Historical story

"If we avoid too drastic descriptions, the genocide organized by the Germans will fade away." Interview with Bartosz T. Wieliński, author of the book "Hitler's Doctors' War"

The lust for power and the sense of impunity in Nazi Germany created a state program of murdering disabled children and euthanizing sick people, and then opened the way to bestial experiments on concentration camp prisoners. In the book "Hitler's Doctors War" Bartosz T. Wieliński describes the operation of the deadly machine of the Nazi system.

Anna Jankowiak:Your latest book, Hitler's Doctors War, has just been released. It is an extremely moving story about Nazi doctors and the medical experiments they carried out. What prompted you to take up such a difficult and difficult topic?

Bartosz T. Wieliński: As a journalist of "Gazeta Wyborcza" dealing with Germany, I often write about the Second World War, Adolf Hitler, his close and further surroundings. And, of course, about German crimes and the perpetrators:those direct and those who acted from behind the desk. I am constantly looking for new threads, new stories, untold heroes that could tell the story of a criminal war from a different perspective.

The text about the conflict of Adolf Hitler's closest doctors was to be a typical newspaper story for 20,000. characters that would appear in Ale Historia, the magazine Wyborcza. However, there were far too many connections and threads to consummate this topic in a press fashion. I decided to tell this story in detail. It was a five-year journey through Hitler's mansions and his field quarters, offices of Nazi notables, death hospitals, and concentration camps. I was able to visit most of these places.

The reader of your book struggles with many emotions - from sadness and compassion, through indignation and anger. When you write and collect information on such topics, you spend much longer in the brutal world of concentration camps. How do you deal with the emotions that accompany it?

Two years ago, this is the exact question I asked Jens Rommel, the German prosecutor who pursues living concentration camp guards and brings them to justice. He dealt with genocide every day. He told me that he was saved by the fact that the photos taken in the concentration camps were black and white. This lack of colors allows you to keep your distance from this cruel world and keep your mental balance. I think it was so in my case.

Brandt eagerly set about cleansing the Third Reich of "worthless life" - the operation went down in history as T4 operation and it is estimated that it claimed up to 250,000 lives.

I tried to describe the crimes without resorting to euphemisms, but to present this hell in detail. I think we owe it to the victims. If we resort to simplifications and avoid overly drastic descriptions, the genocide organized by the Germans will fade away. But in order to describe a topic in detail, it must be studied in detail. As I was researching the book, there were weeks when I dreamed about concentration camps every day. In black and white.

How the work of the foreign correspondent of "Gazeta Wyborcza" influenced your approach to the subject of war?

The Second World War is an extremely important element of the public debate in Germany. What country and what kind of society Germany is today is precisely the result of this catastrophe, this fall of their nation. As a correspondent, I came into contact with it constantly. And I wrote about it all the time.

It's not just about guilt or memory. The effects of the war influence German foreign policy, the economy, even the language . On my shelf I have a dictionary of words marked with the stigma of Nazism, such as "final victory" or "degenerate art", which are not used in public circulation.

Bartosz Wieliński in his book "Hitler's Doctors' War", which has just been published by Agora, follows the fate of two doctors closest to Hitler, as well as many key figures of the Nazi medical community.

Among Polish journalists dealing with Germany, it is common to play the role of a judge who settles accounts and reproaches Germany, for example, for unsuccessful denazification, too little knowledge about Polish war victims, a discussion about whether Germans were also victims of the war. I avoid this attitude. I try to understand the processes and explain them.

Which of the events you describe do you most remember? Could you please tell our readers about it?

In 2014, before the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, I went to the island of Sylt to do a material about the mayor of one of the towns on it - the city of Westerland. The mayor's name was Heinz Reinefahrth, was an SS general during the war, he drowned the Warsaw Uprising in his blood, and was responsible for the slaughter of Wola. And after the war, protected by American and British intelligence, it worked in peace as a local politician in northern Germany.

I was on my way to Sylt to ask people if they knew what their former mayor had done and how they got on with it. I was convinced that all doors would be locked, that in the town hall they would throw me down the stairs. It turned out to be quite the opposite, city politicians were open to the conversation and honestly admitted that they were ashamed not only for the crimes of Reinefarth, but also for being silent about them in the city of Westerland for so many years.

A plaque devoted to the Polish victims with a request for forgiveness was hung on the town hall, the mayor of Westerland gave a moving speech in Warsaw at the commemoration of the anniversary of the uprising.

One of the main themes of "Hitler's Doctors War" is the rivalry between the two adjutants of "patient A". We are talking about Karl Brandt and Theo Morell. The scope of their activities and the ruthlessness they demonstrated during this period go beyond the limits of morality. And although evil is hard to grade, did you think any of them was worse and more cruel?

Morell was only interested in money. He was used to luxuries and wanted to maintain this standard of living. Brandt wanted, above all, unlimited power. And he also wanted to go down in the history of medicine as the one who set a new direction for it. Święta believed that the state had the right to "relieve", or murder unproductive individuals , and that prisoners can even be used for brutal experiments, because they will die in a concentration camp anyway, so thanks to the experiments, their deaths will not be wasted.

Therefore, this handsome, capable doctor was definitely a darker character.

World War II was a time when a lot of scientific research was carried out. What impact do you think they have had on the development of medicine?

Very high, as evidenced by the interest of the American intelligence in German scientists who took part in them. Operation Paperclip, aimed at shelling out and taking the best German experts to the US, did not only concern rocket designers such as Wernher von Braun, but also doctors who tested the resistance of the human body to changes in pressure, hypoxia or low temperature on KL Dachau prisoners. It was they who became the fathers of space medicine.

After the war, the German medical community disobeyed them, falsely claiming that pseudoscientific research had been conducted on camp prisoners. However, that was not true.

Most of the studies have been conducted with concentration camp prisoners who were treated as "guinea pigs". Neither their lives nor the suffering to which they were exposed were cared for. Many of the discoveries made at that time pushed the development of medicine forward, and their results allow us to save human lives until today. How do you think that these issues should be approached today?

We will not change history, but we cannot forget it. Or to pretend nothing happened. In renowned German scientific institutions, two generations of doctors conducted research on preparations made by prof. Julius Hallervorden, a neuropathologist cooperating with the organizers of the T4 campaign, who chose children with diseases interesting from his point of view in psychiatric hospitals.

Karl Brandt followed Hitler like a shadow.

The children were then murdered, and shortly thereafter he would take out their skulls and make preparations from them. The scientists who were in charge of the collection left by Hallervorden were deaf to the arguments that it was not right to work on the remains of the victims of the totalitarian state.

Could you tell us something about the role of women in medicine at that time? Most of them were relegated to the role of wives and mothers, whose only task was to extend the nation. In your book, however, you mention a breakthrough moment when women also began to deal with medicine. Some even with much more determination than their colleagues.

The Third Reich was a country of misogynists. The role of a woman was reduced to giving birth to children and taking care of the family. Only men controlled the state, only those around him knew that Hitler had a partner. The Germans found out about Ewa Braun only after the war.

Therefore after Hitler took power, women were removed from the medical profession. Only those who were unmarried could remain doctors. The situation changed only when it turned out during the war that thousands of doctors were appointed to the ranks of the Wehrmacht to deal with wounded soldiers, so there was no one to treat civilians. At that time, women were re-admitted to the profession and they were selflessly replacing doctors. This decision, however, did not change the anti-woman policy in the Third Reich. She was a necessity-dictated exception.

In the years 2005–2009 you were the foreign correspondent of "Gazeta Wyborcza" in Berlin. I can't help but ask you what it is like to interview Angela Merkel?

Angela Merkel practically does not give interviews to foreign journalists. I tried to get an audience for several years and I probably touched upon all the contacts in Berlin that were available to me. I went to the interview with the Chancellery, remembering the text from the weekly "Der Spiegel" from 2005, in which I read that there was a portrait of Empress Catherine the Great in her office.

I wanted to base my conversation on this, to ask how the Russian monarch who buried the First Polish Republic could be a point of reference for her. Unfortunately, a hideous portrait of Chancellor Adenauer hung over her desk as a frame. The conversation took a different course. Merkel knows how to charm her guests. She talked a lot about the fact that she liked Poland very much. She is retiring this year and I think - looking at her potential successors - that Polish politicians will miss her a lot.

Finally, I would like to ask you about your plans for the future. Can we expect another book in the near future?

I decided to take a break from the Third Reich for a while. Maybe I can find a topic from the Cold War period?

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Bartosz Wieliński in his book "Hitler's Doctors' War", which has just been published by Agora, follows the fate of two doctors closest to Hitler, as well as many key figures of the Nazi medical community.

You can read an excerpt from this tense and chilling book HERE.