User:Pete K/Biodynamics

Biodynamic Agriculture and its connection to the Nazis

The following is from a post to the Waldorf Critics list by historian Peter Staudenmaier. It represents the most comprehensive study of the connections between Anthroposophy/Waldorf and the Nazis through Biodynamic Agriculture. As usual, Mr. Staudenmaier is careful to provide complete sources for the information he presents. It has been the mission of Anthroposophists to disguise, discredit or completely ignore this topic. It is one of the topics Anthroposophists will not allow to be discussed on Wikipedia. The text of Mr. Staudenmaier's post follows:

Hello Waldorf critics and others,

I wanted to follow up on Frank’s odd response to the history of SS-sponsored bio-dynamic plantations at various concentration camps. Perhaps an overview of this history will help spur a more attentive anthroposophical engagement with this chapter of anthroposophy’s past. Part of my archival research over the last several months has involved working through the records of these bio-dynamic installations at Dachau and elsewhere, but for purposes of this post I will largely stick to published sources.

The basic parameters of the SS biodynamic program have been publicly known for a long time, though anthroposophists seem to have taken virtually no notice of this. The scholarly literature on the topic extends back to the 1960s. Here is a brief list of some of the readily available publications that examine the network of biodynamic enterprises within the concentration camp system:

Enno Georg, Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS (Stuttgart 1963), for decades the standard historical work on the SS network of economic enterprises, discusses the SS’s biodynamic agriculture sites at the concentration camps on pp. 62-66, with special attention to the Dachau operation.

Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, “Von Heidelberg nach Dachau” in Gerhard Baader and Ulirch Schultz, eds, Medizin und Nationalsozialismus (Berlin 1980), pp. 113-138; see esp. the section “Die Heilkräuterplantage im KZ Dachau” 116-120.

Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, “Nationalsozialistische Medizin: Volks- und Naturheilkunde auf “neuen Wegen”” in Heinz Abholz, ed, Alternative Medizin (Berlin 1983), pp. 27-50 (which also contains very useful information on the role of anthroposophical medicine in the Third Reich) examines the SS biodynamic plantations on 43-44.

Bernhard Strebel, Das KZ Ravensbrück: Geschichte eines Lagerkomplexes (Paderborn 2003), pp. 212-213 on the biodynamic farm at the Ravensbrück concentration camp; a quick peek at this should dispel Frank’s confusion about its location.

Hermann Kaienburg, Die Wirtschaft der SS (Berlin 2003) describes the SS biodynamic enterprises at length at several points in the book; the chief relevant sections are pp. 771-855; for especially important material see 797-804.

Wolfgang Jacobeit and Christoph Kopke, Die Biologisch-dynamische Wirtschaftsweise im KZ (Berlin 1999), an entire 135 page book on the biodynamic tracts at concentration camps.

This is, in other words, a well-studied topic, and there is no meaningful reason for continued anthroposophical ignorance about it. Here, then, is a summary of this episode in the complex interaction between anthroposophy and Nazism.

Of all the branches of the anthroposophical milieu in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the one that displayed the most consistently enthusiastic attitude toward Nazi endeavors, and the one that received the most consistently positive attention from various Nazi officials, was the biodynamic agriculture movement. A number of prominent Nazis were actively involved in the biodynamic movement; one telling example is Albert Friehe, after 1933 a local functionary of the biodynamic farmers league, who was a Reichstag candidate for the Nazi party in 1932. Another example is Nazi Reichstag member Hermann Schneider, who continued to promote biodynamics well into the war (see e.g. Hermann Schneider, Schicksalsgemeinschaft Europa: Leben und Nahrung aus der europäischen Scholle, Breslau 1941, esp. pp. 89-102).

Other high-level Nazis were supporters of biodynamics, including at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy Robert Ley, Rudolf Hess, and the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. Even figures like Alfred Rosenberg were positively disposed toward biodynamics and visited the estate of leading anthroposophist Erhard Bartsch, the head of the biodynamic movement. One of the chief successes of anthroposophists and biodynamic advocates in the course of the Third Reich was winning the active support of the Minister of Agriculture, Darré, who had initially been skeptical toward biodynamic farming but became a vocal proponent of biodynamics by 1940. Even well before that point, however, several influential members of Darre’s staff were strong supporters of biodynamics, including Hermann Reischle, Hans Merkel, and Georg Halbe; the latter two were also members of the Anthroposophical Society.

A further source of active encouragement of biodynamics, and indeed of practical application of biodynamic methods under Nazi auspices, was the coterie of “landscape advocates” who worked under Nazi minister Fritz Todt. This group was lead by Nazi party member Alwin Seifert, a long-time practitioner and advocate of biodynamics, and the group included a number of active anthroposophists as well, most prominently Max Karl Schwarz, a major figure in the biodynamic movement.

Beyond these extensive personal and political connections, the biodynamic movement was also firmly integrated into the constellation of Nazi institutions. Soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the association of biodynamic growers organized itself into a new grouping, the Reich League for Bio-Dynamic Cultivation (Reichsverband für Biologisch-Dynamische Wirtschaftsweise). In 1935 the Reich League for Bio-Dynamic Cultivation officially joined the Nazi organization Deutsche Gesellschaft für Lebensreform, a collection of ‘alternative’ cultural groups dedicated to alternative health, nutrition, farming, and so forth, with an explicitly and fervently Nazi commitment.

The eventual establishment of a series of biodynamic estates at various concentration camps, however, was the result of intensive ongoing contacts between the biodynamic movement and the SS. One of the crucial figures in this regard was Carl Grund, an anthroposophist and a leading activist in the biodynamic movement since the 1920s, who joined the Nazi party and the SA in 1933; in 1942 he was made a commissioned officer in the SS. Grund was hardly an isolated case; Harald Kabisch, for example, an official of the Reich League for Bio-Dynamic Cultivation, joined the Nazi party in 1941, and Hans Merkel was an SS officer as well. Probably the best known case is that of anthroposophist and biodynamic pioneer Franz Lippert, who joined the SS in 1941 and oversaw the biodynamic plantation at Dachau.

A number of very high ranking SS officers were supporters of biodynamic agriculture and played a central role in the creation of biodynamic installations as part of the concentration camp system. Aside from Otto Ohlendorf, the most famous instance of an SS leader who was sympathetic to anthroposophy, the two chief figures here were Günther Pancke and Oswald Pohl. Pancke was Darré’s successor as head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office and one of Erhard Bartsch’s many Nazi admirers. In 1940 Pancke tried to have Bartsch appointed an SS officer, but was obstructed by Reinhard Heydrich, an opponent of anthroposophy who had Bartsch temporarily imprisoned in 1941. Pancke nevertheless drew on Bartsch’s assistance in planning a biodynamic component to the Nazi settlement of ethnically cleansed territories in Eastern Europe. In the first years of WWII Bartsch devoted significant attention to the question of how to re-shape conquered lands in Poland, now under German control, along biodynamic lines.

Oswald Pohl was the administrator of the concentration camp system. Pohl, a friend of Seifert’s, took a special interest in biodynamics and had his own estate in Comthurey farmed biodynamically; he also sent biodynamic texts to Himmler, and was yet another high-ranking Nazi guest at Bartsch’s biodynamic estate. In January 1939 Himmler created a new SS undertaking, the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Ernährung und Verpflegung (German Research Facility for Food and Nutrition), known as the DVA for short. The DVA was subordinate to Pohl and existed from 1939 until the very end in 1945. A large part of its operations consisted of agricultural plantations located at several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Dachau, and Ravensbrück, as well as other places in both Germany proper and in occupied Eastern Europe. Most of these agricultural projects were biodynamic plantations.

Ravensbrück was the first DVA estate to be converted to biodynamic cultivation, in May 1940. Eventually the majority of the DVA’s plantations were run biodynamically; Himmler also ordered biodynamic experiments to be carried out at Auschwitz. The SS sent its personnel to attend courses provided by the Reich League for Bio-Dynamic Cultivation. The DVA also marketed Demeter products and cooperated with Weleda. The head of the DVA’s agricultural section was SS officer Heinrich Vogel, who was also on good terms with Bartsch. The centerpiece of the DVA biodynamic operations was the sizeable plantation at Dachau.

The Dachau plantation was overseen by anthroposophist Franz Lippert, who had been head gardener at Weleda for many years. Under Lippert’s biodynamic supervision, the Dachau plantation made a considerable profit for the SS. Lippert also published two books for the SS publishing house in 1942 and 1943 based in part on his work at the Dachau plantation. The labor at the Dachau plantation, as at all of the DVA biodynamic estates, was performed by concentration camp inmates. The SS commitment to biodynamics continued until the camps were liberated in 1945.

Since the ignominious end of the mini-empire of SS biodynamic plantations, there has been little noticeable effort among anthroposophists to come to terms with this history. Frank’s recent post, with its revealing perplexity about the structure of the concentration camp system as such and its attempt to distance biodynamics from the operations of the camps themselves, is merely one unfortunate instance of this ongoing denial and naiveté. A variety of anthroposophists, including official PR spokespeople for the Waldorf movement such as Detlef Hardorp, portray the SS officer Franz Lippert, for example, as a great humanitarian and a shining example of anthroposophical conduct during the Nazi era. Anthroposophical histories of the biodynamic movement, meanwhile, say nothing about most of the easily accessible facts that I outlined above.

It would be a nice surprise if that were to change.

Greetings to all,

Peter Staudenmaier

Franz Lippert - A closer look

Hello all,

as mentioned in my reply to Walden, I'd like to take a look at some of the siginificant surrounding factors that can help make sense of anthroposophist views on the SS officer Franz Lippert. The usual anthroposophist line on Lippert is that he was good to his concentration camp prisoners, and that's all that matters. In the words of Waldorf spokesperson Detlef Hardorp, for example, Lippert was a "guardian angel" and a shining beacon of "courage and humanity". Similar opinions have been voiced by other anthroposophists.

This anthroposophical rehabilitation of their fellow anthroposophist, SS member, and Dachau officer seems to be supported by a relatively small number of documents from the immediate post-war period, statements from some of the former prisoners who worked at the plantation and portray Lippert in a positive light. I have not reviewed these documents directly -- they are in the hands of Lippert's family -- and am relying on anthroposophical accounts of their content, but I see no reason to doubt the chief thrust of these accounts as such. The apologetic conclusion about Lippert is itself based on a narrow selection of evidence (which comes moreover from Lippert's daughter and has not been made available to non-anthroposophist researchers) stemming from Lippert's post-war de-Nazification hearings. These hearings ended in an acquittal for Lippert in 1948.

There are many sources that can put these circumstances into context. Let's consider two types of sources for now: ones that tell us more detail on the Dachau plantation, and ones that tell us more detail on post-war de-Nazification proceedings. The two question we can examine are thus: What other evidence do we have about life on the Dachau plantation under Lippert's watch? And what do we know more generally about inmate testimony and about post-war trials of SS officers and so forth?

On the first question, there are a variety of sources that do not tell us anything about Lippert's personal comportment one way or the other, but that do provide a broader perspective on conditions at the biodynamic plantation in Dachau. Probably the most thorough of these is Robert Sigel's article "Heilkräuterkulturen im KZ: Die Plantage in Dachau", Dachauer Hefte 4, 1988. Sigel describes the inmates who worked on Lippert's biodynamic plantation as "slowly wasting away" and notes their high death rate. (p. 171.)

Another thorough source on the Dachau plantation is the 1980 article by Walter Wuttke-Groneberg that I cited yesterday: "Von Heidelberg nach Dachau", particularly the section on "Die Heilkräuterplantage im KZ Dachau" (pp. 116-120 in Baader & Schultz, Medizin und Nationalsozialismus). Wuttke-Groneberg observes that "several hunded prisoners" died at the Dachau plantation (p. 119).

A general history of the Dachau concentration camp, meanwhile, describes the biodynamic plantation as a place "where so many thousands of prisoners labored in all weathers, and where a great many of them were shot or drowned in the ditches" (Paul Berben, Dachau 1933-1945: The Official History, London 1975, p. 87).

We also have a range of published eyewitness testimony from former prisoners at Dachau. Among these is Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz's book Die Mächtigen und die Hilflosen: als Häftling in Dachau (Stuttgart 1957), a memoir by a former Dachau inmate which offers a first-hand and quite harrowing account of work on the plantation (see especially pp. 105-108). These reports are detailed and credible.

Much of Kupfer-Koberwitz's account is confirmed by Reimund Schnabel, whose book Die Frommen in der Hölle: Geistliche in Dachau (Frankfurt 1966) provides a study of clergy inmates at Dachau, who were especially frequently assigned to the labor battalion at Lippert's biodynamic plantation. Schnabel describes the plantation on pp. 140-142. He notes that for some inmates the plantation was a relatively preferred work detail, while for others it was hellish, with dangerous and often deadly working conditions. In light of conflicting testimony from former prisoners, Schnabel concludes that "both the descriptions of extremely cruel working conditions and the reports of relatively comfortable activity are correct." (p. 141) This is consistent with the evidence from other concentration camps as well.

What do other former Dachau prisoners say about the biodynamic plantation? Hans Carls' book Dachau: Erinnerungen eines katholischen Geistlichen aus der Zeit seiner Gefangenschaft 1941-1945 (Cologne 1946) describes it as follows: "In Dachau the clergy were assigned to one of the hardest commandos, the plantation. Most of those who died in 1942/43 perished from the work methods that were required there." (p. 120) A few pages later Carls describes particular acts of sadism at the plantation (123).

A further eyewitness source is Otto Pies, Stephanus Heute (Kevelaer 1951), another memoir by a former priest inmate. His depiction of the plantation is extremely bleak. According to this account, hundreds of clergy "worked, suffered, and died" on the "fields of the notorious plantation" (p. 127). Pies also notes that most of the clergy forced to perform plantation labor were Polish priests, and that Polish priests were treated more harshly than German clergy, another piece of testimony that is consistent with the evidence from other camps. (The distinction is potentially important because the former prisoners who portrayed Lippert positively after the war were German.)

This leads us to our second set of questions: How to assess ex post facto inmate testimony in general, and how to determine the overall conditions within which cases like Lippert's were judged in post-war Germany? Once again, there is a variety of very insightful sources on these matters which do not refer to Lippert specifically and help us place his story into context. Two significant works along these lines are Joshua Greene, Justice at Dachau (New York 2003), and Jörg Friedrich, Die kalte Amnestie: NS-Täter in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt 1984). But there are also sources that offer a more revealing perspective on particular aspects of Lippert's case.

One of these comes from an illuminating point of comparison, a study of the gulag system in the Soviet Union under Stalin. While gulags are not exactly comparable with Nazi concentration camps, some of the basic dynamics of ex post facto inmate testimony about former guard personnel are quite similar. One of the better known studies of the topic is Anne Applebaum's book Gulag: A History (New York 2003). Historian Orlando Figes reviewed this book in the New York Review of Books (see NYROB 6/12/03 p. 50), and made special mention of a figure from his own research, a certain Yuzipenko, who oversaw a women's camp in the 1940s.

We know from a variety of sources that Yuzipenko engaged in systematic rape of some of the inmates. But Figes, a prominent historian of twentieth century Russia, gained access to Yuzipenko's personal archive. He reports that it contained over 20 letters from former inmates of Yuzipenko's camp who wrote in support of Yuzipenko and emphasized his kindness. Keeping in mind that Franz Lippert was not a rapist, this is a striking parallel to the letters from former Dachau inmates contained in the Lippert family's private archive. In order to make sense of material like this, it is not necessary to dismiss evidence such as those letters; instead we need to look at them critically, as we should with all evidence, and try to understand how they fit into the larger picture. It would be a major mistake to conclude from this testimony that Yuzipenko was not a rapist.

In conclusion, let's look at some of the more in-depth research into post-war evaluation of concentration camp officers. One of the best such studies is Karin Orth, "The Concentration Camp SS as a Functional Elite" in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies (New York 2000), pp. 306-336. Orth examines the post-war trials of mid-level SS officers from various concentration camps, particularly those in Germany proper, mentioning Dachau specifically (p. 328) -- it is important to keep in mind that Dachau was not an extermination camp; it was a "regular" concentration camp where many, many people died, but it was not primarily dedicated to industrialized mass murder in the way that camps in the East were. Orth perceptively describes "the nimbus of the "decent" and "correct" SS officer, which was sworn to in numerous court statements" (328). She continues: "Many surviving inmate functionaries testified on behalf of the SS men in order to divert attention from their own involvement in the crimes of the SS." (328) According to Orth's study, some former inmates "believed that a subjective sense of justice demanded they testify that the indicted commander [...] was relatively "decent" and "correct" in his treatment of them and in comparison with their respective predecessors" (328). Of the post-war trials of these SS officers from regular concentration camps, she writes: "only a fraction concluded with an official conviction." (329)

An even more directly relevant study is Harold Marcuse's book Legacies of Dachau: The uses and abuses of a concentration camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge 2001), one of the best sources on the overall contours of post-war rehabilitation of Dachau guards and SS staff; chapter 3, "Good Nazis", is particularly pertinent. See, for example, Marcuse's discussion of how SS criminals were re-cast as "rescuers" after the war by the same court system that acquitted Lippert (pp. 89-94 and 104-5). These German civilian courts -- in sharp contrast to the courts established and staffed by the allied authorities -- routinely invoked the notion that SS officers who treated prisoners well were thereby less guilty, and on this basis these courts on several occasions acquitted defendants who were complicit in multiple murders. In the appeals chambers that handled Lippert's case, SS officers and other Nazi camp personnel got off very easily. According to Marcuse, "most of them were let off without so much as a verbal reprimand." (93) He continues: "by late 1947 the denazification program was no longer taken seriously [...] the chambers began rubber-stamping the remaining cases, releasing thousands of the heavily suspect internees without hearings in early spring 1948." Marcuse characterizes this as "the wholesale release of heavily compromised Nazi activists." (94)

I think that anthroposophist reflections on Franz Lippert's tenure as SS officer at the Dachau biodynamic plantation would benefit greatly from taking these sources into account. Greetings to all,

Peter Staudenmaier

More on the Subject

Here is the following:

The Nazi camp system:

http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/ncamp.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERconcentration.htm

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/badge.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/labor.html

http://www.wsg-hist.uni-linz.ac.at/auschwitz/html/System-KZ.html

http://www.remember.org/camps/

- Compare/contrast these two sources:

An apologist article on the Nazi PR perspective regarding concentration camps:

http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/articles/ccfacts.h\ tml#ref16

and one that looks at the system directly:

ttp://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007387

On the Dachau concentration camp:

(i) History of the Dachau camp:

http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/englisch/frame/geschichte.htm

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005214

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/KZDachau/DachauLife.html

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/Contents.html

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/overview.html

(ii) Nazi attitudes to nature:

"Many prominent advocates of Nazism treated vegetarianism and organic farming as integral to their ideology. Hitler and other elite Nazis who upheld the notions of "organic health" were vegetarians. Walther Richard Rudolf Hess (1894- 1987), whom Hitler made third deputy of the Reich in 1939, demanded that only food with "biologically dynamic ingredients" be served to him. In the aforementioned Anthozoos article, Arluke and Sax stated: "Vegetarianism became the symbol of the new, pure civilization that was to be Germany's future."

In 1930, Richard Walther Darré (1895-1953), who would hold the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Reich Minister of Agriculture from 1933 to 1942, declared: "The unity of blood and soil must be restored." This notorious declaration concerns an alleged mystical connection between Germans ("blood") and their natural environment. Darré—the author of Neuadel aus Blut und Boden ("A New Nobility out of Blood and Soil")—promoted "agriculture according to the laws of nature" and "farming methods according to the laws of life." And in a letter of instruction for Dachau Concentration Camp and Ester-wegen, a "punishment camp for prisoners," Himmler stated: "I wish the SS and the police also will be exemplary in the love of nature. Within the course of a few years the property of the SS and the police must become paradises for animals and Nature.""

(Source: http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.604/healthissue_detail.asp )

(iii)

"Walther Darré, the Reichsbauernführer (leader of nazi-peasantry) and Secretary of Agriculture, personally protected anthroposophic "biodynamic farming" (6). For the time after the war it was planned that the territories of the original German Reich would be cultivated according to anthroposophic bio-dynamic principles, while the new territories in the East would be cultivated with industrial chemical fertilizers. Accordingly in 1941 Himmler ordered a scientific study in Auschwitz to determine, once for all, whether Anthroposophic (Himmler favored) or industrial farming would render better results (6). (In his exchange of letters about his order to examine anthroposophic farming in Auschwitz, Himmler mentions an unnamed SS-officer who is an agitating anthroposophist at Auschwitz [10:89f]. Just another of these apparently many anthroposophic SS-officers.)

The head gardener of the anthroposophic joint-stock "Weleda" (which to this day produces anthroposopic medicine), the anthroposophist and SS-officer Franz Lippert, was 1941-45 assigned to the KZ Dachau, to take care of the medical herb garden of the concentration camp, where the prisoners were "exterminated by work." Weleda was involved in medical experiments in the KZ, e.g., prisoners were frozen to death to test the Weleda anti-frostbite ointment. These experiments were performed by the KZ-physician, anthroposophist, and SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Sigmund Rascher. His father had been a leading member of the Anthroposophic Society at its center in Dornach, who, of course, had sent his son to a Waldorf school. As a kid Rascher even met Steiner himself at Dornach personally (6).

Rascher was of equal quality to his colleague Mengele, an unbelievable pathological sadist, who not even begrudged his victims the delicacies of their last meal, so that in 1945 he was, because of embezzlement, shot on orders from Himmler. At the time Rascher still was a special favorite of Himmler, if not his personal friend, he submitted to Himmler in August 1942 his own invention: the gas chamber. Here one has to know that it was one of Steiner's teachings that potassium cyanide (like in the insecticide "Zyklon B" used in Auschwitz) from an occult point of view not only destroys the body but also the soul.(3) Thus Rascher aspired to a truly anthroposophic "final solution" (6). Ravenscroft proudly claims that Himmler, as a follower of Steiner's bio-dynamic farming, used anthroposophic "pest control of rabbits, rats, and sub-humans" (Ravenscroft words) to drive away the remaining Jews from the European continent by means of ashes from the KZ-crematories homeopathically dispersed in the air (15)."

(Source: http://www.w-reich.de/hdoeng11.htm )

(iv) Experiments conducted on inmates at Dachau:

"In Dachau, as in other Nazi camps, German physicians performed medical experiments on prisoners, including high-altitude experiments using a decompression chamber, malaria and tuberculosis experiments, hypothermia experiments, and experiments testing new medications. Prisoners were also forced to test methods of making seawater potable and of halting excessive bleeding. Hundreds of prisoners died or were permanently disabled as a result of these experiments.

Dachau prisoners were used as forced laborers. At first, they were employed in the operation of the camp, in various construction projects, and in small handicraft industries established in the camp. Prisoners built roads, worked in gravel pits, and drained marshes. During the war, forced labor utilizing concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important to German armaments production.

DACHAU SUBCAMPS

In the summer and fall of 1944, to increase war production, satellite camps under the administration of Dachau were established near armaments factories throughout southern Germany. Dachau alone had more than 30 large subcamps in which over 30,000 prisoners worked almost exclusively on armaments. Thousands of prisoners were worked to death."

(Source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005214 )

(v) Detail on some of the experiments conducted at Dachau and elsewhere in the camp system:

"3. THE NAZI EXPERIMENTS

The Nazi physicians performed brutal medical experiments upon helpless concentration camp inmates. These acts of torture were characterized by several shocking features: (1) persons were forced to become subjects in very dangerous studies against their will; (2) nearly all subjects endured incredible suffering, mutilation, and indescribable pain; and (3) the experiments often were deliberately designed to terminate in a fatal outcome for their victims.

The Nazi experiments fell into three basic categories: (1) Medico-Military Research; (2) Miscellaneous, Ad Hoc Experiments; and (3) Racially Motivated Experiments.

a. MEDICO-MILITARY RESEARCH

Hitler's regime sponsored a series of inhumane experiments for alleged ideological, military and medical purposes. They were undertaken under Heinreich Himmler's direct orders to gain knowledge of certain wartime conditions faced by the German Luftwaffe. The Nazi doctors considered "military necessity" adequate justification for their heinous experiments. They justified their acts by saying that the prisoners were condemned to death anyway. Their experiments included:

i. Freezing Experiments

Prisoners were immersed into tanks of ice water for hours at a time, often shivering to death, to discover how long German pilots downed by enemy fire could survive the frozen waters of the North Sea. It was generally known at the time that human beings did not survive immersion in the North Sea for more than one to two hours.3

Doctor Sigmund Rascher attempted to duplicate these cold conditions at Dachau, and used about 300 prisoners in experiments recording their shock from the exposure to cold. About eighty to ninety of the subjects died as a result.4

Doctor Rascher once requested the transfer of his hypothermia lab from Dachau to Auschwitz, which had larger facilities, and where the frozen subjects might cause fewer disturbances. Apparently, Rascher's concentration was constantly interrupted when the hypothermia victims shrieked from pain while their extremities froze white.5

ii. High Altitude Experiments

In 1942, Doctor Rascher began hazardous high-altitude experiments at Dachau. His goal was to determine the best means of rescuing pilots from the perils of high altitude when they abandoned craft (with or without oxygen equipment) and were subjected to low atmospheric pressures.

Rascher used a decompression chamber to simulate high altitude conditions. He would often dissect several of the victims' brains, while they were still alive, to demonstrate that high altitude sickness was a result of the formation of tiny air bubbles in the blood vessels of the subarachnoid part of the brain. Of the 200 prisoners so tested, 80 died outright, and the remainder were executed.

iii. Sea Water Experiments

Tests on the potability of sea water were conducted at Dachau on 90 Gypsy prisoners by Doctor Hans Eppinger. The subjects were given unaltered sea water and sea water whose taste was camouflaged as their sole source of fluid. Eppinger's infamous "Berka" method was devised to test whether such liquids given as the only supply of fluid could cause severe physical disturbance or death within six to twelve days. The Gypsies became so profoundly dehydrated that they were seen licking the floors after they were mopped just to get a drop of water. [Eppinger killed himself on September 25, 1946, exactly one month before he was scheduled to testify in the Nuremberg trial. The New York Times obituary stated that he had committed suicide by poison]6.

iv. Sulfanilamide Experiments

The German Armed Forces suffered heavy casualties on the Russian Front in 1941 to 1943 because of gas gangrene. These casualties and other combat-related infections created an interest in a chemotherapeutic, rather than surgical treatment. The discovery of sulfanilamide offered the possibility of a new and revolutionary treatment of wound infections caused by the war. Wartime wounds were recreated and inflicted on healthy Jews designated to be treated by the new drug. [Wounds deliberately inflicted on the experimental subjects were infected with bacteria such as streptococcus, gas gangrene and tetanus. Circulation of blood was interrupted by tying off blood vessels at both ends of the wound to create a condition similar to that of a battlefield wound].

v. Tuberculosis Experiments

The Nazis conducted experiments to determine whether there were any natural immunities to Tuberculosis ("TB") and to develop a vaccination serum against TB. Doctor Heissmeyer sought to disprove the popular belief that TB was an infectious disease. Doctor Heissmeyer claimed that only an "exhaustive" organism was receptive to such infection, most of all the racially "inferior organism of the Jews."

Heissmeyer injected live tubercle bacilli into the subjects' lungs to immunize against TB. He also removed the lymph glands from the arms of twenty Jewish children. About 200 adult subjects perished, and twenty children were hanged at the Bullenhauser Dam in Heissmeyer's effort to hide the experiments from the approaching Allied Army.

b. MISCELLANEOUS, AD HOC EXPERIMENTS

The Nazis also conducted experiments which involved unspeakable varieties of torture that carried no pretense of scientific inquiry. They included poison and wound experiments:

i. Poison Experiments

A research team at Buchenwald developed a method of individual execution through the intravenous injections of phenol gasoline and cyanide on Russian prisoners. The experiments were designed to see how fast the subjects would die.

ii. Wound Experiments

When Himmler discovered that the cause of death of most SS soldiers on the battlefield was hemorrhage, he ordered Doctor Rascher to develop a blood coagulant to be administered to the German troops before they went off to war. Rascher tested his patented coagulant by observing the rate of blood drops that would ooze from freshly cut amputation stumps of living and conscious prisoners at the Dachau crematorium. Rascher would also shoot his Russian prisoners in the spleen whenever he needed extra blood to test. [At the Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp, the shoulders and legs of inmates were amputated in useless attempts to transplant the limbs onto other victims]7."

(Source: http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/NaziMedEx.html )

(vi) More on the experiments:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/experiments.html

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/experiments2.html

(vii) Back to biodynamics:

"One final, truly unsettling note is Fant's egregious attempt to rehabilitate the SS functionary Franz Lippert as a "humanitarian." I can only attribute this whitewash of Lippert's activities at Dachau to a deeply misguided notion of "good Nazis." Fant quotes several positive reports about Lippert's conduct in order to absolve him, but fails to mention that the sole source for these reports is Lippert's family. Since anthroposophists are unable to point to a single figure from their ranks who actually joined the resistance to Hitler's regime,30 they are reduced to pleading, a half-century after the liberation of the concentration camps, that at least the anthroposophist Lippert was nice to his prisoners. Scattered individual testimonies may salve the post-war anthroposophist conscience, but they cannot distract attention from the central fact that Lippert's work was an integral part of the SS's use of slave labor in promoting biodynamic agriculture.31

The official history of Dachau describes Lippert's biodynamic plantation as a place "where so many thousands of prisoners labored in all weathers, and where a great many of them were shot or drowned in the ditches" — hardly a "humanitarian" enterprise.32 Another source describes the inmates as "slowly wasting away" on the plantation, and notes their high death rate.33 Contrary to Fant's imaginative depiction of him as a selfless protector of Nazism's victims, Lippert was in fact a fanatic Nazi. Even his anthroposophist friends were taken aback by his fervent devotion to Hitler's regime.34 Fant's grievous misjudgement of Lippert is a case study in anthroposophy's evasion of its own history."

(Source: http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031202114146804 )