4,000 words
(Taken from a guest article written for a school-published science magazine.)
For the people 2.3 billion people living in twenty-first century democracies, science is oft-regarded as an objective discipline, based upon the rigorous pursuit of truth and evidenced observations. But if you took the perspective of a twin during the Holocaust, suffering at the hands of Josef Mengele, or of a Soviet citizen, battling famine as a consequence of mandatory Lysenkoist techniques – this trust in science is in actuality not a universal privilege.
Holocaustic Human Experimentation
One of history’s most known, and most hated, Adolf Hitler bears no introduction. What does need some context, though, is the grave level of human experimentation that the Nazis perpetrated during the Holocaust, mainly directed by SS physician Josef Mengele – let’s start there.
Josef Mengele is described by (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009) as a “highly trained doctor and medical researcher” who was “respected in his field” having earned a PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Munich, began working at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. Throughout his education, Mengele actively embraced racial science, including the false theory of biological racism (believing that Germans were biologically different from, and superior to, members of all other races). Indeed, in his scientific work, he sought to amplify the Nazi cause by increasing the supposed superiority of the German ‘race’ – his employer, too, embraced biological racism, and both provided ‘expert’ opinions to Nazi authorities, and evaluated Germans whose physical or mental condition might qualify them to be forcibly sterilised or barred from marriage under German law.
Following a stint in the German army, in May 1943, Mengele was stationed as a camp physician at Auschwitz-Birkenau – described as “largest of the Auschwitz camps and also served as a killing centre for Jews deported from throughout Europe.” (Ibid.) Mengele had responsibility for Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager (literally, ‘Gypsy camp’), which was populated by nearly 21,000 Romani men, women, and children from 1943. Upon this family camp being liquidated in August 1944, Mengele engaged in selecting the 2,893 Romani prisoners who were to be murdered in the gas chambers – a precursor for his upcoming role in wider Holocaust. It’s fairly well known that the camps operated, in part, as vehicles for forced labour, hence those who could not work were deemed to be of no use to Nazi officials; those designated as such (commonly the disabled, elderly, and young) were tragically murdered in gas chambers, and Mengele even became referred to as an “angel of death” for his role in the “selections”. But this is not the end of the story. Alongside Eduard Wirths, Carl Clauberg, Horst Schumann, Helmut Vetter, and Johann Paul Kremer: Josef Mengele became a member of a team carrying out sickening SS-endorsed human experiments, mainly on twins, and those who weren’t German/Aryan (in the aim of proving theories of biological racism).
In order to explain some of the rationale behind the twin experiments, a quick biology lesson – this is a science magazine after all! Identical twins are not called such without good reason, as monozygotic twins share 100% of their genes (Prescott and Kendler, 1995); hence, any study seeking to investigate purely genetic consequences of a variable can make great use of twins, as there are no biological factors to correct for. This is notable to remember, as there is nothing inherently immoral or unethical about using pairs of twins for scientific investigation, as long as consent is obtained and exploitation does not incur – it goes without saying that neither of those conditions were met in the Nazi experiments – indeed, the study referenced above comments that “because of their unique genetic status, twins play a valuable role in teasing apart genetic and environmental influences on people’s development.” Such methodology is clear in Mengele’s experiments, with (Blakemore, 2019) explaining that he typically “used one twin as a control and subjected the other to everything from blood transfusions to forced insemination, injections with diseases, amputations, and murder. Those that died were dissected and studied; their surviving twins were killed and subjected to the same scrutiny … Eugenicists like Mengele held genetics responsible for undesirable characteristics and social conditions like criminality and poverty. They believed that selective breeding could be used to encourage socially acceptable behaviour and wipe out undesirable tendencies.” I hope the distinction between Nazi human experimentation and contemporary twin studies is clear.
Meet Eva and Miriam Mozes: survivors of the Holocaust, whose lives were changed irrevocably when they were just ten, upon their mother replying “Is that good?” when asked “Are they twins?” by an SS guard. The Mozes twins were one of 1,500 sets of twins (mainly children) who were subject of Mengele’s horrific experiments, whereupon research protocols and medical ethics were utterly abandoned. Eva in particular was forced to sit naked for hours, while having her body repeatedly measured and compared to her sister’s, as well as having to withstand injections of an unknown substance that caused severe reactions. As if that weren’t traumatic enough, the twins also had no idea what was happening to them, with Eva recalling that “As twins, I knew that we were unique because we were never permitted to interact with anybody in other parts of the camp … But I didn’t know I was being used in genetic experiments.” (Blakemore, 2019)
The twin experiments were rooted in eugenics, devised by Frances Galton in 1883, and defined by (National Human Genome Research Institute, 2022) as “an inaccurate theory linked to historical and present-day forms of discrimination, racism, ableism and colonialism.” Galton’s 19th century studies utilised twin studies, and generally drew upon Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection – cue another science interlude! Natural selection is sometimes referred to colloquially as ‘survival of the fittest’, and follows these steps: individuals in a species display ranges of variation caused by differences in genes; those with characteristics most suited to the environment have a greater chance of survival, and thus more chance to reproduce; these characteristics are therefore passed to their offspring, increasing their prevalence in the wider population; over many generations, these beneficial characteristics become the most common and the species changes, or, in other words, evolves. (Darwin, 1859) In accordance with these principles, eugenicists like Galton speculated on whether “desirable” traits like intelligence were genetically passed from parent to offspring in humans, and, if this was the case, they investigated the potential of breeding these genetic traits into humans. One of the big questions in genetics, though, is the balancing roles of genes and environment (think ‘nature vs. nurture’) – for Galton and his successors, twins held the key to identifying which characteristics were genetic and which ones were environmental.
Throughout his “biassed and seriously flawed” research, Frances Galton came to the conclusion that similarities in twins could be attributed to genetics: “The one element that varies in different individuals, but is constant in each of them, is the natural tendency. It inevitably asserts itself.” (Blakemore, 2019) Despite the sketchy methodology, his research spurred on the movement, with twins being dubbed “the most favourable weapons” for the study of the “much-debated nature-nurture problem,” by a group of American researchers in the 1930s (Ibid.) Eugenics severely prospered through twin experiments through the Holocaust – only 200 of the 3,000 twins subjected to medical experiments at Auschwitz survived, and though most records of experimentation at Auschwitz were destroyed, stellar work from the Mozes twins, and their nonprofit Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors, has tracked down more than 100 other twin survivors, to document their experiences, and preserve the hideous history. Importantly, twins were not the only group subjected to human experimentation by Nazi scientists, with other victims including Jewish people, Roma people, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities (among others) – the story of the experiments on non-Aryan folk is what we will now uncover.
Mentioned above, the Zigeunerlager imprisoned nearly 21,000 Romani people, many of whom were to become Mengelian test subjects. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009) describes that “In addition to choosing Roma as subjects for his medical experiments, Mengele conducted an anthropological study of the Roma men, women, and children … [There was an outbreak of] Noma [which] is a bacterial infection that primarily afflicts extremely malnourished children. However, Mengele believed that the Roma children at Auschwitz suffered from Noma because of their heredity rather than because of the conditions at the camp.” Even though the physicians discovered a cure for Noma, all of the children who were cured were murdered in the gas chambers. Moreover, an episode of Netflix’s docuseries ‘World War II: From the Frontlines’ sheds light on the treatment of imprisoned people of colour at the camps; transcribed below is the testimony of Pham Van Kiem, a Vietnamese soldier serving with the French army – it’s translated from French, and the original in the documentary is accompanied with real footage from the camps, it’s heart wrenching, but important and accessible if you want to research further.
“Once we got into the camp, in the barracks, there were many prisoners of all races: Senegalese, Algerians, Morrocans, Tunisians, from all over. [Narrator: ‘the Nazis begin to separate colonial soldiers from other prisoners of war.’] After shaving our heads, we were all given numbers. I didn’t understand why. [Narrator: ‘the Nazis are conducting so-called medical research to advance their racist beliefs’. The screen displays men being compared to skin swatches to record colour, invasive anatomical research, casts being made of faces, and more – description cannot do justice to the horrific scenes.]”
World War II: From the Frontlines, 2023
Despite his atrocious crimes, Mengele evaded arrest for the rest of his life, and was never brought to justice. The only slight glimmer, is that the malpractice of the research that he led did manage to, in part, discredit the field of eugenics. Erin Blakemore writes, “Ironically, the very type of experimentation Nazi physicians thought would uphold the pseudoscience they used to justify genocide ended up undermining the field of eugenics. In the face of unconvincing data revealed by twin studies and worldwide condemnation of Nazi medical experiments, scientists abandoned eugenics en masse and the field died out.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum further concludes that “[Mengele’s] crimes represent the extreme danger posed by science when it is conducted in the service of an ideology that denies the rights, dignity, and even humanity of certain groups of people.” – a potent sentiment which should absolutely not be forgotten as science continues to progress.
Stalinist ‘Science’
Truth is the enemy of the authoritarian state. Unfettered science, thus, cannot be allowed – that was the view of Joseph Stalin, anyway. During his thirty years regime, Stalin had to toe a careful line: a balancing act between utilising science to bring much needed industrial progress to the USSR, and ensuring that scientists didn’t get too comfortable. This balance – in his typical fashion – often relied upon extreme, murderous, force, and negatively impacted the general public.
In fact, in a speech he delivered to his close comrades and higher educational workers, he makes his view clear regarding the policing of science, in order to further the Communist cause while not inhibiting the Soviet state: “To the progress of science, of that science which does not fence itself off from the people and does not hold aloof from them, but which is prepared to serve the people and to transmit to them all the benefits of science, and which does not serve the people under compulsion, but voluntarily and willingly … To the progress of science, of that science whose devotees, while understanding the power and significance of the established scientific traditions and ably utilising them in the interests of science, are nevertheless not willing to be slaves of these traditions; the science which has the courage and determination to smash the old traditions, standards and views when they become antiquated and begin to act as a fetter on progress, and which is able to create new traditions, new standards and new views.” (Stalin on Science, 1946)
As ever, the words of Stalin, a staunch propagandist, must be read with a pinch of salt. Indeed, contrary to his suggestion that the Soviets were advocating for “the science which has the courage and determination to smash the old traditions, standards and views when they become antiquated”, Stalin, a steadfast follower in pseudoscientific Lysenkoist techniques, repeatedly made attacks on modern genetics as well as Western scientific ideas out of sheer principle, both of which exacerbated crises like famine, and inhibited understanding of fields like evolution; in other words, he endeavoured for science that served as little more than a “fetter on progress”. We’ll examine these cases one by one, beginning with Lysenkoism.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) is deemed, by Britanicca, “the controversial ‘dictator’ of Communistic biology during Joseph Stalin’s regime” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.) – and rightly so. Agriculture was in crisis through the 1930s, and Lysenko’s promise of “greater, more rapid, and less costly increases in crop yields” seemed like a golden ticket to Stalin, who instated him as director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, as well as president of the V.I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Contextually, Britannica explain that “by 1948, when education and research in standard genetics were virtually outlawed, some geneticists had suffered secret arrest and death of undisclosed causes … between 1948 and 1953, when [Lysenko] was the total autocrat of Soviet biology, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes.” (Ibid.) Despite being scientifically nonsensical, Lysenko’s conjectural theories that theoretical biology should be fused with Soviet agricultural practice appealed to Stalin on an ideological level, and as such became the singularly allowed mechanism in Soviet farms. The techniques, though, were unsuccessful, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, the measures were abandoned: his ‘grassland’ system of crop rotation was replaced with mineral fertiliser cultivation, and a (USA-inspired) hybrid corn program was implemented across the USSR – a program which Lysenko had previously halted. His legacy was largely dilapidated through Nikita Khrushchev’s premiership, for opposition to his theories was increasingly tolerated, he lost various positions of status, and in 1964 (under Leonid Brezhnev), his doctrines were entirely discredited, and efforts were made toward the reestablishment of orthodox genetics in the Soviet Union – though the situation has still not been fully reconciled.
A report from Peter J. Hotez entitled ‘Anti-science kills: From Soviet embrace of pseudoscience to accelerated attacks on US biomedicine’ gives further details into the effects of Lysenko’s scientific control, as well as wider scientific restraints under Stalin and beyond:
“The intelligentsia was a Great Purge target, as were entire fields of science, including astrophysics, which was ultimately deemed as a “political platform” running counter to Marxism. Another was the field of Mendelian genetics [… which was replaced with Lysenkoist techniques, such as] vernalization [which] was seen as a form of Soviet homegrown science and a source of national pride. Lysenko was able to convince Stalin that genetics was an evil science, much like relativity. Political expediency became the rationale for promoting pseudoscience even if it meant that millions of rural peasants would die of starvation in the USSR when Lysenko’s cold-resistant crops failed to materialise … Vavilov [a geneticist] was arrested in 1940 and rounded up with other intellectuals, including the founder of the Marx-Lenin Institute of World Literature. He was interrogated and sent to a Soviet prison in Saratov where he perished, possibly by starvation in January 1943, despite repeated appeals from international leaders including Winston Churchill … Vavilov received a posthumous pardon by Nikita Khrushchev during the 1950s … It remains a great irony that Vavilov devoted his scientific career to the humanitarian cause of feeding the population of the Soviet Union only to die by starvation … Following the death of Stalin in 1953, the USSR began reopening to international science, ushering in a new era in vaccine development. Throughout the 1950s, both the US and Soviet Union suffered from severe polio epidemics prompting the 2 nations to embark on an unprecedented scientific collaboration … A decade later, the US and USSR collaborated to improve a vaccine leading to the eradication of smallpox. Nonetheless, state oppression of Soviet scientists continued … The physicist and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, won the Nobel Prize in 1975 advocating for human rights, but was subsequently arrested and exiled to Gorky. The mathematician and chess champion, Natan Sharansky, was arrested on treason charges in 1977 and kept in solitary confinement.”
(Hotez, 2021)
Briefly mentioned above as having been “deemed as a ‘political platform’ running counter to Marxism”, astrophysics was another restricted field of interest. In the introduction to his paper ‘The 1936-1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers’, Robert McCutcheon argues that “few astronomers or historians are aware of the extent to which Soviet astronomy was devastated”, including the fact that “more than two dozen Soviet astronomers were arrested between March 1936 and July 1937.” (McCutcheon, 1991) – the following information and quotes come from the same source; I’d recommend giving it a full read if you’re interested in a deeper look.
Formally the “astronomical capital of the world”, the Central Astronomical Observatory at Pulkovo became a “battleground” during the civil war (1917-1922), with one incident in 1919 resulting in the Cheka arresting and holding two Pulkovo astronomers for several days. By 1930, conditions worsened further with the illegitimate appointment of Anton Drozd as Pulkovo’s director, who was described by a contemporary as “a near-maniac who conducted himself more like Pulkovo’s conqueror than like its director”, and sought predominantly to exact revenge on the staff who had humiliated him ten years earlier (after he baselessly alleged that the observatory’s scientific work was not being carried out with enough energy and claimed there were irregularities in administration); he wasn’t removed from his erratic post until 1933. Upon this, Boris Gerasimovich, a stellar evolution specialist who had spent several years at the Harvard College Observatory, was appointed in his stead.
On the one hand, he restored the work environment to a “more tranquil norm”, but he was also oft-regarded as having a “difficult and explosive personality”. McCutcheon describes how Gerasimovich viewed “young astrophysicists as undisciplined and in too much of a rush to publish untested theories and poorly documented research” – an interesting contrast to Stalin’s later 1946 speech, which toasted to science “which recognizes that the future belongs to the young scientists”. A series of three attacks on Pulkovo, facilitated through newspaper Leningradskaia pravda, culminated in the declaration that it was time to “bring true Bolshevik order to Pulkovo”, and a denunciation (citing foreign contacts) was signed, launching an investigation by the NKVD. Unsurprisingly, the secret police determined that the accused was guilty, and astrophysicist Boris Numerov was arrested in October 1936; following this – and following severe beatings – he signed a fabricated document whereupon he confessed to being the “organiser of a counterrevolutionary group of astronomers and geophysicists that had cooperated with German fascists and had engaged in wrecking. spying, and terror” since 1929, the time of his recent trip to Germany.
Indeed, the confession listed Numerov’s colleagues (essentially the entire Leningrad astronomy community) as conspirators and accomplices. McCutcheon dubs the night of 6-7 November as “the night of long knives for Pulkovo”, for six astronomers were arrested. This was not the end, either, as two further arrests were made on 4 December, 10 February 1937 saw the arrest of Pulkovo’s scientific secretary, and arrests in Tashkent resulted in only three astronomers being left in the observatory; as 1937 dawned, Gerasimovich was “director of a nearly deserted institution.” Moreover, a denunciation was made against Gerasimovich to the vice-president of the Academy of Sciences, accusing him of “softness” toward the wives of the arrested astronomers, and “insufficient zeal” at an observatory meeting supporting the sentence against those found guilty in the trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center.
Consequently, research at the observatory soon stopped: no other astronomers in the Soviet Union could immediately fill the voids of the arrested, and Gerasimovich delayed finding replacements for the arrested astronomers in the vain hope that they would be released quickly. Stalin personally aggravated the situation in early 1937, by launching a campaign against the academy’s most prominent member, Nikolai Bukharin (an ex-rival from the Soviet leadership race, who would be purged at a high profile show-trail the following year), who was accused of “corrupt, wrecking work carried out in the Academy of Sciences”. Gerasimovich himself was denounced for sabotage, before being arrested in June 1937; no suitable replacement was left in Leningrad, so the Academy of Sciences appointed Sergei Beliavskii to take on the directorial role at Pulkovo. The Astronomy Council met in late October 1937, and condemned the purged astronomers as “enemies of the people”, and declared that “these enemies had disrupted the solar service, failed to give due attention to the training of new cadres, purposely delayed the construction of a new southern observatory, and prevented the Astronomy Council from carrying out the planning of Soviet astronomy for the Third Five-Year Plan.” Additionally, they denounced the Leningrad Astronomical Institute for continuing to publish the works of “enemies” even after their “wrecking activities had been unmasked”.
To conclude the astronomical story, I’d like to point to one final damning statement from McCutcheon’s fascinating paper: “Between March 1936 and the end of 1937 at least twenty-nine astronomers (and one assistant director for administrative affairs) disappeared. The twenty-nine made up 10 percent to 20 percent of all astronomers in the Soviet Union in 1935. The damage to Soviet astronomy was even higher than this percentage would indicate, however.” (He goes on to discuss the effects of the Purge – again, I recommend.)
All of these cases – Lysenkoist agriculture, purged geneticists, and astronomist attacks – speak clearly to the overarching aims of Stalin’s totalitarianism: control of the objective. To illustrate this, there are a number of potent quotes from George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, written as an allegory against authoritarianism (explicitly including Soviet Russia). One of these quotes speaks directly to control of maths and science: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it … And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?” (Orwell, 1949) This conveys the two-fold implications of propaganda, especially those which attack the objective facts of science and history, as not only do these techniques seek to wear down a specific fact (e.g. that Mendelian genetics were some inherent evil), but they foster paranoia and loyalty; paranoia to speak out for the truth, at risk of being purged, and loyalty to the whims of the Party and the ‘truth’ that they choose to write.
Historic examples like those explored here thus convey the necessity for critical thinking in the modern era, including not just taking the world a self, or state, proclaimed expert at face value, as well as the importance of standing up for truth and debate – in the words of Orwell, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Reference list
Blakemore, E. (2019). Why the Nazis Were Obsessed With Twins. [online] History.com. Available at: https://www.history.com/news/nazi-twin-experiments-mengele-eugenics.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species. S.L.: Alma Classics.
Hotez, P.J. (2021). Anti-science kills: From Soviet embrace of pseudoscience to accelerated attacks on US biomedicine. PLOS Biology, 19(1), p.e3001068. doi:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001068.
McCutcheon, R.A. (1991). The 1936-1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers. Slavic Review, 50(1), pp.100–117. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/2500602.
National Human Genome Research Institute (2022). Eugenics and Scientific Racism. [online] National Human Genome Research Institute. Available at: https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism.
Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada.
Prescott, C.A. and Kendler, K.S. (1995). Twin Study Design. Alcohol health and research world, [online] 19(3), pp.200–205. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6875762/#:~:text=Identical%2C%20or%20monozygotic%20(MZ)%2C%20twins%20have%20100%20percent.
Stalin on Science. (1946). Synthese, [online] 5(1/2), pp.55–56. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20113817?searchText=stalin+science&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dstalin%2Bscience%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A05fe03b3393c39f1ed00407a6046437f&seq=2 [Accessed 17 Jun. 2024].
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (n.d.). Trofim Lysenko | Soviet biologist and agronomist. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Trofim-Lysenko.
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica (2018). Outer Space Treaty | 1967. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/event/Outer-Space-Treaty.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2009). Josef Mengele. [online] Ushmm.org. Available at: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/josef-mengele.
World War II: From the Frontlines. (2023). Netflix.
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