Doug's Darkworld

Mildred Harnak. Image is free to use according to Wikipedia:ticket #2008031210021854

Another extemporaneous post. Boy, getting even uglier on the Iran front, with ships being sabotaged. Trump blames Iran, predictable and silly. Effective though if he is looking for a reason to start a war. Typically the nation one wants to start a war with is blamed for some incident, whether or not it actually occurred is irrelevant. If necessary, incidents can and have been manufactured. As Hitler did before invading Poland. Iran is not Poland though, it’s not 1939, and Trump isn’t Hitler. If war breaks out, my prediction is that nothing good will come of it.

Speaking of Hitler, two other things I wanted to touch on came up in my readings. Revisiting the “Trump is Hitler” trope, I realize there’s a few more differences that make the comparison iffy at best. I may have mentioned that Hitler seized power at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval in Germany. Trump is a product of  relatively much more stable times. Hitler had huge numbers (millions) of organized paramilitary fighters that were loyal to Hitler, Trump has nothing of the kind.

Most importantly of all, within a year of seizing power, there was the Night of the Long Knives, where Hitler used his loyal followers to slaughter his political opponents. 85 to more than 1,000 killed. After which all political parties except the Nazis were outlawed. While Trump may fantasize about having Warren and Clinton seized and jailed/executed, I don’t see any realistic chance he is going to get that kind of personal power. Not that I’m defending the man of course, he’s a disaster on multiple levels. Just not one that involves all of us being forced to wear MAGA hats.

And speaking of Nazis and Germany’s slide into horror, I came across some nasty little Nazi business that I wanted to share. And yes, this post is not quite as extemporaneous as I led on, these various tidbits have been floating around in my head and I wanted to tie them all together somehow. Anyhow, the story of Dr Hermann Stieve. He was a German doctor, rose to prominence after World War One, became at age 35 the youngest doctor to chair a medical department at a German university. He was a researcher, particularly of the female reproductive system. In fact he was the first to scientifically show that the rhythm method is ineffective as a form of birth control. He wasn’t a Nazi, but he was certainly a Nationalist and not exactly uncomfortable with Nazi ideology.

Wait, a Nazi sympathizing doctor, Hitler’s Germany,  female reproductive system … this is going to get rather dark, isn’t it? Yes, yes it is. So, after World War One the good doctor had a problem. The Weimar Republic, Germany’s post World War One government, didn’t condone the death penalty. So bodies and organs for study were in short supply. Fortunately for the our doctor, this all changed in 1934. Hitler was now in power, and Nazi jails started executing people right and left. And in no time German teaching and research hospitals had all the fresh corpses they needed.

Few, if any, objected. So by the early thirties, it had to have been common knowledge that the Nazis were regularly murdering Germans under the thinnest of legal pretexts. I mean it got much worse later, but still, most if not all people were able to carry on with their lives and just accept it. Shows how normalized evil can percolate through society. Few objected when Jews were dismissed from all University positions either. Granted it also rapidly became actually dangerous to object, again, no comparison to our current Trump troubles.

Our Doctor Stieve, no objections at all. And once the war got underway, he made a deal with a nearby women’s prison, and got fresh bodies pretty much on order. And the prison’s record keeping on their prisoners even helped with his research. He claimed none of the bodies he used were political prisoners, which pretty much has to be a lie. On one occasion one of his assistants recognized a body as belonging to a dissident friend. She immediately quit Dr Stieve’s program, the only one of his students or assistants known to have quit for moral reasons. Silver linings?

There were worse allegations against the doctor, but they don’t seem to hold up to scrutiny. When the prison changed their execution time to midnight, Stieve did however have influence enough to get it changed to morning executions … so he got his specimens as fresh as possible. Speaking of which, a few years back among his effects his family found hundreds of slides with tissue sample from his experiments. They were recently buried in Berlin, which is how I stumbled upon this story. The doctor was of course executed after the war for his crimes. Snort. No, only doctors who actually worked in the death camps were prosecuted. If doctors like Sieve were prosecuted, which would have been a huge numbers  of doctors, it would have hurt the reputation of German medicine. Couldn’t have that. Where Stieve disposed of his subjects is also unknown, partly why the tissue samples above got a real burial.

One subject though, Mildred Harnak, her post experimental remains were given to a friend of hers for disposal. She was a member of Red Orchestra, a German antiwar group that was rounded up and executed. Mildred is the only Red Orchestra member whose burial site is known.  Mildred was originally from Wisconsin, and had married a German and moved to Germany. Her husband was also a member of Red Orchestra. She was originally sentenced to six years for espionage. Hitler ordered her execution though, so she has the dubious distinction of being the only American who Hitler personally ordered killed. Her last words on the guillotine were reportedly: “Ich habe Deutschland auch so geliebt” (“I loved Germany so much as well.”)

God rest her soul, and all those murdered by the Nazis.

(Copyright © 2019 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.)