Sushi Tora, Washington, D.C. December 29, 2008
Last night before attending “Twelfth Night” at the Shakespeare Theater, I decided to stay downtown and take myself out to a dimly lit Japanese restaurant on F Street that I’d been admiring. I was intrigued by its darkened windows, which reduced the patrons inside to ghostly silhouettes.
A family of four was seated on my left so close I could easily hear their conversation. The boy was maybe twelve, the girl ten or not much older—too young, I thought, to be ordering off a Japanese menu. But the parents deferred to them when the waitress asked if they were ready to order. The daughter began with an order of edamame, and then she asked the waitress if she could substitute a vegetarian alternative, like tofu, in any of the entrees. Told she could, she ordered a tempura dish. The father ordered last and asked for a cup of won ton soup. When the waitress asked if he would be having an entrée, he said that he couldn’t possibly know what he wanted for an entrée until after he’d tasted the soup. “Do I have to order now?” he snapped, “If so can you tell me if today’s soup is acidic or slightly sweet?” The embarrassed waitress told him she would find out. When she left, the father asked the children if they had ordered off the menu when they were in Tokyo or if they needed their hosts’ assistance. A little of both, they agreed.
Well, the father continued, I want to finish what I was talking about in the car because I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about those German scientists in the film. What they edited out of all that Nurenberg footage was any mention of the positive results of their experiments on altitude sickness and hypothermia. The doctors weren’t being irresponsible—they were following currently accepted scientific and ethical behavior. It’s hard for you to understand, but times change, and things that were acceptable in the past sometimes become unacceptable. Like slavery or child labor or debtors’ prisons. Then there’s “community standards,” which is how the same law is applied differently in different parts of the country at different times, depending on what’s considered acceptable in a specific community. It’s an example of democracy in action—the community gets to decide how they want to enforce a specific law. That’s what’s called States Rights—it’s right there in the Constitution. So if a majority of Germans believed they were doing the right thing, it would be difficult to argue that they were behaving unethically—which is different from behaving immorally. Here’s the difference: They weren’t behaving unethically because they were doing what they believed in their hearts to be right and true. To convict and sentence them to the standards of other countries as part of losing a war is a bully’s justic. It isn’t really fair. And that’s unethical.
So what are they accused of, really? They were tried because they chose the most appropriate subjects for medical experiments. These experiments weren’t designed to torture, although sometimes I’m sure the photographs make it look like torture. But what they don’t tell you is that the patients were given everything available for pain. Did they look uncomfortable in those photos? Would they have sit still for anything if it was really all that painful?
But these doctors weren’t tried for the medical experiments, they were tried for being the ones who decided which people went to the work camps and which ones weren’t strong enough to survive in the work camps and sent them to a hospital, which is where they belonged. There they were pampered as the subjects for medical experiments. Of course they wanted to keep them alive as long as they could—if they died, the experiment would be a failure. And the experiments weren’t designed to cause pain or to torture but rather to provide information that they could use to save thousands of soldiers’ lives—both Axis and Allies soldiers’ lives—by creating practical treatments for hyperthermia and altitude sickness—which were causing most of the casualties in the mountains. And they took their subjects not from those who had a chance at survival, but only those patients who would be dying shortly anyway. And some of these subjects were insane or suffering with dementia or psychosis so they didn’t even know where they were.
The lead prosecutor in the film even admitted they were all respected doctors and the brightest and best medical scientists of their time. They were honorable men, distinguished men, intelligent men. He tried to use that to convict them, like they should have known better, that more was expected of them. But what it doesn’t say is that if Germany had won that war, those doctors would be known today as heroes. And if they refused they could be charged with breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’d taken on becoming doctors to cause no harm—thousands were dying from illnesses that could be cured by the death of a few who were doomed anyway. It was unethical to insist on staying alive if there is no hope for you and thousands would survive by dedicating what’s left of your life to help others. Plus it was a military order. To disobey would be treason, and treason is a capital crime in a war. They probably would have been arrested and sentenced to death by the Nazi government if they refused.
The Japanese waitress was at their table, and he paused, looking over his shoulder, impatient, interrupted, and ill-tempered.
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