The horrific experiments of figures such as Josef Mengele have become a taboo subject that continues to hold back German science 60 years on, according to Rolf Winau, Professor of the History of Medicine at the Free University of Berlin.

A reluctance to examine and understand the Nazi doctors’ crimes has paralysed debate over the ethics of modern medicine, he said, particularly in the field of fertility treatment.

The result has been a climate of suspicion that is immensely damaging to patients: many new therapies that are routine and uncontroversial elsewhere in Europe have been rejected because of misplaced concern about the potential for abuse.

Procedures such as embryo freezing and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a means of screening for inherited diseases, are banned, and IVF doctors must transfer every embryo they create to their patients’ wombs. This has generated one of the highest multiple birth rates in Europe, with serious consequences for the health of mothers and their babies.

German sensitivities also have implications beyond the country’s borders: its politicians have given strong support to efforts to prohibit therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research through the European Union and the United Nations.

Professor Winau said the backlash against modern reproductive therapies was an overreaction based on a misunderstanding of the medical outrages of the Third Reich.

By breaking the taboo and confronting these crimes, today’s doctors could convince public opinion that these technologies can be adopted without being abused for eugenic purposes, he told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference.

Analysis of the Auschwitz experiments of Mengele and his colleague Carl Clauberg could illuminate the rigorous ethical safeguards that surround modern research, yet few universities and hospitals have “faced up to their history” in this way.

“We have to erase the taboo,” Professor Winau said. “Today there are still a great number of doctors who do not wish to be disturbed by remembering the dark times of German medicine. We have to study the history of medicine in the Nazi era in order that we understand the roots and mechanisms of an inhuman medicine, and why over 45 per cent of all German physicians were Nazis and why some of them worked as researchers in the concentration camps.

“We need to study the Rassenhygiene, the German version of eugenics, in order to show how far eugenic and racial thinking can go, so that we can have it in mind when we discuss ethical questions on reproduction and fertility. If we do not, we face uncertainty, lack of information and confusion when considering ethical questions in the future.”

Professor Winau has particularly examined the crimes of two Nazi doctors who were highly respected in their fields before the Second World War: Clauberg, an endocrinologist, and Hermann Stieve, an anatomist.

Clauberg was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women in Block 10 at Auschwitz, whom he used as human guinea pigs to develop a method of mass sterilisation that did not require surgery. His correspondence with Heinrich Himmler shows that the Nazis intended to use Clauberg’s technique in occupied Ukraine and Russia. Clauberg experimented with X-rays and substances such as formalin, which would be injected into his victims’ wombs to cause inflammation and scarring that left them infertile. Those that survived were later sent to the gas chambers.

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