Professor wins grant to study German's life

POTSDAM — A Clarkson University history professor is writing a biography about a complex and controversial German scientist.

Sheila F. Weiss, a faculty member in the college's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, recently was awarded a $277,000 National Science Foundation grant to fund her research into the life of Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer.

Von Verschuer (1896-1969) was a German baron and eugenics expert who is infamous for having overseen the work of Dr. Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Nazi era. Despite his grave moral transgressions, the human biologist eventually regained respect in the scientific community after World War II.

Ms. Weiss said that she was fascinated by the moral ambiguities posed by the man's life story.

"It's hard to know what he really thought. It's hard to reconcile this devout Protestant with his statements on eugenics during the Nazi regime," she said. "In some ways, the story of Otmar von Verschuer is the story of conservative German science in the 20th century."

Ms. Weiss has traveled several times to Germany to research the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where von Verschuer directed a prestigious center during World War II. She has met with the man's son, who is considered nobility there.

"Here was this Jewish girl from a working-class background in New York City going to see this German baron whose father was an anti-Semite," Ms. Weiss said of her travels. "It was a daunting task."

Von Verschuer was an influential pioneering scientist specializing in twin studies. When the Third Reich came to power, he sided with its cause by giving talks about "the Jewish question" at Nazi conferences, and acting as a consultant to determine the "Jewishness" of certain individuals.

In return for bolstering Adolf Hitler's racial views, von Verschuer gained notoriety and funding for his studies. He made what Ms. Weiss calls a "Faustian bargain" with the regime in order to advance his work.

"Von Verschuer had a prejudice against Jews since he was a young boy. He projected that onto his science, but there's a big gap between that and his technical work," Ms. Weiss said. "What was said about the Jewish question could not have been viewed as scientific, even at the time. We make it too easy if we say that eugenics was simply a pseudoscience — it wasn't."

As the adviser for Mengele's doctoral thesis, von Verschuer secured the funding from the Third Reich for Mengele's grisly "experiments."

Mengele was known as the "Angel of Death" by Jews in the concentration camp because of the way the white sleeves on his coat hung down as he pointed left and right, directing new arrivals either to the gas chambers or to the forced labor camps.

Mengele tortured Jewish and Gypsy children and twins, performing brutal surgeries and experiments in his lab. He even killed people specifically to obtain eyes, internal organs, skeletons and body parts needed for von Verschuer's experiments in Berlin.

Von Verschuer always denied that he knew what Mengele was doing, or what was going on at Auschwitz, but Ms. Weiss says that she has the first piece of solid evidence that the scientist and his wife had some knowledge of the atrocities.

Von Verschuer's son has shared a letter from his sister with the historian that says during the war, Mengele came to Berlin to visit the family for dinner. After the meal, the adults went into the other room to talk.

"When they left, the mother was crying and saying, 'It's so terrible. It's so terrible,'" Ms. Weiss said. "We can deduce that Mengele told them what was going on. What is clear is the horror of Auschwitz was spelled out. They certainly knew it was not just a normal concentration camp."

Von Verschuer's career spanned 50 years, from 1919 to 1969, which included four important periods — the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Allied occupation and early West Germany. Under each regime, von Verschuer did what he could to support those in power in order to solidify his own position, Ms. Weiss said.

"Otmar was not maniacally anti-Semitic like Hitler. He would politically have been in favor of something like an apartheid system, not in favor of killing the Jews. He felt they had too much influence," she said. "But he never made a public apology after the war."

After all von Verschuer had done — despite his extreme ethical stain — he eventually went back to his studies and regained an honorable reputation among scientific scholars, Ms. Weiss said.

"Everyone was interested in the scandal, the grave ethical transgressions committed on his part and the medical crimes committed by Mengele. My question was, how could someone who was so tainted have attained a position like he did in the post-war period?" she said.

Von Verschuer was named a professor at the University of Muenster. During the early years of the Cold War, he conducted research into the effects of atomic bombs and energy on human populations. He also wrote about restoring Christian family values.

In some ways, Ms. Weiss said, she feels the questions asked about von Verschuer are the same questions people ask about Nazi Germany as a whole.

"Ever since I was an undergraduate, I always wondered, 'How could the country of Bach, Beethoven, Einstein and Planck fall into the moral abyss and elect someone like Adolf Hitler?'" she said. "Sensationalism teaches us nothing. History doesn't come in black and white. It comes in shades of gray."