2023-08-30 03:01:34
Joachim Mrugowsky was a doctor who during the Hitler years carried out human experiments and boasted of having arrived at a new conception of science.
At the age of 25, Joachim Mrugowsky received his doctorate in natural sciences and, in the field of medicine, specialized in neurology, communing with so-called alternative medicine, being relentless in criticizing the mechanistic medical concepts that prevailed at the time. He was a pioneer of holistic medicine, he considered the natural capacities of the human organism for its own healing. He was considered one of the foremost authorities on “human heredity and racial hygiene.”
At the same time that he graduated as a doctor, he enrolled in the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, with membership number 210049. He made a military career reaching the rank of colonel, and serving as director of the Waffen SS Institute of Hygiene, the group of shock of the Nazi Party created by Heinrich Himler and that with its 35 divisions came to commit all kinds of atrocities and war crimes, being sentenced en bloc at the Nuremberg Trials. Mrugowsky was responsible for implementing the use of Cyclone-B gas in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, as well as for some of the most horrifying experiments ever perpetrated on human beings.
Numerous psychiatrists have tried to unravel the enigma of how so many doctors were able to push the ethical frontiers of their profession to make their Hippocratic Oath compatible with the criminal practice of experimenting on human beings, to investigate the levels of suffering they are capable of enduring or the delirious genetic search for specimens of greater racial purity. Of this, Joachim Mrugowsky is an extreme example.
Mrugowsky was not alone in his practice of medicine. Victor von Weizsäcker, pioneer in the field of psychosomatic diseases and one of the founders of anthropological medicine. He directed the Breslau Institute for Neurological Research from 1941 to 1945, and the Breslau Military Hospital. At both medical institutions, the brains of Jewish children were examined for traces that scientifically fueled racial prejudice. When in 1933 the National Socialist regime ordered the public burning of books, von Weizsäcker suggested numerous works to throw on the pyre, among others, The Future of an Illusion, a book by Sigmund Freud. Von Weizsäcker pointed out the need to compulsively sterilize those considered socially useless. When he was tried at Nuremberg, he sought to scientifically draw a distinction between the murder and what he claimed to have done: “Scientific studies on worthless bodies of human beings.” With this conception of medicine, it is not surprising that von Weizsäcker considered Joachim Mrugowsky one of the most distinguished scientists of his time.
The thousands of prisoners in the concentration camps of the Third Reich were raw material of insurmountable value for Joachim Mrugowsky to advance his theories. Those defenseless and suffering bodies were subjected to all kinds of tests. In the Sachsenhausen prison camp, Mrugowsky suggested an execution with aconitine-poisoned ammunition to test how sodium channels in nerve and muscle cells opened. The doctor recorded the experiment this way: “One of the poisoned tried in vain to vomit. To achieve this, he placed four fingers of his hand joint-deep at the back of his mouth. Despite this, he was unable to vomit… Motor restlessness later increased violently… Death came 121, 123 and 129 minutes after receiving the injection”.
Joachim Mrugowsky was one of twenty-three defendants in the Doctors’ Trial, one of twelve trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity held after the end of World War II. He was accused of planning and carrying out inhumane and degrading medical experiments and mass murder. He was 42 years old when he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on June 2, 1948.
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