Current dissertations

Institute of History, Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine

Doctoral candidate

Katharina Urfa

Title of the dissertation

Between fertility and forced sterilization : observations on research on women to strengthen the national body during National Socialism, exemplified by the publications of the physicians Stieve, Mayer and Seitz in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift and Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift

Abstract

A central point of National Socialist ideology was the plan to strengthen and expand the German people and the Aryan race. The deportation and systematic murder of the Jews was only part of the perfidious plan. On the other hand, medical research was promoted in this area and often fatal experiments were carried out on concentration camp inmates or examinations of murdered or executed persons.

Medical journals have been important media for medical communications since their inception. As medical journals, they help the exchange of knowledge within a specialist department, and as medical weeklies, they also help interdisciplinary communication. However, they not only serve to disseminate new scientific findings, but also form an important control body for maintaining clean and ethically impeccable research. Not only the scrutiny of the content, but also of the experimental design and in particular the selection of test subjects or research objects is one of the tasks of the publishers, but also of the readership.

The exchange of knowledge via medical journals was also maintained during the National Socialist regime. However, it is questionable whether they also fulfilled their control function during this time, or whether they also fell into the mills of the inhuman research efforts of the Nazi regime and ethical concerns in dealing with work on concentration camp inmates or prisoners remained unspoken.

This work deals in particular with the question of whether the three gynecologists Hermann Stieve, August Mayer and Ludwig Seitz openly wrote about their research on women who fell victim to the fascist regime in their publications in the major medical journals, the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift and Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift, in order to use their findings not only to advance medical research but also to promote the strengthening of the German "national body".

Those responsible for the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime had to answer for their actions at the Nuremberg Trials. As part of these negotiations, the Nuremberg Code was drawn up, which is regarded as the basis of the later Declaration of Helsinki, which sets out internationally recognized rules and responsibilities that are intended to ensure ethically clean work with human subjects today.