Article ID: CBB363337914

Electroconvulsive Therapy in the Shadow of the Gas Chambers: Medical Innovation and Human Experimentation in Auschwitz (2020)

unapi

Six years after it was first introduced into psychiatry in 1938, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) became the subject of criminal human experiments in Nazi Germany. In 1944, at the Auschwitz III / Monowitz camp hospital, the Polish Jewish prisoner psychiatrist Zenon Drohocki started experimental treatments on prisoners with an ECT device that he had constructed himself. According to eyewitnesses, Drohocki's intention to treat mentally unstable prisoners was soon turned into something much more nefarious by SS doctors (including Josef Mengele), who used the device for deadly experiments. This article provides an account of this important and little-known aspect of the early history of ECT, drawing on an extensive array of historical literature, testimonies, and newly accessible documents. The adoption of ECT in Auschwitz is a prime example of the "grey zone" in which prisoner doctors had to operate—they could only survive as long as the SS considered their work useful for their own destructive purposes.

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Authors & Contributors
Jones, Edgar
Youngsoo Cho
Reichelt, Bernd
Schöhl, Stephanie
Maher, Max
Sheffer, Edith
Concepts
World War II
Medicine and the military; medicine in war
Medicine and ethics
Psychiatry
Nazism
Human experimentation
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century
Places
Germany
Great Britain
Moravia
United States
Japan
France
Institutions
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
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