Document qkwM0ZLMLpVgaX5epMgV9Y20G

344 NOTES TO PAGES 248-53 10 cigarettes per day in the middle of the war; see Ernst G. Schenck, Zur Frage der Sander- und Konzentrat-Verpflegung der Waffen-SS (n.p.: SS-WirtschaftsVerwaltungshauptamt, n.d. [1944?]), p. 17. One of the curious contradictions of the era is that Jews and political prisoners in concentration camps, like up standing German women outside the camps, received half rations throughout the war. There is an interesting logical oddity here: "healthy" German women received half rations because tobacco was known to be bad for you; Jews and concentration camp prisoners received half rations because tobacco was also viewed as precious and in short supply. See Dr. Kreitmair of Vienna to the Reichsstelle fur Kaffee und Tabak, August 19, 1944, R8 XII/53, BAK. Chapter 7 The Monstrous and the Prosaic 1. An indoor domestic radon hazard was identified in Germany as early as 1907, and then periodically rediscovered in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s, before political events drew attention to the hazard--especially the Arab oil crisis and the subsequent insulation of homes, but also the accident at Three Mile Island; see my Cancer Wars, pp. 197-216. 2. Richard Walther Darre, Das Schwein als Kriterium fiir nordische Volker und Semiten (Munich: Lehmann, 1933). 3. Fr. W. Landgraeber, "Radium-Mineralien und Lagerstatten auf der Erde/' Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 52 (1939): 777. 4. Deaths caused by human experimentation were actually a minuscule fraction of the total medical murders committed during the Nazi era: roughly 1,000 people died from the effects of human experimentation, whereas 200,000 people were killed in the "euthanasia operation"; see my "How Many People Died from Nazi Human Experiments?" unpubl. MS. 5. Fritz Lickint, "Die konservative Behandlung des Krebses," Hippokrates 7 (1936): 668. 6. Karl H. Bauer et al., "Weitere Erfahrungen mit cancerogenen Stoffen," Langenbecks Archiv 193 (1938): 499-502; Bauer to Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, July 13,1938, R73/10179, BAK. 7. Liek, Der Kampf, pp. 19-20. 8. In Hanover in 1937, for example, a naturopathic healer treated a woman complaining of stomach pains with homeopathic remedies; he also found a lump in her breast that he identified as cancerous, yet continued to treat her with homeopathic preparations. The healer advised the woman to have an op eration, but she refused. In April of 1939 the tumor ulcerated; the woman went to a licensed physician who ordered her into a hospital, but it was too late for surgery. She was treated with radium but died in June of 1940. The naturo pathic healer was convicted of "negligent manslaughter" (fahrliissige Totung) and sentenced to four months in prison "for having failed to insist that the woman submit to an operation." See Bruno Steinwallner, "Zur fahrlassigen Behandlung von Krebskranken," Monatsschrift fur Krebsbekampfung 10 (1942): 160-61. In a similar case in 1941, a Grafelfing woman was convicted of man slaughter for the death of a cancer patient under her care; the woman was NOTES TO PAGES 253-55 345 declared "a danger to the community" and sentenced to six months in prison. The Monatsschriftfur Krebsbekampfung ridiculed the punishment, asking, "Why only six months?" ("Mitteilungen," 9 [1941]: 179). Additional cases can be found in Nagel to Reichsarztekammer, April 27,1937, E 1496, THW. There are other cases where cancer literature was suppressed for the crimi nal activities of its authors. In 1936, for example, a physician by the name of Josef Wetterer, editor of Kampf dem Krebs, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for fraud and profiteering. (Auler to Landesausschuss, Decem ber 15,1936, E 1493, THW.) Wetterer was barred from the German Radiologi cal Society, his journal was banned, and his book, Heraus aus der Krebsnot, for which he had won the Cadilhac Prize, was confiscated by the Gestapo. The court ordered a psychiatric evaluation (by euthanasia experts Schneider and Schwenniger), which found him suffering from "grotesque greed" and "a pathologic drive for profit and power"; see "Mitteilungen," Monatsschrift fiir Krebsbekampfung 5 (1937): 29. 9. It is not obvious to me that the level of fraud or dishonesty was higher in the Nazi era than in most other periods of history. One rarely hears stories of plagiarism, or falsification of data, or other kinds of "misconduct" in the nar row definition of this term sometimes worried about in governmental research institutions; see, however, Robert L. Berger, "Nazi Science--The Dachau Hy pothermia Experiments," New England Journal of Medicine 322 (1990): 1435-40. 10. Hans Stroink, "Borst and the Von Brehmer Incident," American Journal of Dermatopathology 8 (1986): 522-24. Stroink threw out the only known copy of Borst's speech in the spring of 1998, two months before I contacted him. 11. Documentation can be found in E 1496, THW. Military authorities about this time asked the Reich Health Office to conduct a separate investigation; see G. Zeugerle to Reichsgesundheitsamt, March 4,1936, and the undated review by H. Dieckmann, "Zusammenfassender Bericht fiber die amtliche Nachuntersuchung der v. Brehmerschen Krebsdiagnostik," R86 2764, BAK. Reiter's office concluded that the technique had "no diagnostic or therapeutic value." 12. David J. Hess, Can Bacteria Cause Cancer? Alternative Medicine Confronts Big Science (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 41. 13. Brehmer headed the Paracelsus Institut at the Theresien Hospital in Nuremberg from 1935 to 1937; in a postwar text he says that Hitler dissolved the institute in 1937, but he does not mention that it was Streicher who brought him there in the first place. He does say that he came under Gestapo surveil lance and was "silenced" after 1937, though he was able to continue his re search at a tumor research laboratory in Berlin. See Wilhelm von Brehmer, "Siphonospira polymorpha v.Br." (Haag/Amper: Linck-Verlag, 1947), p. 170. 14. Wolfgang Weyers, Death of Medicine in Nazi Germany: Dermatology and Dermatopathology under the Swastika (Philadelphia: Promethean Medical, 1996), p. 138. Erik Enby presents similar misrepresentations in his Hidden Killers: The Revolutionary Medical Discoveries ofGunther Enderlein (Saratoga: S & G Commu nications, 1990), pp. 5-9. 15. Hermann Druckrey evaluated Brehmer's claims and found them "vollig haltlos" (totally without merit); he also cautioned that the refutation of Brehmer's therapy "should teach us not to undertake therapeutic experiments