Mr. Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust and the just released
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a
Master Race.

http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/hnn.us/index.html

The Story of the New Jersey Doctor Who Helped Kill Prisoners at
Buchenwald in the Name of Eugenics

http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/hnn.us/index.html

The Story of the New Jersey Doctor Who Helped Kill Prisoners at
Buchenwald in the Name of Eugenics

By Edwin Black

Mr. Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust and the just released
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a
Master Race.

The "Little Camp"-the isolation and quarantine section of Buchenwald.
Block 57. One morning in late May 1944.

Three-tiered geometric wooden boxes lined the barrack. Each shelf
housed as many as sixteen emaciated humans. A thirsty and exhausted
Frenchman named Oliv struggled to climb down from the top for his
day's work. But he was too weak. As Oliv lay limp, a fat, well-fed
inmate doctor walked in.

The other French prisoners pleaded with the doctor that Oliv was too
ill to work and suffered from severe rheumatism. He needed medical
attention. A small infirmary, stocked with medicines and called "the
hospital," had been established in the Little Camp. The doctor
controlled access to the facility and the drugs. Those admitted to the
hospital could be excused from work until nursed back to working
strength-and thereby live another day.

But the doctor, himself a prisoner yet reviled as a barbaric stooge of
the SS, was known for refusing admission to the hospital except to
those he favored--or those who could bribe their way in with relief
packets. Most of all, the doctor hated the French communists. They--
and their diseases--were everywhere in the Little Camp. The doctor
believed that each inferior national group was a carrier of its own
specific set of diseases. Frenchmen, he thought, brought in diphtheria
and related throat diseases as well as scarlet fever. Simply put, the
Little Camp doctor was unwilling to use his limited hospital to lessen
the prisoners' loads, extend their lives or relieve their suffering.
The prisoners' job was to work. His job was to ensure they kept
working--until they could work no more.

Furious and impatient, the Little Camp doctor pushed the others out of
the way, stepped onto the lowest of the three tiers, reached up and
grabbed Oliv's foot as it dangled over the edge. He then yanked Oliv
over the short sideboard and down the eight feet to the floor. Oliv
tumbled to the floor like a doll, cracking his skull. Blood soaked
down the back of his shirt. As the life seeped out of Oliv, his
comrades hauled him onto the lowest bunk, and then hurried out to
their backbreaking labors at the quarry. When they came back to Block
57 that night, Oliv was dead. Next to the bathroom was a makeshift
morgue; they moved his body there. Later, Oliv's body waited its turn
at the crematorium.

The French inmates of the Little Camp never forgot the brutality the
doctor showed them, while exhibiting seemingly incongruous medical
compassion to others. They never forgot that while most of them were
worked and starved into skeletons, the doctor ate well. Many prisoners
lost 40 percent of their weight shortly after arriving in the Little
Camp. But the doctor arrived at Buchenwald fat and stayed fat. No one
could understand how a talented physician could render his skills so
effectively to some, while allowing others to die horrible deaths.
After Buchenwald was liberated in April of 1945, the stories about Dr.
Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen emerged. He was accused of murdering a
thousand prisoners by injection.

The United States military conducted war crimes trials at Dachau for a
variety of lesser-known concentration camp Nazis and their inmate
collaborators, especially the medical killers. Katzen-Ellenbogen was
among them, and was found guilty of war crimes, right along with the
other so-called "butchers of Buchenwald." He was sentenced to a long
term in prison. The court finding, however, was not an easy one. It
was complicated by conflicting stories of Katzen-Ellenbogen's
outstanding academic background and prewar record.

Many found Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen and the many lives he led
incomprehensible. How could he alternately function as a gifted
psychiatrist and as a murderous man of medicine? At the time, none
understood that Katzen-Ellenbogen viewed humanity with multiple
standards. He was an American eugenicist. Nor was he just any
eugenicist. Katzen-Ellenbogen was a founding member of the prestigious
but pro-Nazi Eugenics Research Association headquartered at the
Carnegie Institution and the chief eugenicist of New Jersey under then-
Governor Woodrow Wilson.

A Superior Species

In the first years of the twentieth century, American eugenics
crusaded to create a superior species. The superior species the
eugenics movement sought was not just tall, strong, talented people.
In a throwback to the pre-Civil War era, eugenicists craved the blond,
blue-eyed Nordic types who had settled America in the previous
century. This group alone was fit to inherit the earth. In the
process, the movement intended to subtract Negroes, Indians,
Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people,
the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic
lines drawn up by American raceologists. After racist eugenics became
entrenched in American law and national health policy, including the
forced sterilization of thousands of Americans, the idea was
transplanted to Germany by the Rockefeller Foundation and other
American philanthropies intent on ethnic cleansing. Hitler discovered
American race politics and made it the scientific and juridical basis
of genocidal Nazi eugenics.

Katzen-Ellenbogen was a classic eugenicist. Viewing humanity through a
eugenic prism, he was capable of exhibiting great compassion toward
those he saw as superior, and great cruelty toward those he considered
genetically unfit. In Buchenwald, the French, with their Mediterranean
and African mixtures, were eugenically among the lowest, not really
worthy of life. At the same time, in Katzen-Ellenbogen's view, those
of Nordic or Aryan descent were treasured--to be helped and even
saved.

How did one of America's pioneer eugenicists wend his way from New
Jersey to Buchenwald's notorious Little Camp? The story begins in late
nineteenth-century Poland. Katzen-Ellenbogen was the name of a famous
line of Polish and Czech rabbis going back centuries. However, he--or
perhaps his immediate branch of the family--obscured any connection
with a Jewish heritage. Like many European Jews who had drifted from
tradition, he spelled his last name numerous ways, hyphenated and
unhyphenated, and sometimes even signed his name "Edwin K.
Ellenbogen." He was probably born as Edwin Wladyslaw Katzen-Ellenbogen
in approximately 1882, in Stanislawow, in Austrian-occupied Poland.

Katzen-Ellenbogen first studied at a Jesuit high school in Poland.
Then he attended the University of Leipzig, where he secured his
medical degree in 1905. While in medical school, he became engaged to
a girl from Massachusetts, Marie A. Pierce, daughter of a judge and
scion of a prominent family of Americans dating back to the Minutemen.

In 1905, Katzen-Ellenbogen sailed for America, settling briefly in
Massachusetts, where he married Marie. He added "Marie" to his various
middle names, and utilized her family's connections to further his
academic pursuits. Various letters of introduction were provided, as
was the money Katzen-Ellenbogen needed to continue his university work
in Europe. There he studied psychiatry with some of the best names in
the field, during the formative years of the profession, and he also
learned the mystifying medical art of hypnosis.

In 1907, Katzen-Ellenbogen returned to the United States, where he was
naturalized as a citizen and started work in state institutions, such
as the Danvers State Hospital of Massachusetts. One of the early
exponents of Freud in America, Katzen-Ellenbogen became a Harvard
lecturer in abnormal psychology. He developed expertise on fake
symptoms, authoring an article on the topic in the Journal of Abnormal
Psychology.

His expert testimony was pivotal in convicting a murderer who claimed
diminished capacity due to an epileptic attack; the convicted man was
electrocuted in 1912. Epilepsy became one of his specialties, and he
was appointed co-editor the international quarterly, Epilepsia.

In 1911, Woodrow Wilson became governor of New Jersey. Katzen-
Ellenbogen was asked to become scientific director of the State
Village for Epileptics at Skillman, New Jersey. It was there that he
would develop his eugenic interests. "While there," recalled Katzen-
Ellenbogen, "I particularly studied...the hereditary background of
epilepsy." As the state's leading expert, Katzen-Ellenbogen was then
asked by Wilson to draft New Jersey's law to forcibly sterilize
epileptics and defectives. In the process, Katzen-Ellenbogen became an
expert on legal and legislative safeguards and jurisprudence.

In 1913, Katzen-Ellenbogen became charter member #14 of the Eugenics
Research Association at the Carnegie Institution's Cold Spring Harbor
lab complex. The eugenics movement, spearheaded by the Eugenics
Research Association, campaigned around the world to create a master
Nordic race and sterilize or segregate all other humans out of
existence. The doctor continued his active membership in the ERA even
after he sailed for Russia in 1915, never to return to the United
States.

Katzen-Ellenbogen bounced around the capitals of Europe for the next
few years. He was about to board a ship in Holland when he received a
telegram informing him that his only son had died in America after
falling from a roof. Katzen-Ellenbogen was never the same. He became
morose and introspective, questioning the value of human life, at
least his own. "I contemplated to offer myself as physician to the
leprosy colony in the upper State of New York," he recounted. He also
considered suicide.

In 1925, Katzen-Ellenbogen developed a relationship with a woman named
Olga. She described him as "the companion of my life." He described
her as "my ...

read more =BB

In a throwback to the pre-Civil War era, eugenicists craved the blond,
blue-eyed Nordic types who had settled America in the previous
century.

http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/hnn.us/index.html

The Story of the New Jersey Doctor Who Helped Kill Prisoners at
Buchenwald in the Name of Eugenics

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