Caplan: Beware Holocaust analogies

During his lecture, titled “Bioethics & the Holocaust,” Caplan said that medical experimentation during World War II is often ignored in discussions of bioethics, though the field originated largely in response to Nazi doctors’ atrocities during the war.

Caplan said that many bioethics articles, however, reference the Nuremberg Code, rules governing medical research on humans developed specifically to prevent future instances of the barbaric experiments carried out on concentration camp prisoners.

One reason the bioethics community often ignores the topic of the Holocaust is that it is hard to accept that doctors were so intimately associated with it, with some bioethicists suggesting that only “fringe elements” were involved, Caplan said.

On the contrary, “collaboration between the medical community and the Nazi party was so intimate that if you took away all Nazi doctors, you would have virtually no doctors left,” Caplan said. He gave the example of the German military, which employed many respected scientists to study the effects of extreme pressure and cold on the human body.

To address the disconnect between a profession normally associated with benevolence and the atrocities committed in the name of medicine, some, like psychiatrist Robert Lifton, believe that Nazi doctors developed “split personalities,” Caplan said. One personality allowed them to kill people while on duty, while the other allowed them to go home and play with their children, he explained.

Caplan said that this theory, however, diminishes the doctors’ moral responsibility and ignores ethical implications.

Other doctors did not exhibit this split and did conceive of their work in moral terms, he added, citing Gerhard Rose, the leading doctor on tropical medicine during the war, as an example.

When the German military asked Rose to experiment on concentration camp prisoners to find cures for typhoid and typhus, Caplan explained, Rose refused and was left alone because of his status in Germany.

Support nonprofit student journalism. Donate to the ‘Prince’. Donate now »

Rose was ultimately convinced, however, that experimentation on prisoners who would likely die anyway could lead to lifesaving breakthroughs. Because of this reasoning and his initial refusal, Caplan said, Rose was one of the few doctors not sentenced to hanging at the Nuremberg Trials.

During the trials, doctors justified their experimentation in utilitarian terms, arguing that the inhumane treatment of experimental subjects was subordinate to the greater good of society. As a result, the first principle of the Nuremberg Code requires voluntary consent of the subject before experimentation can begin, Caplan said.

With the context of Nazi experimentation in mind, Caplan explained, comparisons portraying bioethical issues like the Terri Schiavo case as analogous to the Holocaust are inaccurate. “[They] fail to understand the Nazi approach to euthanasia,” he said.

The debate in that case concerned whether Schiavo would have wanted her feeding tube removed or be sustained indefinitely in a persistent vegetative state. Nazi physicians, in contrast to modern bioethicists, did not take issues of patient consent and quality of life into account.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

If people had suggested that Schiavo’s feeding tube be removed because the cost of keeping her alive was harmful to society, Caplan explained, their utilitarianism could have been related to the Nazis’.

Caplan concluded by suggesting a shift in society’s view of medical experimentation during the Holocaust. The focus should not be on the “kooks and crackpots” like Josef Mengele because those were extreme cases, he said.

“At the end of the day, it’s the Gerhard Roses that speak to us more,” he explained. “A lot of normal people — not so different from you and I — ended up in a camp freezing, torturing and blowing up others.”