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==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 Misplaced Pages. 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==
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 . 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 )

Latest revision as of 16:55, 30 September 2007

Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_arbitration/Waldorf_education#Pete_K_banned applies to this page if it contains content which relates to Waldorf education, PLANS, Rudolf Steiner, orAnthroposophy. Fred Bauder 20:14, 1 June 2007 (UTC)