Angrily, the SS guard kicked the chair away from under the man to be hanged. His friend turned to him, took the noose, and, in a remarkable act, kissed his friend’s hand and then put the noose around his own neck. The man couldn’t fulfill the order because his hands were shaking so much with fear and distress. An SS guard ordered the inmate to put a noose around his friend’s neck. There he had to watch while an inmate was forced to hang his friend who had tried to escape. Sadly, there is no shortage of horrific examples, but I have selected just one from the biography of Thomas Buergenthal.4 At just nine year old, Thomas was rounded up with thousands of Jews and taken to Auschwitz. Within this political framework, “using” the inmates of concentration camps as “subjects” in medical research might even have seemed to these doctors to be ethical if it contributed knowledge for the greater good.Ĭruelty for its own sake was a part of ordinary Nazi guards’ behavior. Nazi laws defined Jews as genetically subhuman and ordered their extermination as part of the eugenics program of the time. In practice, the feelings of the subjects in these experiments were of no concern. What these scientists lost sight of, in their quest for knowledge, was the humanity of their “subjects.” It is an irony that the human sciences describe their object of study as “subjects” because this implies sensitivity to the feelings of the person being studied. Goldblatt’s hands back to front may not (I assume) have been motivated to do cruel things for cruelty’s sake: They, too, were presumably following their scientific impulse, wanting to understand how to test the limits of microsurgical procedures. Even the Nazi doctors who had sewn poor Mrs. Let’s assume (generously) that these doctors were not being cruel for the sake of it-that the scientists doing the immersion experiments wanted to contribute to medical knowledge, to know, for example, how to help victims rescued after being shipwrecked in icy seas. These examples are particularly shocking because they involve educated doctors and scientists (professions we are brought up to trust) performing unethical experiments or operations. They collected systematic data on how heart rate correlated with duration of time in the water at zero degrees centigrade.3 Hearing about this unethical research retriggered that same question in my mind: How can humans treat other people as objects?ii How do humans come to switch off their natural feelings of sympathy for another human being who is suffering? He told the students that the best data available on human adaptation to extreme cold had been collected by Nazi scientists performing “immersion experiments” on Jews and other inmates of Dachau concentration camp, whom they put into vats of freezing water (see Figure 1). The professor was teaching about human adaptation to temperature. Years later I was teaching at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. I realized there was a paradox at the heart of human nature-people could objectify others-that my young mind was not yet ready to figure out. Just one of the many “experiments” they had conducted. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them on again so that if she put her hands out palms down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside. He had been introduced to the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. My father also told me about one of his former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt,i whose mother had survived a concentration camp. I knew our family was Jewish, so this image of turning people into objects felt a bit close to home. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true. He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. To a child’s mind (even to an adult’s) these two types of things just don’t belong together. Just one of those comments that you hear once, and the thought never goes away. When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades.
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