crematoria, since the front was getting nearer. The crematoria were not relocated, because there were not enough workers. . . .

Q. Did you see a gas chamber next to the crematorium?

A. Yes, I did see one next to the crematorium. Between the gas chamber and the crematorium there was a connecting structure.

Q. Did you know that in the gas chambers and the crematoria there took place the liquidations of innocent human beings?

A. I have known since spring 1943 that innocent human beings were being liquidated in Auschwitz gas chambers and that their corpses were subsequently incinerated in the crematoria. . . .

Q. Why was the brick lining of the muffles so quickly damaged?

A. The bricks were damaged after six months because the strain on the furnaces was colossal.

Q. What motivated you to continue with the building of the other crematoria as senior engineer with Topf?

A. I had my contract with the Topf firm and I was aware of the fact that my work was of great importance for the national socialist state. I knew that if I refused to continue with this work, I would be liquidated by the Gestapo.

The Russians also questioned Fritz Sander about the crematoria. He expressed concern about the strain on the furnaces.

I decided to design and build a crematorium with a higher capacity. I completed this project . . . and I submitted [it] to a State Patent Commission in Berlin.

The "Krema" was to be built on the conveyor belt principle. That is to say, the corpses must be brought to the incineration furnaces without interruption. When the corpses are pushed into the furnaces, they fall onto a grate, then slide into the furnace and are incinerated. The corpses serve at the same time as fuel for the heating of the furnaces. . . .

Q. Although you knew about the mass liquidation of innocent human beings in crematoria, you devoted yourself to designing and creating higher capacity incineration furnaces for crematoria-and on your own initiative.

A. I was a German engineer and key member of the Topf works and I saw it as my duty to apply my specialist knowledge in this way in order to help Germany win the war, just as an aircraft construction engineer builds airplanes in wartime, which are also connected with the destruction of human beings. [Sander's design was never carried out.]

Sander died of a heart attack a few weeks after his interrogation. The Soviet Union sentenced Prüfer to 25 years in prison for "crimes against the civilian population and captive members of the Red Army." He died of a stroke in 1952. The other two engineers captured by the Soviets, Gustav Braun and Karl Schultze, were also sentenced to 25 years in prison, but they were released in 1955.

1. What roles did science, medicine, and engineering play in the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis?

2. The trial of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg led to the creation of ethical guidelines for medical experiments conducted on humans. Known as the "Nuremberg Code," these guidelines established the principle of "informed consent," which means that researchers may not perform experiments on human subjects without their voluntary consent. Today, most physicians take a professional oath to follow certain ethical guidelines when they care for their patients. Do workers in other roles, such as engineers, have ethical obligations that are specific to their profession?

3. How did the engineers Prüfer and Sander perceive their task? Did they know the purpose of the crematoria they designed and helped build? What motivated them to do this work? To what extent were they responsible for the deaths of prisoners at Auschwitz?

4. Prüfer claimed that he would be "liquidated" by the Gestapo if he refused to "continue with this work." Today, scholars point out that there is no evidence of any German having been executed for refusing to participate in the murder of Jews. Does Prüfer's belief that he would face death, even if mistaken, diminish his moral responsibility?

5. Sander said it was "my duty to apply my specialist knowledge in this way in order to help Germany win the war, just as an aircraft construction engineer builds airplanes in wartime, which are also connected with the destruction of human beings." Is there an ethical difference between constructing weapons for a military to use to kill soldiers and creating technology for the murder of civilians during wartime? To what extent are designers and engineers responsible for the tools and weapons they create and the ways in which those tools and weapons are used?

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In 1945, Germany's boundaries were redrawn, and the country was divided into four "zones of occupation." Each zone was governed by one of the Allied powers: the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. After the first trial at Nuremberg, each Allied power continued holding trials for former Nazis and their collaborators in their own zones of occupation.

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Students can learn about Josef Mengele who used the Nazi racial theory (built upon distorted scientific principles) to justify experiments performed on Nazi victims. This resource also includes critical thinking & discussion questions.

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Josef Mengele is one of the most infamous figures of the Holocaust. His service at Auschwitz and the medical experiments he conducted there have made him the most widely recognized perpetrator of the crimes committed at that camp. His postwar life in hiding has come to represent the international failure to bring the perpetrators of Nazi crimes to justice.

Because of his infamy, Mengele has been the subject of numerous popular books, films, and television shows. Many of these portrayals distort the real facts of Mengele's crimes and take him out of his historical context. Some portray him as a mad scientist who conducted sadistic experiments with no scientific basis.

The truth about Mengele is even more disturbing. He was a highly trained doctor and medical researcher, as well as a decorated war veteran. He was respected in his field and worked for one of the leading research institutions in Germany. Much of his medical research at Auschwitz supported the work of other German scientists. He was one of dozens of biomedical researchers who conducted experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. And he was one of a number of medical professionals who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Mengele acted within the norms of German science under the Nazi regime. His crimes represent the extreme danger posed by science when it is conducted in the service of an ideology that denies the rights, dignity, and even humanity of certain groups of people.

Mengele before Auschwitz

Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in the Bavarian city of Günzburg, Germany. He was the eldest son of Karl Mengele, a prosperous manufacturer of farming equipment.

Mengele studied medicine and physical anthropology at several universities. In 1935, he earned a PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Munich. In 1936, Mengele passed the state medical exams.

In 1937, Mengele began working at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, Germany. There, he was an assistant to the director, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer. Verschuer was a leading geneticist known for his research on twins. Under Verschuer's direction, Mengele completed an additional doctorate in 1938.

Embracing Nazi Ideology

Mengele did not actively support the Nazi Party before it came to power. However, in 1931, he joined the , the paramilitary of another right-wing party, the German National People's Party. Mengele became a member of the Nazi Stahlhelm SA when it absorbed the Stahlhelm in 1933, but he ceased actively participating in it in 1934.

During his university studies, however, Mengele embraced racial science, the false theory of biological racism. He believed that Germans were biologically different from and superior to members of all other races. Racial science was a fundamental tenet of Nazi ideology. Hitler used racial science to justify the forced sterilization of persons with certain physical or mental diseases or physical deformities. The Nuremberg Race Laws, which outlawed marriage between Germans and Jewish, Black, or Romani peoples, were also based upon racial science.

In 1938, Mengele joined the Nazi Party and the SS. In his work as a scientist, he sought to support the Nazi goal of maintaining and increasing the supposed superiority of the German "race." Mengele's employer and mentor, Verschuer, also embraced biological racism. In addition to conducting research, Verschuer and his staff - including Mengele - provided expert opinions to Nazi authorities who had to determine whether persons qualified as German under the Nuremberg Laws. Mengele and his colleagues also evaluated Germans whose physical or mental condition might qualify them to be forcibly sterilized or barred from marriage under German law.

Serving on the Eastern Front

In June 1940, Mengele was drafted into the German army ( At first, he worked for the Wehrmacht ). A month later, he volunteered for the medical service of the Waffen -SS (the military branch of the SS). SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) in German-occupied Poland. There, Mengele evaluated the criteria and methods used by the SS to determine whether persons claiming to be of German descent were racially and physically suitable to qualify as Germans.

Around the end of 1940, Mengele was assigned to the engineering battalion of the SS Division " " as a medical officer. For about 18 months beginning in June 1941, he saw extremely brutal fighting on the Wiking eastern front. In addition, in the first weeks of Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, Mengele's division slaughtered thousands of Jewish civilians. Mengele's service on the eastern front earned him the Iron Cross, both 2nd and 1st Class, and promotion to SS captain (SS- Hauptsturmführer ).

Mengele returned to Germany in January 1943. While awaiting his next Waffen - SS assignment, he began to work again for his mentor Verschuer. Verschuer had recently become the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin.

Assigned to Auschwitz

On May 30, 1943, the SS assigned Mengele to (literally, "Gypsy camp"). Beginning in 1943, nearly 21,000 Auschwitz. There is some evidence that Mengele himself requested this assignment. He worked as one of the camp physicians at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the Auschwitz camps and also served as a killing center for Jews deported from throughout Europe. In addition to other duties, Mengele had responsibility for Birkenau's Zigeunerlager Romani men, women, and children (pejoratively referred to as Zigeuner or "Gypsies") were sent to Auschwitz and imprisoned in the Zigeunerlager . When this family camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, Mengele participated in selecting the 2,893 Romani prisoners who were to be murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed chief physician for the part of the Auschwitz camp complex called Auschwitz-Birkenau or Auschwitz II. In November 1944, he was assigned to the Birkenau hospital for the SS.

"Angel of Death": Selecting Prisoners to be Murdered

As part of their camp duties, medical staff at Auschwitz performed so-called selections. The purpose of the selections was to identify persons who were unable to work. The SS considered such persons useless and therefore murdered them. When transports of Jews arrived at Birkenau, the camp medical personnel selected some of the able-bodied adults to perform forced labor in the concentration camp. Those not selected for labor, including children and older adults, were murdered in the gas chambers.

Camp physicians at Auschwitz and at other concentration camps also conducted periodic selections in the camp infirmaries and barracks. They conducted these selections in order to identify prisoners who were injured or had become too ill or weak to work. The SS used various methods to murder these prisoners, including lethal injections and gassing. Mengele routinely carried out such selections at Birkenau, leading some prisoners to refer to him as the "angel of death." Prisoner Gisella Perl, a Jewish gynecologist at Birkenau, later recalled how Mengele's appearance in the women's infirmary filled the prisoners with terror:

We feared these visits more than anything else, because [. . .] we never knew whether we would be permitted to live [. . . .] He was free to do whatever he pleased with us.

- Quoted according to Gisella Perl's memoir I was a Doctor in Auschwitz 1

After World War II, Mengele became infamous for his work at Auschwitz thanks to the accounts of prisoner physicians who had worked under him and of prisoners who had survived his medical experiments.

Mengele was one of some 50 physicians who served at Auschwitz. He was neither the highest ranking doctor in the Auschwitz camp complex nor the commander of the other doctors there. Nevertheless, his name is by far the best known of all the doctors who served at Auschwitz. One reason for this was Mengele's frequent presence on the ramp where selections took place. When Mengele did not himself perform selection duty, he often still appeared at the ramp, looking among the prisoners for twins for his experiments and physicians for the Birkenau infirmary. Consequently, many survivors who underwent selection upon arrival at Auschwitz assumed that Mengele was the doctor who had selected them. However, Mengele performed this task no more often than his colleagues.

Biomedical Researchers at Auschwitz

The SS authorized German biomedical researchers to conduct unethical and often lethal human experiments in the concentration camps. Auschwitz provided prisoners for human experiments conducted at various other camps. It also served as the site of a variety of human experiments. This is because of the number of prisoners sent there. The SS sent 1.3 million men, women, and children from many different national and ethnic backgrounds to Auschwitz. Researchers looking for human subjects who met specific criteria could more easily find them at Auschwitz than at other camps.

Mengele was one of more than a dozen SS medical personnel who conducted experiments on people imprisoned at Auschwitz. These doctors included:

Eduard Wirths, the head Auschwitz physician;

Carl Clauberg, a noted specialist in the treatment of infertility;

Horst Schumann, who gassed thousands of patients with disabilities during the Nazi Euthanasia Program;

SS physician Helmut Vetter, who conducted drug trials for the Bayer subsidiary of IG Farben on prisoners at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Gusen concentration camps;

Johann Paul Kremer, a professor of anatomy.

These doctors saw their appointment to Auschwitz as an exciting opportunity to advance their research.

Types of Experiments Conducted

The experiments in the concentration camps permanently maimed many victims or caused them to die. In some experiments, death was the intended outcome for the victims. The medical professionals who conducted experiments at Auschwitz did not seek the prisoners' consent or inform them of their treatment or possible effects. The types of experiments conducted at Auschwitz included:

Testing methods of mass sterilization;

Inflicting wounds on prisoners or infecting them with diseases to study the effects and test treatments;

Conducting unnecessary surgeries and procedures on patients for research purposes or to train medical professionals;

Murdering and dissecting prisoners for anthropological and medical research.

Mengele's Experiments at Auschwitz

Separate from his regular duties at Auschwitz, Mengele conducted research and experiments on prisoners. His mentor Verschuer may even have arranged Mengele's assignment to Auschwitz for the purpose of supporting the research of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A). Throughout his time at Auschwitz, Mengele sent his colleagues in Germany blood, body parts, organs, skeletons, and fetuses. These were all taken from Auschwitz prisoners. Mengele collaborated on his colleagues' research projects by conducting studies and experiments for them using prisoners.

In addition to his work with the KWI-A, Mengele also conducted his own experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. He hoped to publish the results and thereby gain the credentials to qualify for a university professorship.

In the course of his service at Auschwitz, Mengele organized a research complex located in a number of barracks. He chose his staff from among the prisoners who were medical professionals. Mengele was able to obtain up-to-date instruments and equipment for his research and even set up a pathology lab.

Research Goals

Mengele's own research and the research he conducted for the KWI-A generally focused on how genes develop into specific physical and mental traits. When conducted ethically, this is a legitimate and important field of genetic research. However, the work of Mengele, Verschuer, and their colleagues was warped by their belief in a pseudoscientific theory of race that was fundamental to Nazi ideology. This theory held that human races are genetically distinct from each other. It established a hierarchy of races and stressed that "inferior" races are genetically more likely to exhibit negative traits than members of "superior" races. These negative hereditary traits supposedly included more than just physical and mental illnesses and deficiencies. They also supposedly included socially unacceptable or immoral behaviors, such as vagrancy, prostitution, and criminality. According to the false theory of race, intermarriage between races passed negative traits to "superior" races and undermined them.

Mengele sought to identify specific physical and biochemical markers that could definitively identify the members of specific races. Mengele and his colleagues believed that finding such markers was vitally important for preserving the supposed racial superiority of the German people. For Mengele and his colleagues, the importance of the research justified conducting harmful and lethal experiments on people - in this case Auschwitz prisoners - whom they considered to be racially inferior.

Who were Mengele's Victims?

Mengele drew his victims mainly from two ethnic groups: Roma and Jews. These groups were of particular interest to biomedical researchers in Nazi Germany. Nazi ideology considered both Roma and Jews to be "subhuman" and to pose a threat to the German "race." For this reason, Nazi scientists did not consider medical ethics to apply to members of these groups.

While Mengele served at Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than 20,000 Roma were imprisoned there and hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived there on transports. Nowhere else in the world could scientists have access to so many members of these groups concentrated in one place. And nowhere else did they have the power to experiment on human beings in whatever way they wanted. Mengele commented to a colleague that it would be a crime not to take advantage of the opportunities for human experimentation at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Roma

In addition to choosing Roma as subjects for his medical experiments, Mengele conducted an anthropological study of the Roma men, women, and children in the Zigeunerlager . When there was an outbreak of Noma, a gangrene of the mouth, among Roma children in the camp, he assigned prisoner physicians to study it. Noma is a bacterial infection that primarily afflicts extremely malnourished children. However, Mengele believed that the Roma children at Auschwitz suffered from Noma because of their heredity rather than because of the conditions at the camp. The prisoner physicians discovered how to cure Noma, which was normally fatal. Nevertheless, all of the children who were cured were eventually murdered in the gas chambers.

Twins

In the 1930s, twins were a major focus of human genetic research. Before World War II, Verschuer and other biomedical researchers used twins to study the hereditary basis of diseases. These earlier researchers obtained the consent of the twins or their parents, but it was difficult for researchers to enlist many twins for these studies. At Auschwitz, Mengele collected hundreds of pairs of twins from among the Jews who arrived there on transports and from among the Roma imprisoned there. No researcher had ever been able to study and experiment on such a large number of twins.

Mengele ordered his staff to measure and record every aspect of the twins' bodies. He drew large amounts of blood from the twins and sometimes performed other painful procedures on them.

[...] They also gave us injections all over our bodies. As a result of these injections, my sister fell ill. Her neck swelled up as a result of a severe infection. They sent her to the hospital and operated on her without anesthetic in primitive conditions. (...)

From the account of Lorenc Andreas Menasche, camp number A 12090. 2

Mengele also murdered sets of twins at the same time in order to conduct autopsies of their corpses. After he studied the autopsies, Mengele sent some of their organs to the KWI-A.

Persons with Congenital Anomalies

When he conducted selections of arriving Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mengele looked for people with physical abnormalities. These people included dwarfs, people with gigantism, or persons who had a club foot. Mengele studied these people and then had them murdered. He sent their bodies to Germany for study by researchers.

Mengele also sought out Roma and Jews with heterochromia, a condition in which a person's eyes differ from each other in color. One of Mengele's colleagues at KWI-A was particularly interested in this condition. Mengele had persons with heterochromia murdered at Auschwitz and sent their eyes to this colleague.

Children

Most of the victims of Mengele's medical experiments were children. The children Mengele selected for experiments lived in separate barracks from the other prisoners and received somewhat better food and treatment. Mengele was friendly toward the children. Moshe Ofer, a survivor of Mengele's experiments, recalled in 1985 that

[Mengele] visited us as a good uncle, bringing us chocolate. Before applying the scalpel or a syringe, he would say: 'Don't be afraid, nothing is going to happen to you...' ...he injected chemical substances, performed surgery on Tibi's spine. After the experiments he would bring us gifts...In the course of later experiments, he had pins inserted into our heads. The puncture scars are still visible. One day he took Tibi away. My brother was gone for several days. When he was brought back, his head was all dressed in bandages. He died in my arms. 3

Mengele used children for his own experiments and also to support the work of the KWI-A. He collaborated in a study of the development of eye color by putting a substance supplied by one of his colleagues in the eyes of children and newborns. The results ranged from irritation and swelling to blindness and even death.

A prisoner who was assigned to care for Jewish twins selected for Mengele's experiments later described how the children reacted emotionally and physically to their treatment:

Samples of blood were collected first from the fingers and then from the arteries, two or three times from the same victims in some cases. The children screamed and tried to cover themselves up to avoid being touched. The personnel resorted to force. (...) Drops were also put into their eyes....Some pairs of children received drops in both eyes, and others in only one. ....The results of these practices were painful for the victims. They suffered from severe swelling of the eyelids, a burning sensation.... 4

Evading Justice

In January 1945, as the Soviet Red Army advanced through western Poland, Mengele fled Auschwitz with the rest of the camp's SS personnel. He spent the next few months serving at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and its subcamps. In the final days of the war, he donned a German army uniform and joined a military unit. After the war ended, the unit surrendered to US military forces.

Posing as a German army officer, Mengele became a US prisoner of war. The US Army released him in early August 1945, unaware that Mengele's name was already on a list of wanted war criminals.

From late 1945 until spring 1949, Mengele worked under a false name as a farmhand near Rosenheim, Bavaria. From here he was able to establish contact with his family. When US war crimes investigators learned of Mengele's crimes at Auschwitz, they tried to find and arrest him. Based on lies told by Mengele's family, however, the investigators concluded that Mengele was dead. The US effort to arrest him forced Mengele to recognize that he was not safe in Germany. With financial support from his family, Mengele immigrated to Argentina under yet another false name in July 1949.

By 1956, Mengele was well established in Argentina and felt so safe that he obtained Argentine citizenship as José Mengele. In 1959, however, he learned that West German prosecutors knew he was in Argentina and were seeking his arrest. Mengele immigrated to Paraguay and obtained citizenship there. In May 1960, Israeli intelligence agents abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel to be tried. Correctly guessing that the Israelis were also looking for him, Mengele fled Paraguay. With support from his family in Germany, he spent the rest of his life under an assumed name near São Paulo, Brazil. On February 7, 1979, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil. He was buried in a suburb of São Paulo under the assumed name "Wolfgang Gerhard."

The Discovery and Identification of Mengele's Body

In May 1985, the governments of Germany, Israel, and the United States agreed to cooperate in tracking down Mengele and bringing him to justice. German police raided the home of a Mengele family friend in Günzburg, Germany, and found evidence that Mengele had died and been buried near São Paulo. Brazilian police located Mengele's grave and exhumed his corpse in June 1985. American, Brazilian, and German forensic experts positively identified the remains as those of Josef Mengele. In 1992, DNA evidence confirmed this conclusion.

Mengele eluded arrest for 34 years and was never brought to justice.

Last Edited: Feb 21, 2023

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Prominent SS physician Josef Mengele, called the "angel of death" by his victims, conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners in the Auschwitz camp.

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This resource includes a list of information about the types of research that Nazi doctors did on victims. It also highlights specific doctors that students may hear about when studying the Holocaust in depth in other classes or reading about in other classes.

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The German physicians who ran SS and Wehrmacht medical institutions, along with medical personnel at lower levels, participated actively in carrying out Nazi extermination plans. SS physicians assigned to the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, played a special role. They conducted criminal medical experiments on prisoners and committed other acts that violated medical ethics. Having furthered the extermination program in the concentration camps, they have gone down in history as medical criminals.

The SS physicians who carried out pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz included:
Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg
Carl Clauberg experimented with sterilization in the camp. Part of Block No. 10 in the Main Camp was put at his disposal. Several hundred Jewish women from various countries lived in two large rooms on the second floor of the building. Clauberg developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization that consisted of introducing into the female reproductive organs a specially prepared chemical irritant that produced sever inflammation. Within several weeks, the fallopian tubes grew shut and were blocked. Clauberg's experiments killed some of his subjects, and others were put to death so that autopsies could be performed.

In June 1943, Clauberg wrote to Heinrich Himmler:
The non-surgical method of sterilizing women that I have invented is now almost perfected . . . As for the questions that you have directed to me, sir, I can today answer them in the way that I had anticipated: if the research that I am carrying out continues to yield the sort of results that it has produced so far (and there is no reason to suppose that this shall not be the case), then I shall be able to report in the foreseeable future that one experienced physician, with an appropriately equipped office and the aid of ten auxiliary personnel, will be able to carry out in the course of a single day the sterilization of hundreds, or even 1,000 women. Dr. Horst Schumann
Like Clauberg, Horst Schumann was searching for a convenient means of mass sterilization that would enable the Third Reich to carry out the biological destruction of conquered nations by "scientific methods" - through depriving people of their reproductive capacity. "X-ray sterilization" equipment was set up for Schumann in one of the barracks at Birkenau. Every so often, several dozen Jewish men and women prisoners were brought in. The sterilization experiments consisted of exposing the women's ovaries and the men's testes to X-rays. Schumann applied various intensities at various intervals in his search for the optimal dose of radiation. The exposure to radiation produced severe burns on the belly, groin, and buttocks areas of the subjects, and festering sores that were resistant to healing. Many subjects died from complications. The results of the X-ray sterilization experiments were unsatisfactory. In an article that he sent to Himmler in April 1944, titled "The Effect of X-Ray Radiation on the human Reproductive Glands," Schumann expressed a preference for surgical castration, as being quicker and more certain.
Dr. Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele held a Ph.D. and a medical doctorate. In close collaboration with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics, he studied the phenomena of twins, as well as the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. He was also interested in people with different-colored irises and in the etiology and treatment of noma ("water cancer" of the cheek). This latter disease, widespread in the so-called " Roma Family Camp," where Mengele had had a laboratory, had been previously almost unknown in Europe. Mengele's first experimental subjects were Roma children. On Mengele's orders, children suffering from noma were put to death in order for pathology investigations to be carried out. Organs and even complete heads of children were preserved and sent in jars to institutions including the Medical Academy in Graz, Austria.

Mengele also began selecting dwarves and persons with physical peculiarities (including inborn disabilities and the developmental defects that appear in dwarfism) from the Jewish transports brought to Birkenau for extermination, from the Jewish Theresienstadt Family Camp in Birkenau, and from the so-called Mexico ( Sector BIII).

In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele subjected pairs of twins and people with physical handicaps to special medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism. Usually painful and exhausting, these examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved, terrified children (for such were the majority of the twins). The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toeprints were taken. As soon as the examinations of a given pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengele ordered them killed by phenol injection so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy. Scientifically interesting anatomical specimens were preserved and shipped to the Institute in Berlin-Dahlem for more detailed examination.

Ruth Elias was pregnant when she was transferred from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. She said, "I delivered a beautiful big blonde girl, but Mengele ordered that my breast be bound so that, as he said, 'We can see how long a newborn baby can survive without food.'" After watching her baby suffer for several days, a female Czech doctor gave Elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child's agony.
Dr. Johann Paul Kremer
The killing of prisoners was also accompanied by research into the changes that occur in the human organism as a result of starvation - in particular, liver atrophy ("braune Atrophie"). This research was carried out at Auschwitz Concentration Camp by SS-Obersturmführer Johann Paul Kremer, M.D., Ph.D., professor at the University of Münster, where he lectured on anatomy and human genetics. At the Block No. 28 clinic in the main camp, he carried out assessments of prisoners attempting to gain admission to the hospital. Many of them were at the point of exhaustion, in the "Musselman" state, in the final stages of starvation to death. Kremer ordered most of them killed by phenol injection. Kremer selected prisoners who struck him as particularly good experimental material, and questioned them just before their deaths, as they lay on the autopsy table awaiting injection, about such personal details as their weight before arrest and any medicines they had used recently. In some cases, he ordered these prisoners photographed. Before their bodies were cold, they were subjected to autopsies and slides were made for Kremer of the liver, spleen, and pancreas.
SS Physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter and Eduard Wirths
In 1941-1944, SS camp physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, and Eduard Wirths carried out clinical trials of the tolerance and efficacy of new medications and drugs, with such ode names as B-1012, B-1O34, B-1O36, 3582, P-111, rutenolu, and peristonu, on Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoners. They did so on commission from IG Farbenindustrie, and particularly from the Bayer firm, which was part of that cartel. These preparations were given to prisoners suffering from contagious diseases, who had in many cases been deliberately infected.
Prof. Dr. August Hirt
In 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Prof. Dr. August Hirt, chairman of the anatomy department at the Reich University in Strasbourg, set about assembling a collection of Jewish skeletons under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe Foundation. To this end, he received permission from Himmler to select the required number of prisoners at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The selection of 115 persons (79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 "Asians" - probably Soviet POWs) and the preliminary preparation, consisting of biometrical measurements and the collection of personal data, were carried out by Hirt's collaborator, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Bruno Beger, who arrived in Auschwitz in the first half of 1943. Berger finished his work by June 15, 1943. After going through quarantine, some of the prisoners whom Berger selected were sent in July and early August to Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, where they were killed in the gas chamber. The victims' corpses were sent to Hirt as material for his skeleton collection, which was intended for use in anthropological studies that would demonstrate the superiority of the Nordic race.

Sources: The State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Reprinted with permission.
Elias story in Bernard Edinger, "Claude Lanzmann Does it Again," The Jerusalem Report, (January 22, 2018).

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The German physicians who ran SS and Wehrmacht medical institutions, along with medical personnel at lower levels, participated actively in carrying out Nazi extermination plans. SS physicians assigned to the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, played a special role. They conducted criminal medical experiments on prisoners and committed other acts that violated medical ethics.

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Gather and synthesize information that sensory receptors respond to stimuli by sending messages to the brain
for immediate behavior or storage as memories.

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The brain can process information by responding with immediate behaviors or storing information as memories that can result in learned behaviors. In this unit, teachers can teach students about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),  a mental health disorder that results from repeated stimulation to certain events that can lead to physical reactions and memories of traumatic events. Teachers can have students explore PTSD in Holocaust survivors to show that, because of the way humans process information, the effects of the Holocaust can persist for decades and entire lifetimes. The effects of the Holocaust are not a thing of the past, but can continue to affect survivors in the present-day. This can lead to discussions of the effects of traumatic events around the world today on future generations and how we can help survivors of traumatic events.

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Scientific Paper: Lifelong PTSD in Holocaust Survivors

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Scientific Paper: Lifelong PTSD in Holocaust Survivors

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Teachers can have students analyze the data in this scientific paper that shows a correlation between Holocaust survivorship in the elderly and PTSD. This align with the above standard and practices the NGSS Science & Engineering Practice of analyzing data.

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Henry Szor, MD

Abstract

Despite the fact that 50 years have passed since the Nazi regime and the Holocaust the psychic sequelae are far from being overcome. The majority of Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans still list their experiences as the "most significant stressors" of their lives. The literature provides ample evidence that posttraumatic stress disorder among survivors persists into old age. However, there is still a need to define the differences in frequency, clinical presentation, severity, and comorbid conditions among aging Holocaust survivors. Age at the time of trauma, cumulative lifetime stress, and physical illness are reported to have a positive association with more severe posttraumatic symptomatology. The presence of comorbid Axis i psychiatric disorders (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSIVI]), has been the focus of research by our group, demonstrating that their interaction with earlier trauma leads to a course of chronic, debilitating disease. Despite reactivation of traumatic symptoms during aging and continuous mental suffering, the majority of Holocaust survivors show good instrumental coping and preserved functioning.

Abstract

A pesar que han transcurrido 50 años desde el régimen nazi y del Holocausio, las secuelas psiquicas aun no han sido superadas. La mayoria de los sobrevivientes del Holocausto y los veteranos de la II Guerra Mundial todavia relatan sus experiencias como los "factores estresantes más significativos de sus vidas". La literatura ofrece una amplia evidencia acerca de la persistencia del trastorno de estrés postraumático entre los sobreviventes a lo largo de los años. Sin embargo, aun existe la necesidad de definir las diferencias en cuanto a frecuencia, presentación clinica, severidad y comorbilidad entre los sobrevivientes de edad avanzada-del Holocausto. Se ha informado que la edad en que ocurrió la experiencia traumática, la acumulación de factores estresantes a lo largo de la vida y la enfermedad fisica presentan una asociación positiva con la sintomatologia postraumática más severa. La presencia de algún trastorno psiquiátrico del eje. I (del Manual Diagnóstico y Estadistico, DSM) ha sido el foco de investigación de nuestro grupo y se ha demostrado que la interacción con traumas precoces conduce a una enfermedad de curso crónico y debilitante. A pesar de la reactivación de sintomas traumáticos durante el envejecimiento y el continuo sufrimiento mental. la mayoria de los sobrevivientes del Holocausto muestran una adecuada adaptación y un buen funcionamiento en la vida diaria.

Résumé

Cinquante ans nous séparent du régime nazi et de l'Holocauste mais ce temps écoulé n'a pas effacé les séquelles psychiques chez les survivants, loin de là. Pour la majorité de ceux qui ont subi l'Holocauste et des vétérans de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, cette période constitue le "stress le plus éprouvant" de leur existence. L'état de stress post-traumatique persiste chez les survivants même lorsqu'ils atteignent un âge avancé, comme le démontrent de nombreuses données rapportées dans la littérature. Il serait toutefois nécessaire de mieux définir les différentes modes de présentaion des troubles rencontrés chez les survivants âgés de l'Holocauste: fréquence, présentaion clinique, sévérité, comorbidité. Il existe une corrélation positive entre la plus grande sévérité de l'état de stress post-traumatique et l'âge du sujet au moment du traumatisme, la répétition d'événements stressants au cours de la vie et l'existence de pathologies somatiques. Nous avons centré nos recherches sur des sujets souffrant également de troubles psychiatriques de l'Axe I (classification du DSM Manuel Diagnostique et Statistique des Troubles Mentaux) et nous avons pu établir que l'interaction entre ces troubles et l'existence d'un événement traumatique antérieur aboutit à une évolution chronique et débilitante de la pathologie psychiatrique. Cependant, bien que l'on observe une réactivation des symptômes de l'état de stress post-traumatique chez les sujets âgés et alors que leur souffrance mentale est toujours présente, la majorité des survivants de l'Holocauste témoigne d'une bonne fauclté d'adaptation aux contraintes matérielles et psychologiques de la vie quotidienne.

Research into posttraumatic psychiatric morbidity has a long history. Since the first descriptions of "soldiers' heart" syndrome in the American Civil War, wars, natural catastrophes, mass fires and accidents, rape abuse, and torture have all added to our understanding of the effects of trauma on the human psyche. Despite the accumulating data and the magnitude of human suffering, the unique diagnostic categorization of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a "latecomer" in formal psychiatric classification systems.

Two factors have delayed the progress in diagnosis and understanding of PTSD: (i) the attribution of this disorder to combat-related events; and (ii) the tendency to view the symptoms developing after a trauma as "normal response." Thus, in the first half of this century, the psychiatric approach to trauma has varied widely After World War II (WWII), the American Psychiatric Association included "gross stress reaction" in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Surprisingly, this entity was dropped from DSM-II and only the advent of DSM.-IV in 1994 separated acute stress disorder from PTSD. In addition, DSM-IV offers as specifiers the definitions of "acute" or "chronic" to describe the course of the disorder, as well "with delayed onset" to acknowledge appearance of the disorder 6 months (or later) after exposure to the trauma. It is important to note that the current classification also relinquishes the emphasis of the uniqueness of the traumatic event and conceptualizes PTSD as common to many different types of events. In these events, the individual experiences, witnesses, or is confronted with death or serious injury, and responds with intense fear, helplessness, or horror.

Despite the refinement and opcrationalization of diagnostic criteria for PTSD, relatively little is known about the course of the disorder. In the March 1999 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, three published studies used longitudinal designs to address both the acute and chronic effects of trauma. The study by Koren and colleagues, in conjunction with retrospective studies of the natural history of PTSD seem to emphasize that the course of PTSD is one of an increase in symptoms in the early phase (1 to 3 months after trauma), followed by a plateau. Is this "plateau" phase lifelong? Do PTSD symptoms remain severe and disabling throughout the life cycle? Are maturation, aging, and reintegration into society factors that affect the course of PTSD?

Veterans of WWII and Holocaust survivors offer a unique opportunity to evaluate the course of PTSD through the life cycle of people who have been subjected to extreme and massive psychic trauma in their youth. The majority of Holocaust survivors and more than half of WWII veterans interviewed 50 years after the war spontaneously listed it as the "most significant stressor" of their life. With the aging of veterans and survivors, reports of reactivation of PTSD have been published. Physical ill health, retirement, loneliness, comorbid psychiatric illness, anniversaries, reunions, and use of alcohol and psychotropic medication are all factors implicated in the exacerbation of both arousal and reexperiencing symptoms of PTSD. For many WWII veterans, PTSD has lasted 50 years, although masking of intrusive symptoms in midlife was usual. The rates of active PTSD reported among the veterans range from 12.4% to 45%. It is noteworthy that veterans who suffer from comorbid psychiatric conditions report no significant reduction in symptoms over the preceding 10 years.

The Holocaust was the most traumatic experience to occur in the 20th century. Most of the survivors are now elderly and for them, aging is a phase of severe crisis.

Psychiatrists and other health professionals can facilitate the voicing of the suffering of people who spent their lives in the persistent shadows of the Holocaust. Indeed, in the last decade, many studies have focused on the long-term consequences of this massive traumatization. Among the particularities of survivor suffering were: being outlawed, discrimination, defamation, total absence of rights, loss of individuality, life-threatening ewer a long period of time, torture, physical hardships, ill health, being uprooted, few or no survivors in the family and elsewhere, lack of graves for victims, and the realization at the end of WWII that language, culture, and home are lost forever. In later life, when friends are gone, the need to share with others becomes urgent; to bear witness is vital.

In 1997, Sadavoy reviewed the late-life effects as reported in studies of Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans. He concluded that survivor syndromes indeed persist into old age, that Holocaust survivors as a group have adapted well to instrumental aspects of life, but that there is a deficiency of treatment studies in this population. The Traumatic Stress Studies Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, provides more specific data, as do several research groups in Israel. Converging lines of research demonstrate that aging Holocaust survivors are in a sense a "fragile" group. Cumulative trauma, recent stress, and lack of social support increase the probability of retraumatization in old age. Nevertheless, it is surprising that using DSM criteria to diagnose present PTSD in aging Holocaust survivors, the reported rates in controlled studies are 46% to 55.5%. Major comorbid psychiatric illness was excluded from these studies. This may be a significant drawback, as depressive and dissociative features, as well as markers of the adrenocortical (steroidal) pathway, are notably abnormal in nontreatment-seeking survivors. Increased risk of suicide, depression, chronicity of schizophrenia, and development of late-life paranoia have all been reported in aging Holocaust survivors. Thus, there is a need to study the presence of comorbid PTSD in the minority of survivors who suffer from psychiatric disease. This may aid in understanding the complex relationship between massive psychic trauma and the course of PTSD in subjects who have been under close observation by mental health professionals most of their lives.

The present study was conducted to evaluate the presence of "active" PTSD in a group of aging Holocaust survivors who were either repeatedly hospitalized, or spent most of their lives in long-stay psychiatric institutions.

Subjects

At the end of WWII, nearly 500 000 Jews survived the Holocaust. Of these, approximately 300 000 immigrated to Israel in two main periods: shortly after the establishment of the State of Israel, and between 1989 and 1992 when large groups of Jews immigrated from the former USSR. It is estimated that 200 000 survivors are now living in Israel, most of whom are now elderly. In the 1950s, nearly 2000 Holocaust survivors were repeatedly or chronically hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals in Israel. The most common diagnosis then was that of schizophrenia. In 1998, there were 700 such patients hospitalized in long-stay wards. The Abarbanel Mental Health Center is Israel's largest academic psychiatric center. 'Ihe center's psychogeriatric division consists of three wards encompassing 110 inpatient beds. From January to June 1998, for the purpose of the present study, all aging Holocaust survivors were interviewed.

Holocaust survivors were defined as subjects that were in Eastern or Western Rurope under the Nazi regime during the years 1933 to 1945. Inclusion criteria for the study were: (i) age ≥65 years; (ii) being a Holocaust survivor. Rxclusion criteria were: (i) DSM-IV diagnosis of dementia; (ii) inability (cognitive impairment or language difficulties) to endorse the Impact of Event Scale (IES); and (iii) patient's refusal to participate in the study.

Methods

All patients had previously been diagnosed according to DSM-IV criteria as part of an ongoing study project (the data relevant to this project are detailed in reference 16). For purposes of the present study, the IES and revised PTSD inventory (R-PTSD) were used.

The IES comprises two subscales describing and quantifying intrusive and avoidance experiences. The RPTSD inventory is based on endorsement (by the interviewing researcher) of DSM criteria for the presence of PTSD. Both these instruments were previously used and validated in studies of Holocaust survivors and trauma victims.

Data are presented as means ± standard deviation (SD) and ranges. We used these simple statistical measures as the aim of the study was to present a descriptive audit.

Results

During the period January to June 1998, 93 Holocaust survivors were being treated at the Abarbanel Mental Health Center psychogeriatric wards. Of these, 32 did not fulfill the criteria of the study, and were excluded. All 61 participating patients underwent a semistructured interview. After the interview all endorsed the IES.

Our series comprised 41 women and 20 men. Mean age for the group was 77.1 years (± 6.8; range 65-91). Ihe majority of subjects were in Eastern Rurope during the Nazi regime (43 of 61; 70.5%). Axis I (DSM) psychiatric diagnoses for the group were as follows: 32 of 61 (52.5%) schizophrenia, 17 of 61 (27.9%) affective disorders, and 12 of 61 (19.6%) other psychotic disorders.

The R-PTSD inventory facilitated diagnosis of comorbid PTSD in 91.8% of patients (56 of 61). As previously shown, the inventory correlated well with the Schizophrenia Clinical Interview for Diagnosis (SCID). Thus, comorbid PTSD can be said to be reliably diagnosed in the overwhelming majority of subjects in the present study. The IES results demonstrated a significant difference between intrusive and avoidance symptoms. While both subscales were scored as significantly higher than the reported means for the normal population, intrusions were scored as notably more prominent than avoidance. Mean intrusion score was 42.7 ±4.1 (range 3651) and mean avoidance score was 29.7±3.4 (range 2731); < 0.01 [paired Student /-test]). The IES scores in the present study are in the range of a previous study of elderly subjects suffering from PTSD reported by our group.

Discussion

Our sample represents a unique group of elderly Holocaust survivors who show a high comorbidity of chronic PTSD (91.8%), with psychotic disorders more than 50 years after the experience of the massive psychic trauma of the Holocaust.

The occurrence of chronic PTSD of such magnitude for an extremely prolonged period is striking. It is significantly higher than the rate reported for war veterans, ranging from 12.4% to 45%. This difference may be related to the unique nature of the Holocaust trauma, combining dehumanization, confrontation with death, and massive loss for a prolonged period. Beal demonstrated that the co-occurrence of imprisonment in addition to the experience of combat led to a higher incidence of PTSD and other psychological symptoms, compared to combat experience alone. Furthermore, Kidson ct al show that the specific nature of the traumatic experience, such as taking of casualties, or the experience of combat stress, resulted in more pronounced severity, and was significantly associated with the occurrence of PTSD in WWII veterans. Thus, the specific nature of the traumatic experience may influence the occurrence of PTSD and its persistence over time. Beyond this aspect, the coexistence of a severe psychotic disorder in our scries of patients seems to bc decisive. As demonstrated by Kidson et al, even minor pathologies, such as anxiety and depressive disorders, were more common in war veterans with PTSD. Therefore, this seems to suggest that the severity of the coexistent psychiatric morbidity, such as schizophrenia, may explain the high incidence of chronic PTSD present for such a prolonged period.

It is difficult to say whether the occurrence of PTSD in our group represents lifelong suffering, beginning close to the end of the traumatic experience and persisting for more than 50 years, or whether it represents a phase of symptomatic reactivation occurring in WWII veterans in their old age, as demonstrated by Macleod.

The exposure to trauma puts into effect mechanisms of coping (directed towards the environment), as well as defense mechanisms (directed towards traumatic memory and its psychic repercussions). It is generally acknowledged that most Holocaust survivors have succeeded in mobilizing effective skills for coping, manifesting themselves by recreating families and adapting to social roles. However, the impact of the Holocaust on ego functions led to the activation of defense mechanisms, mostly of splitting and ensuing encapsulation, numbing, and avoidance. As in psychosis, the coexistence of psychosis in our patients led to processes of fragmentation of the ego, thus impairing the exercise of these ego functions. Again, this may have been a decisive factor in the occurrence of active PTSD symptomatology. Furthermore, the primary process (psychosis) may have uncovered the core memories of the traumatic experience and prevented the possibility of masking. One of our patients only described a cannibalistic experience during extreme starvation in the Theresienstadt concentration camp when in the manic-psychotic phase of his bipolar disorder. While euthymic or depressed, he was unable to recall or recollect this experience. Our sample demonstrates a relative preponderance of intrusive symptomatology versus avoidant features. This finding may also be related to the disorganizing effect of psychosis on the ego.

Conclusion

Our findings show that the comorbidity of psychosis and PTSD in Holocaust survivors leads to a lifelong debilitating illness. Nonpsychotic survivors usually succeeded in achieving a sense of integrity through "historicizing" their memories (establishing a continuity between early, positive pre-Holocaust memories, through traumatic memories during the Holocaust and memories of reestablishing the fabric of life in the post-Holocaust period). In contrast, the psychotic survivors were unable to reach this equilibrium and, for them, memory is a lifelong burden.

Selected abbreviations and acronyms

IES

Impact of Event Scale

PTSD

posttraumatic stress disorder

R-PTSD

Revised Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (inventory)

SCID

Schizophrenia Clinical Interview for Diagnosis

REFERENCES

1. Saigh PA., Bremner JD. The history of posttraumatic stress disorder. In: Saigh PA, Bremner JD, eds. [ Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Comprehensive Text. New York, NY: Allyn & Bacon. 1998:1-17. Google Scholar]

3. Andreasen NJC. Posttraumatic stress disorder In: Kaplan HI, Sadock BJ, eds. [ Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry. Baltimore, Md: Williams & Wilkins. 1985:918-924. Google Scholar]

6. Zohar J., Sasson Y., Amital D., lancu I., Zinger Y. Current diagnostic issues and epidemiological insights in PTSD. CNS Spectrum. [ Google Scholar]

34. Searles HF. The fear of change. In: Searles HF, ed. [ Google Scholar]

35. Auerhahn NC., Laub D. Annihilation and restoration: post-traumatic memory as pathway and obstacle to recovery. [ Google Scholar]

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Lifelong posttraumatic stress disorder: evidence from aging Holocaust survivors

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Despite the fact that 50 years have passed since the Nazi regime and the Holocaust the psychic sequelae are far from being overcome. The majority of Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans still list their experiences as the "most significant ...

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Students can learn about learned behaviors and PTSD from traumatic events from a Holocaust survivor herself.
**Trigger warning: There is graphic information in this video and teachers must use discretion in using this video in the classroom.

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Living 70 Years with PTSD After Surviving the Holocaust (And Still Holding on to Hope)

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Below, I have highlighted some amazing scientists that were affected by the Holocaust--either forced to emigrate after losing their jobs or sadly murdered at the hands of Nazis. For each scientist, I have written a brief description of their scientific achievement(s), the unit/lesson I would highlight them in, and a resource for students to learn more about this person.

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Leonore Rachelle Brecher was a scientist who studied botany and zoology in the early 1900s. She is credited on over 20 scientific publications. She worked in several prestigious universities but was eventually denied employment as Nazi powers arose in Europe. When Germany and Austria merged, Brecher was listed as "non-Aryan" and eventually sent to Maly Trostinec where she was executed essentially upon arrival.

Teachers can highlight Brecher's life and work when studying MS-LS1-5 of the NGSS using her work on the development of pupa coloration on different colored backgrounds.

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Teachers can spark discussion about the ethics of using data collected by Nazi doctors in their experiments.

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The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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Gustav Gellner was a military doctor for Austria who was an expert in epidemiology, infectious disease, and microbiology. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and subsequently died while imprisoned in a concentration camp. Teachers could connect his work to the infectious disease unit in the beginning of this Padlet, or introduce his work with bacteriology in lessons associated with MS-LS1-1 and MS-LS1-2 of the NGSS.
*This resource will need to be translated and can be translated via Google.

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Gustav Gellner (8. prosince 1871 Mladá Boleslav - 8. ledna 1943 Terezín) byl český lékař židovského původu, epidemiolog a historik lékařství.

Život a dílo

Narodil se do asimilované židovské rodiny Karla Gellnera a Gabriely, roz. Fischerové (sám Gustav Gellner roku 1902 přestoupil k římskokatolické církvi). Měl dva bratry a sestru, přičemž bratr František Gellner byl básníkem. Gustav absolvoval roku 1890 mladoboleslavské gymnázium, poté se zapsal na lékařskou fakultu UK, odkud přešel na lékařskou fakultu Vídeňské univerzity, kde roku 1897 získal titul doktora medicíny (MUDr.). Následně se stal vojenským lékařem a tuto praxi vykonával až do svého penzionování roku 1930.

Během první světové války zabránil vypuknutí epidemie cholery v pevnosti Josefov, za což získal Řád rakouského Červeného kříže. Velel také nemocnici v Přemyšlu, poté byl velitelem zdravotní kolony 55. pěší divize na italské frontě a konec války zažil na západní frontě. Během té doby získal rytířský Řád Františka Josefa s meči, Signum laudis a další vyznamenání. Poté Gustav Gellner vstoupil do vznikajícího československého vojska, sloužil postupně v Bohumíně, Šternberku a především v olomoucké vojenské nemocnici na Klášterním Hradisku, kde byl od roku 1927 velitelem.

Odborně se Gustav Gellner věnoval epidemiologii, nakažlivým onemocněním, mikrobiologii a sérologii. S J. Kabelíkem publikoval studii k sérologii na počátku tuberkulózy a za studii o profylaxi infekčních chorob získal cenu Vojenského ústavu vědeckého. Od roku 1925 začal také studovat historii na brněnské filozofické fakultě, kde roku 1931 získal titul doktora filosofie (PhDr.). To již jeden rok žil na odpočinku v Brně a věnoval se zejména historii lékařství. Publikoval spisy Nemoc Ladislava Pohrobka (1934) a Životopis lékaře Borbonia a výklad jeho deníků (1938), také dvě menší studie Jan Černý a jiní lékaři do konce doby Jagellonské (1935) a Zemský lékař na Moravě, Tomáš Jordán z Klausenburku (1936).

Po německé okupaci se přestěhoval do Prahy a pokračoval ve výzkumu, bádal v knihovnách a archivech, protože měl v úmyslu zpracovat zbývající materiál k tématu pobělohorského lékařství v českých zemích, resp. k výuce lékařství na olomoucké univerzitě. Ovšem dne 21. září 1942 byl zatčen gestapem a v listopadu odvezen do Malé pevnosti Terezín, kde začátkem následujícího roku na následky věznění zemřel. Jeho manželka Marie (roz. Löwyová, svatba roku 1901) spolu s dcerou Alžbětou zahynuly později v Osvětimi. Syn Jan včas emigroval a ve druhé světové válce bojoval v 311. československé peruti RAF, později za RCAF. Roku 1947 udělila Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity Gustavu Gellnerovi venia docendi pro dějiny lékařství in memoriam.

Odkazy

Reference

Literatura

LINHARTOVÁ, Věra. MUDr. et PhDr. Gustav Gellner, doc., in memoriam. Universitas. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2006, roč. 39, čís. 4, s. 56-58. Dostupné online. ISSN 1211-3384.

Externí odkazy

v Souborném katalogu ČR, jejichž autorem nebo tématem je Gustav Gellner

Gustav Gellner v Encyklopedii dějin města Brna

Gustav Gellner v Biografickém slovníku Historického ústavu Akademie věd ČR

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About Gustav Gellner: Lékař a historik lékařství (1871 - 1943) | Biography, Facts, Career, Wiki, Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gustav Gellner (8. prosince 1871 Mladá Boleslav - 8. ledna 1943 Terezín) byl český lékař židovského původu, epidemiolog a historik lékařství. Narodil se do asimilované židovské rodiny Karla Gellnera a Gabriely, roz. Fischerové (sám Gustav Gellner roku 1902 přestoupil k římskokatolické církvi). Měl dva bratry a sestru, přičemž bratr František Gellner byl básníkem.

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What has medicine learned from the Nazis?

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A lot, some of it salutary. In the 1920s, German scientists correctly picked up on x-rays as a possible source of genetic damage. In the same decade they also launched a huge campaign against tobacco, condemning it as a "plague" and "lung masturbation", according to Robert N Proctor, the historian, in his book The Nazi War on Cancer.