Some of the trials involved tests of the drug sulfanilamide, a potent anti-bacterial treatment that derived from the research at the giant German drug manufacturer Bayer. Children were deliberately infected with tuberculosis and they were then submitted to surgery for the removal of lymph nodes, both with and without drug treatment, to observe the progress of the disease or the possible success or failure of treatment. The experiments were taking place at the Neuengamme concentration camp, near Frankfurt, and as the Allied forces approached in the closing months of the war, all the surviving children were murdered — along with their carers — in an effort to keep the nature of the experiments secret.
The experiments on human victims gave results that were (and still are) used to understand the dangers facing high-altitude pilots and troops in extreme conditions. There was a wanton disregard for the human rights of the subjects in all all those medical trials — not simply because the doctors were intent on cruelty, but as part of the nationalist culture. Hitler’s creed was based on the inherent superiority of the Aryan race. There are many repercussions of these German medical experiments in the modern world. White phosphorus has been widely used in recent conflicts, including the attacks on Fallujah, Iraq, by United States troops from 2004, and again in Afghanistan in 2009. It caused widespread injuries to civilians. In their attacks in south Lebanon and in Gaza, Israeli troops have fired shells of white phosphorus causing terrifying injuries to the civilian population, and Saudi aircraft have been reported to have used phosphorus shells in attacks against Houthi fighters in northern Yemen in 2009. The position is interesting in international law, since the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which came into force in 1978, included a protocol banning the use of all incendiary attacks against civilians. The Israelis have never signed this agreement, and in any event the United States sanctions the use of white phosphorus as a means of illuminating a war zone at night. They state that there is no prohibition of this deployment of ‘flare’ (as phosphorus is known by the American military) and the burning of civilians is thus taken as an incidental side effect, and not the prime purpose.
We now have an extensive understanding of the effect of hypothermia on the human body which is widely published and universally consulted — and all of it stems directly from the medical experiments in Nazi Germany. The United States also has the detailed results from the Japanese medical experiments, but has kept them classified so they remain truly secret weapons to the present day. The legal position remains unclear; when the 23 German medical staff were prosecuted in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Trial’ in 1946–47 they argued that there was no international convention covering medical experimentation.
The prosecution by the Allies of the German experimenters offers a revealing comparison to the way the Japanese were treated by the United States. Whereas Dr Shiro Ishii lived on to die of natural causes, protected through secrecy by the United States, the aim of the Allies with the Nazi perpetrators was to bring them to trial. Some were — those tried at Nuremberg were widely publicized as being the guilty men who were to suffer for their crimes. However, many of the scientists and doctors whose work might prove to be of value to the West were secretly taken to American institutes with their falsified papers and encouraged to continue working for the other side. Josef Mengele responded to the approach of Allied forces by moving to a camp in Lower Silesia and then to the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in what is now the Czech Republic. Eventually he was apprehended and arrested by the United States military but they concluded that he had no special knowledge of interest to America, and need not be detained further. In June 1945 he was suddenly released and provided with papers under the name Fritz Hollmann. Under instructions to lie low, he worked as a farmhand until he was able to secure transport to Buenos Aires, Argentina. To this day I have found an acceptance in that fine city of former Nazi officials, many of whom fled there after the war. A number of prominent Nazis also fled to nearby Paraguay, whose leader was of German descent and who involved them in the modernization of the country. Mengele began life in South America as a construction worker but — as more German escapees arrived and befriended him — he quickly rose to the position of co-owner of the Fadro pharmaceutical company. Teams of Israelis went out to find him and capture him to face trial, so he later moved to a bungalow in a suburb of São Paulo, Brazil, for the last years of his life. Shortly before Mengele’s death by drowning while on holiday in 1979, he met his son for the first time as an adult and explained that he remained steadfast to his Nazi beliefs, and insisted that he had never harmed anyone in his life. There have since been reports that he continued his medical experimentation in South America for many years.
The use of results from human experimentation against prisoners is controversial at best. Yet there had long been examples of top-secret human experimentation of this sort in the United States, albeit on a far more modest scale. During the 1930s experiments were carried out in which people were unwittingly injected with cancer cells and injected with radioactive nucleotides, and in Alabama 400 black workers were experimentally injected with syphilis, while in Iowa 22 orphans were put under such intense psychological distress that they were experimentally turned from being normal children into stuttering, quivering victims. The United States Army infected 40 °Chicago prisoners with malaria, without their knowledge or consent.
When the war began, top-secret medical research gained pace. The Chemical Warfare Service carried out tests with poison gases that could be used in secret weapons (Lewisite and mustard gas) on 4,000 unwitting young soldiers. During the development of the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project, plutonium was injected into soldiers. It is unlikely that they understood the risks, and three became seriously ill. One died.
Late in the war years, the University of Chicago Medical School organized the injection of malaria into mental patients at Illinois State Hospital, and the University of Rochester organized more trials with plutonium being injected into the veins of prisoners. The malaria research continued in Atlanta, with 800 prisoners being infected, and at the Argonne National Laboratories, Illinois, radioactive arsenic was injected in order to study how this element was eliminated from the body.
The most important medical research in the wartime United States was purely beneficial, however. It brought penicillin into widespread use for the treatment of bacterial infections and this launched the present-day era of antibiotic therapy. The antibiotics had been discovered in England, but little had been done by the British to realize their potential as an agent of treatment. It was American enterprise and scientific skill that would bring this from a laboratory curiosity into a therapeutic agent that would save countless millions of lives.
The British were among the nations that, when war broke out, had large stockpiles of chemical weapons ready for use. Germany and the Allies both knew how poison gases had been a dominant factor in World War I, and each played a waiting game with the other. Undoubtedly there would have been no reluctance to use these dreadful devices, if the other side had done so first. The only reason gas war did not break out was because of this tactical stalemate; it was not because of principle. From the outbreak of war, the British were all equipped with gas masks and were told to keep them handy. Just as present-day youngsters carry a lunchbox to school, children in wartime Britain ran to school clutching their gas masks in their hands. There were regular drills in how to use them, and practices of mustering in the air-raid shelters hastily constructed in the school yard, every week. The threat of these secret weapons was ever present.