Medical School and Medical Training Under the Nazis
On paper, medical training under the Nazis differed little from that of the pre-Nazi era. However, its fundamental spirit was ruinously distorted and medical standards suffered a dismal decline.
Medical students had to be “Aryan,” and were required to belong to the National Socialist Students’ League. The students’ entire course of studies was constantly interrupted by the demands of the various party organizations to which they were forced to belong. A student whose knowledge of the racial theories and Nuernberg laws was not sufficient would fail his medical examinations.
Chairs in the universities were filled in many cases by Nazi so-called “professors” who might or might not have a scientific background. The true scientific societies under the Nazi regime became less and less active, and the Nazi professors in the universities devoted more time and interest to their SA or SS organizations than to the teaching of medicine. These Nazi professors would don their brown SA or black SS uniforms on all possible occasions, exchanging them proudly for their academic gowns at all academic celebrations and meetings.
The worst Nazi politicians, like Streicher, were given the free run of university clinics, such as at Erlangen. This submissiveness to lay politicians led to a general decline of respect for German academic medicine not only on the part of their own public and abroad but even on the part of the very same politicians before whom they kowtowed. This went so far that Streicher, when addressing a full faculty meeting at the University of Erlangen in 1936, called the assembled professors “complete idiots” to their faces. This was by no means an isolated occurrence.
Particularly deplorable was the degradation of psychiatry. Psychiatric university teaching declined to the level of a mere rehashing of the Nuernberg and sterilization laws. The modern techniques of psychotherapy had been abandoned, and treatment deteriorated to pep talks full of Nazi indoctrination admonitions and threats. No wonder that these methods backfired against the best interest of the German war effort which they were foolishly intended to serve. The lack of proper understanding and treatment of German soldiers who developed combat fatigue or neuroses, on the part of their own medical personnel, drove many of them to surrender to the enemy; efforts to rehabilitate them and restore them to duty were frustrated by the ruinous infusion of Nazi doctrine.
Summary
The general decline of German medical conduct and the poisoning of German medical ethics which the Nazis brought about laid the basis for the atrocious experiments of which the defendants are accused.
Many of these were experiments in name only; we will show them to have been senseless and clumsy and of no real value to medicine as a healing art. The Nazi medical world was flooded with preposterous and wicked notions about superior and inferior races and developed a perverted moral outlook in which cruelty to subjugated races and peoples was praiseworthy. Training in SA and SS formations was hardly calculated to develop physicians who could comprehend even the bare elements of the doctor-patient relationship. In this noxious garden of lies, the seeds of the experiments were planted. In the climate of Nazi Germany, they grew with horrible rapidity.