Lecturing about the Holocaust

This is going to be an atypical post for me but I want to jot down and share some thoughts and feelings I had during the lecture I presented this morning on the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial.

As Professor Zinnikus pointed out to all of us during his lecture, teaching about the Holocaust is troubling and difficult and the way in which an educator presents this gruesome material has to be carefully planned. How one goes about it depends, of course, on who the audience is—Germans or non-Germans, Jews or non-Jews, young people or children or adults, Holocaust survivors or children of survivors, people who already know a great deal of the history and background or people who only know that something terrible happened but do not really know the where, the how, or, most importantly, the why (always the most difficult question of all).

Those of us who teach also cannot help but bring parts of ourselves into the way in which we research and present our material. This does not mean that we lose scientific or historical objectivity and present false or terribly biased information to our students. It does mean that if the material being presented is important to the presenter, then the presenter’s personal history and temperament will factor into how the lecture plays out. I will admit that this “personalization” phenomenon is very true for me, and it is true regardless of the topic I am speaking about, as long as it is a topic about which I care a great deal. I became a biologist because I fell in love with the material, with the information, fairly early in my educational life and it has been a love affair that has, happily, persisted into middle age. How I do biology and what I do as a scientist has changed but my fascination for the phenomena of life remains. And—as all of you have now experienced first hand—I like to talk about it! History, particularly the history of this place we are living in now, has also fascinated me for some time and the opportunity to combine my disciplines of interest, biology/medicine and modern German history, is an opportunity that I am very pleased to have had.

During my talk this morning, I felt quite carried along by my own narrative of the events of the Nazizeit and the details of what the medical professionals in the dock at Nuremberg were being accused of—what, in fact, most of them were convicted of, and for which several were condemned to death and executed. The Doctors' Trial holds a particular fascination for me (and for many other people) because of the fact that, in Germany and the USA and most of the rest of the world today, and in Germany prior to 1933, the prime directive of a doctor’s existence was to save lives, to alleviate suffering, to help people. During the Nazizeit, this credo was corrupted and altered. Doctors under Nazism were responsible not for the health and well being of individuals, but for the health of the Volksgemeinschaft, the people’s community. The collective health of the Volk, the maintenance of the purity of its bloodline, that was important and what happened to individuals much less so. As I explained in my lecture today, to an SS doctor, it was a far more grievous ethical violation to cause pain and suffering to a rat than to a Jew, or a Gypsy, or a Slav, or a homosexual. The data derived from the concentration camp experiments was needed to help save the lives of German pilots and sailors, members of the Volk who were worth saving and needed if the Reich was, in fact, to last 1000 years. The destruction of individual humans who were not part of the Volk was considered not ethically neutral, but ethically mandated. It needed to be done to safeguard the future and strength of the Aryan “race”.

Next week we will travel to Nuremberg and then Munich and we will see some of the actual places where important events of the Nazizeit took place. The same will be true during our time in Berlin the following week. These trips and today’s lecture were not designed to demonize the German people, either the German people of today or even those of that terribly dark time in the history of this country. To do so, to generalize to an entire, heterogeneous group of people is to make the same cataclysmic error as the Nazis.

In the past few weeks I believe all of you have come to like being here, to like the country and to like the people and I hope I’ve made it clear to you that so do I. My first time living in Germany was a life-changing and wonderful experience for me and I jumped at the chance to come back here last summer with the first group of our biomedical science study abroad program. And here I am again, and, if things work out as I hope, here I will be with a new batch of students next summer and so forth.

Yet this is the place and these are the descendants of the people who committed what can only be described as the most horrific crime against humanity in the history of humanity. Six million European Jews out of a total population of about 11 million were exterminated; several hundred thousand Gypsies (Roma and Sinti people) out of a population of perhaps 2 million were killed; 3 million Poles: 20 million Russians; and collectively several millions more. As you have now experienced for yourselves, Germans are both anxious to think about and discuss these things and hesitant and unwilling. The process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past, is a terribly difficult thing for the people here and it includes coming to terms with their own real sense of victim hood. Millions of Germans were killed or died of hunger and disease; millions were displaced from their homes, their country was bombed back into the Stone Age and then divided by her conquerors into two, entirely distinct nations. The people unlucky enough to be living in the east, having survived the Nazi dictatorship, found themselves living in a new fascist state, albeit a fascism of the extreme left rather than the extreme right. Yet, until very recently, it was not acceptable here to really discuss or dwell on the suffering of Germans during and immediately after the war, only on the suffering they imposed on others.

To think about these things, to talk to Germans and others about them, to see the physical places where the important events of those times took place, is, I believe, enormously helpful both to you and to your German friends and acquaintances. It is the only way that a true Vergangenheitsbewältigung can be achieved. Coming to terms with the past is the opposite of forgetting the past—it is understanding the past in a way that lets you interpret and understand the present and, to some extent, predict the future. The doctors convicted at Nuremberg, while they were in my personal opinion, consummately evil men, were nevertheless men. They were not monsters; they were humans who did monstrous things. Men continue to do monstrous things today. This is not “ethical relativism”. I am not equating or even comparing subsequent genocides and crimes against humanity with the Shoah. This sort of comparative analysis strikes me as fraught with all sorts of historical and philosophical perils. What I am saying is that I feel lucky to be able to come here to Germany and study and to then teach you, or rather to help you to learn. I hope, on the one hand, that my lecture today, and some of the places we will soon visit and learn about, do not upset you too much. On the other hand, I hope that they do.