Science and the Swastika

- Season 1

(2001)

Looks at the role of doctors in Nazi Germany and how many of them willingly took part in eugenics and euthanasia in the 1930s and 1940s, thus betraying the fundamental tenets of their profession, with initial sterilisation policies moving to ones of killing adults and children who were mentally or physically disabled. The programme includes an interview with Dr Erich Haessler, who worked at the hospital where the first victim of the 'euthanasia progamme was killed in 1939 - a deformed baby, murdered on the orders of Hitler himself.

Considers the work carried out by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps where they used inmates for experiments in their gynaecological and genetic research. Looks at people such as the infamous Dr Josef Mengele and his experiments with twins, mainly children, at Auschwitz, and also at Professor Clauberg who used hundreds of women in his sterilisation drug experiments. Also considers the morality and human feeling that was obliterated by ideology, ambition or lack of restriction.

Looks at how after the Second World War the American military recruited dozens of German scientists. Amongst them was Professor Hubertus Strughold whose subsequent development of space medicine made a large contribution in the ability to send astronauts to the Moon. However, as a Nazi doctor he was involved in inhuman experiments at Dachau concentration camp, using inmates in experiments on the effects of high altitude and extreme cold. Looks at how far the Apollo moon programme may have been tainted by Nazi war crimes and criminals.

Why did the Germans, the most advanced scientific nation, fail to build a nuclear bomb during the War? In late 1938 a Berlin scientist, Otto Hahn, discovered nuclear fission. Werner Heisenberg, the chief scientist of Germany's wartime nuclear project, pioneered quantum mechanics and won the Nobel Prize. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Heisenberg friends begged him to leave Germany, knowing he would be asked to work on nuclear research for Hitler but he refused. The focus of the story is a famous meeting in Copenhagen in 1941 between Niels Bohr and Heisenberg ...