Don’t write off the Ashkenazim
there was little incentive to step outside of that.” One of the most discomforting exhibits is a 1943 copy of The Lancet, discussing research conducted in Buchenwald, which concluded: “We leave our readers to make their own deductions.”
Experiments happened in hospital wards and research centres out in the open, with studies often instigated by scientists. Pharmaceutical companies, industry and the military also benefited, for example Salamander Shoes used prisoners to test the endurance of their wares in Sachsenhausen.
And while some was “mad science”, undertaken seemingly for sadistic pleasure and not properly controlled, other experiments led to breakthroughs. “You had things like the development of lifejackets coming out of Sigmund Rascher’s experiments with people in freezing Among the victims were 25 Britons, including Jews Polish women who survived medical experiments, reunited after the war
water,” explains Schmidt. “It brings up all sorts of ethical questions. Do you use that research, do you start over? Do you recreate the conditions in a more ethical way?”
After the war, the Nuremberg Code was signed, setting out the rights of research subjects to informed consent. “The legacy of the Nazi experiments was not great medical discoveries but the ethical protection of patients,” explains Weindling. “Every time we are asked to give consent, we can be grateful to the protests of victims and fellow prisoners.”
Yet justice was much slower, with post-war Germany reluctant to confront what had happened, and many victims were never compensated (the British Foreign Office also did little to help British victims challenge this).
“When the twins Jona and Miriam Fuchs applied for compensation in 1960 they were rejected,” says Weindling. “The position of the German Ministry of Finance until the revelation that Mengele was dead in 1985 was that a ‘twin experiment’ was anthropological and not medical, and not harmful to health, so no compensation was payable.” Compensation for surviving victims was calculated in terms of loss of earning capacity. “This meant that X-ray sterilisation victims, including many women who did not work outside the home, received only minimal compensation or none at all.”
While some scientists were brought to trial, many were not. Heinrich Gross, who conducted research on children murdered so their bodies could be used for research, became a celebrated forensic psychiatrist. The truth emerged 60 years later, but he was never tried. “He was personally collecting children to be murdered and he continued on with his profession after the war. He was praised for scientific achievements based on material he obtained very problematically,” says Schmidt. “And he walked off scot free.”
Germany’s medical establishment was likewise slow to address its dark past; it was only last year that the influential Max Planck Society acknowledged that its archives contained euthanasia victims’ brain tissue. But in some ways it’s not surprising to learn this; given the scale of what happened and the infrastructure it required, from doctors to nurses to technicians, it’s clear many people who carried on working in the medical establishment after the war must have been involved.
“You had to rebuild the country, there were people who were needed,” says Schmidt. “Right afterwards you had all these survivors of the camps, there had to have been medical staff around and they weren’t all part of the allied troops.”
The extent of collaboration, and the full scale of what happened to the victims, may never be known. In the course of constructing the exhibition, Weindling came across a “new” victim and the likelihood is there are many more to find. This is a story that for years was shrouded in secrecy, perhaps partly because it happened alongside, but apart from the Holocaust, and also because, in the midst of the horror of the Nazi era, some victims may not have known they were being experimented on and understood it only as torture. Others, who underwent procedures like castration, may not have spoken up out of a misplaced sense of shame.
This is the first exhibition the Wiener library has staged to have an age rating (16 plus); as Schmidt says, it’s a subject that was hard for victims to talk about and is hard for people to consider even now. “Most of us trust doctors and look to science to improve our lives,” she says. “In this case, for the idea that it would improve one particular population’s lives other populations were sacrificed. It’s a difficult thing to confront.”
Science + Suffering: Victims and Perpetrators of Nazi Human Experimentation, until 29th September 2017. www.wienerlibrary.co.uk
JUDAISM IS a Middle Eastern religion again, with Israel now the engine of our world religion. In these pages, on June 9, Ben Judah said: “Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaism is, in the greatest sweep of Jewish history, the mainstream. Ashkenazi Judaism was the flickering.”
So was European Jewish history just a passing phase? A curio? Ben has taught me many things in life and is a great friend. But, on this point, I think he overreaches.
There is of course a distinction between European Judaism, which has never fully recovered from the evil of the Holocaust, and Ashkenazi Judaism, perhaps one of the potent and remarkable forces in world history since the emancipation of European Jews began in the 19th century. It has easily outlived its geographical roots.
I’ve never been a great fan of listing Jewish achievements. Regularly tallying up Nobel Prize winners and billionaires is something for only tribally-obsessed Jews and antisemites.
But let’s be clear about what Ashkenazi Jews have achieved in the world, in medicine and media, physics and psychoanalysis, politics and philosophy. Ashkenazi Judaism was born in Eastern Europe, but it did not die there. The culture of learning and ambition came with those who left. Other qualities, adaptability, a strong sense of community, an independence of mind, all travelled with the Ashkenazim out of the ghetto and helped them shake the world.
Ashkenazi Jews helped build New York, where I’m writing this, perhaps the greatest metropolis of modern times. They raised its towers, wrote its novels and sang its songs.
In Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Flushing and Monsey, Charedi communities to rival those of the old country flourish, untouched by pogroms and Cossacks.
Ashkenazim also built Hollywood, the most powerful dream factory in history, still the capital of world cinema. And if you think those are all 20th century achievements, then look no further than Google, Facebook and Snapchat, all the creations of Ashkenazi Jews. In Silicon Valley, they have built the future.
And, of course, they also built much of modern day Israel, forging a remarkably resilient and forward-looking nation state out of the ashes of the 20th century.
Elsewhere in London, Toronto, Cape Town, Chicago, Manchester, Miami, Buenos Aires, Mexico City; Ashkenazim exist at the fulcrum of many great modern societies. You only have to look at decrepit Vienna, which exterminated its own Jewish bourgeoisie, to realise how important a role Jews play in the societies where they are allowed to flourish.
Again, I’m not a fan of Jewbragging, but Ashkenazim have the highest IQ of any large ethnic group in the world. Consequently they will continue to achieve extraordinary things.
Ben is right to point out that Judaism has become far more Middle Eastern since the creation of Israel. And as the years pass, the Poles and Russians who helped create Israel will become ever more Middle Eastern. Increasingly it is a Mizrachi nation.
But the most important thing about Ashkenazi culture is how resilient and durable it is. Israel will always, on some level, be an Ashkenazi country, with a European history to informs its present.
What this really comes down to is how you view the future of the diaspora. In a world where the Jews finally have a flourishing nation state, what purpose does living anywhere else have? Is the state of Israel our eventual destiny? Will the irrepressible logic of Jewish history take us all there eventually?
I think not. The state of diaspora is not just an exilic one. We are not just passing time before eventually returning home: it’s been too long for that. Jews have been in a state of diaspora since the Romans destroyed the second temple. And here’s the thing: we’ve got really good at it. Given our history, life in the diaspora today is a bizarrely safe, comfortable and advantageous way of living
I think there will be Ashkenazi — and indeed Sephardi — communities flourishing in the Western world for as long as Israel flourishes in the Middle East. This duality is, I believe, essential to the thriving of the Jewish people. We must be among the nations and not just a nation on our own.
In the grand sweep of Jewish history, Europe didn’t work out so well in the end. It’s deep-rooted Christianity, ethnic homogeneity and capacity for tribal violence ultimately made it a hostile soil for the Jewish people to take root. But the seeds that were germinated in Poland and Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, Lithuania and Hungary, have scattered around the world and grown into a mighty forest.
Ben is right to celebrate the history of Middle Eastern Judaism and its renewed centrality in the Jewish story. But in celebrating that we mustn’t overcorrect. You never write off the Ashkenazim. We’re not just passing time before going home
Josh Glancy is the Sunday Times’ New York correspondent