German science elite apologizes for Nazi medical experiments
By Tony Czucka, Associated Press Writer

BERLIN

Grisly medical experiments and killings carried out in the name of German science rank among the most horrific crimes committed under Hitler's Third Reich. But only now has Germany's elite scientific club apologized to the victims, coming clean on the role played by doctors such as the Auschwitz "Angel of Death," Josef Mengele.

In a powerful gesture nearly six decades later, one of Germany's most respected scientific organizations invited former victims to attend a reconciliation ceremony this month at the site of a Nazi- era research institute that Mengele supplied with blood and body parts from death camp inmates.

Leaders of the Max Planck Society viewed an apology as overdue after recent investigations of its own corroborated close - even enthusiastic - links between leaders of its predecessor, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and the Nazi regime.

"I am shocked at how leading scientists of their time gave support to this criminal ideology of a master race," Max Planck Society president Hubert Markl said in an interview.

"As a biologist myself, I find that impossible to grasp, again and again."

Markl, who was six when World War II ended, is the driving force behind the investigation by an independent panel of historians - not only to beg forgiveness for the victims, he said, but because "we owe it ourselves as well as the generations to come to no longer attempt to avoid the necessary investigation into the truth."

Pseudo-scientific research carried out by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Germany during World War II is a catalogue of horrors, turning a club founded in 1911 that once boasted Albert Einstein as a member, into an accomplice in the Holocaust.

It started with twisted ideas of "racial hygiene" espoused by some of its leading lights. Those theories gave the Nazis scientific justification for forced sterilization, forced abortions and "euthanasia" - the killing of the retarded, handicapped and others deemed a burden on the national gene pool - after Hitler seized power in 1933.

When the Nazis set up concentration camps during World War II, researchers working under the society's umbrella also began receiving organs of camp victims used as human guinea pigs. The Nazis hoped the research would lead to medical advances that would help them build a master race.

While postwar Germany has done much to atone for the Holocaust, Markl said the scientific community has never made such a dramatic gesture acknowledging its role.

He felt it was now time for a gesture more powerful than another plaque outside a building, a meaningful act that would cleanse the reputation of German science and bequeath "the historic truth" to future generations.

Addressing the victims during the June 7 gathering, he expressed "deepest regret, compassion and shame at the fact that crimes of this sort were committed, promoted, and not prevented within the ranks of German scientists."

Leading German scientists "cooperated in the preparation of Nazi crimes, and they used them to pursue their scientific goals beyond every moral boundary of humanity," he said.

One of Mengele's surviving victims, Eva Mozes Kor, described her ordeal in harrowing detail to the Berlin audience, which included many scientists.

Deported from her native Romania, her Jewish family was separated at the Auschwitz arrival ramp by Mengele. Kor, then 10, and her twin sister Miriam were pulled aside by SS guards because Mengele was fascinated by research on twins. The rest of her family perished in the gas chambers.

"Without warning or explanation he ripped Miriam and me away from mother," she recalled. "Our screaming and begging fell on deaf ears."

Along with other victims of Nazi experiments, she was kept in a rat-infested barracks and sent for regular sessions in Mengele's lab, where she was injected with germs and had her blood taken. At one point, she got such high fever she thought she would die.

"Had I died, Mengele would have also killed Miriam with an injection to the heart and performed comparative autopsies on our bodies," she said. "That is how most of the twins died."

Of some 1,500 pairs of twins who underwent Mengele's experiments, less than 200 victims are believed to have survived, said Kor, who heads a support group for survivors in her home town of Terre Haute, Ind.

Especially damning for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society are links between Mengele and Otmar von Verschuer, who headed its Nazi-era Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin.

The Max Planck Society says its new findings show that Verschuer, who was Mengele's doctoral adviser in the 1930s, "knew of the crimes committed at Auschwitz and, together with several aides and colleagues, used them for his purposes" by working with organs from Auschwitz victims.

Markl, whose largely government-funded group employs 3,000 scientsts at institutes across Germany, expects a final report on the German scientific community's darkest past in 2004. Topics still being researched include scientists' role in Nazi military programs.

The impetus to face the past came from Markl's memory of the 1950s and 1960s, when many Nazi-era intellectuals and officials - including some leading scientists - again held top positions in postwar Germany.

"I experienced how a lot was concealed then, and it bothered me," he said in the interview. "Now I'm in a position to do something about it."

© The Associative Press

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