Jewish Bodies and Profits

By Steve Rodan

Health Minister MK Moshe Arbel has appointed a new committee to examine the alleged involvement of the medical community in the disappearance of children brought by their parents from east Yemen and the Balkans in 1948-1954.

Jerusalem Post. May 2023

More than a century ago, a young Zionist leader, in cooperation with Germany, decided to make Palestine a laboratory for experiments on Jews. Arthur Ruppin, touted as the father of Zionist settlement, was known as a hater of Jews who believed that they were an inferior race, a concept that matched that of his professors in Germany.

In 1905, Ruppin, by then a successful businessman and close to the German Jewish leadership, joined the Zionist Organization. Three years later, sponsored by Zionist Organization president David Wolffsohn, Ruppin was assigned to move to Palestine and open an office in charge of immigration to the holy land. Under the watchful eye of the Ottoman Empire, he rejected some 80 percent of Jews on grounds that they were unsuitable for settlement.

Although trained as an economist and law, Ruppin worked with Germany to formulate solutions to the "Jewish problem." They both agreed that the Jews were genetically defective. Ruppin argued, however, that the Jewish race could be corrected through selective breeding as well as modern education and culture.

Ruppin was a disciple of Ernst Haeckel, a zoologist who divided humans into 10 races. On top of the list was Caucasians. Decades before Hitler, Haeckel urged Germans to keep their race pure to ensure domination over the rest of the world. His ideas contributed to the rise of Nazism less than 15 years after his death.

In cooperation with German racial theorists, Ruppin began experimenting with Jewish subjects to identify their genetic traits. His first subjects included Jews from Yemen, whom Ruppin classified as "special Jewish types," able to work like an Arab peasant while remaining a devout Jew. [1]

But Ruppin was far more important to both Germany and the Zionist movement. He played a dominant role in the negotiations for the Transfer Agreement in late 1933, which aligned the two sides and sabotaged a worldwide boycott of Hitler. Ruppin, now head of the German Department of the Jewish Agency, determined which German Jews could enter Palestine and how much money could they carry with them to their new home. The lion's share of the applicant's funds was seized by Berlin and the Zionists. The agreement rapidly expanded to all fields, including intelligence, trade, finance, health and political cooperation.

Later, Ruppin turned Palestine into a laboratory for "all kinds of experiments." He scoured the hallways of Jewish schools for interesting subjects. He would study and compare their facial features and seek to link them with their geographical origins. What is known of the experiments was that Ruppin studied every facet of these children, approved by the Zionist leadership. He photographed them from different angles and under varying conditions. [2]

Sharing data with Hitler

Ruppin shared his data with the Germans. By now, Hitler had come into power and many of his German racial theory colleagues adopted Nazism and used any research to justify the persecution and elimination of the Jews. Under Hitler, who preached an "anti-Semitism of reason," significant funding for research on Jews and other groups poured into German universities and institutes. [3] This was no problem for Ruppin, an admirer of Hitler, particularly for his determination to use race selection as a means to improve the German nation.

Soon, Hans Gunther became a partner of Ruppin. Like Ruppin, Gunther was not a scientist or physician. He was an author who promoted eugenics and influenced Hitler to adopt his theories to justify everything from sterilization to extermination. In 1930, Gunther was appointed to the new chair on racial theory at the University of Jena. Two years later, he joined the Nazi Party. Gunther termed the Jews "a thing of ferment and disturbance, a wedge driven by Asia into the European structure." He warned that the Jews marked the biggest threat to the Germans, whom he called the "Nordic race." [4]

Ruppin shared his data on Jews with Gunther, who used it to promote the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 as well as secret lethal programs that included the testing of gas chambers on humans. Ruppin was important to Gunther, who did no research of his own and was ridiculed in academic circles as a dilettante. [5] The information provided by Ruppin helped avoid German experimentation on Jews in the early and mid-1930s. Instead, the eugenicists used mostly gentiles, whether the elderly, infirm or mentally ill, as subjects.

Father of Mengele

One of the leading eugenicists was Ernst Rudin. He played a significant role in the Nazi sterilization program, which began in 1934. From then, some 50,000 Germans a year were made barren. [6] In 1941, Nazi leaders studied a proposal to sterilize some Jews rather than subject all of them to extermination.

Rudin also marked a link to one of the most notorious SS men, Josef Mengele. Born in 1911, Mengele rose rapidly under the Nazis to become one of the top researchers in Germany. Under Rudin, Mengele was awarded a doctorate from Munich, cited in medical journals as a "racial expert." He joined the SS in May 1938 and served in Poland and Ukraine. In May 1943, Mengele was appointed chief physician for the women's section in Auschwitz. His assignment was selection for labor as well as experimentation, particularly on 1,500 sets of twins. His findings were sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

Mengele also worked with major pharmaceutical companies. One of them was Bayer AG, charged in a 1999 lawsuit as monitoring Mengele's experiments for research. Bayer wanted to know how bacteria and viruses would affect humans. For this, Mengele used twins for lethal injections. Then the twins were killed and Mengele would perform autopsies. [7]

By the time, Mengele arrived in Auschwitz, Ruppin was dead. The scope of his experiments was never made public. The amount of money he received from Germany for cooperating with racial science was never disclosed. But the Zionist leadership did not end the use of Jews for medical experiments and secretly worked with West Germany throughout the 1950s.

As early as 1949, the new State of Israel began conducting experiments on Jews that closely resembled those of Ruppin and his Nazi colleagues. Again, the subjects were Yemenites, most of them babies. At least 2,000 were snatched from their mothers by Jewish Agency and medical personnel who claimed that the babies were sick. Shortly after, authorities insisted that the children had died. Israeli documents and oral testimony show that many of the babies were given up for adoption and some underwent experiments. In 1952, Israeli researchers published some of the findings.

"There exist still, however, the Jews of Yemen, who have lived in isolation for nearly 2000 years," a team of Israeli and British researchers wrote in 1952 in the highly-respected journal Lancet. "They are a deeply religious community among whom miscegenation with the surrounding Arabs must have been very rare. These Yemenite Jews have recently migrated to the new state of Israel and thus become much more readily accessible for anthropological investigation. [8]

Testimony given to Israel's parliament in 2017 asserted that Israeli authorities worked with foreign countries, including Britain, in the experiments on the Yemenites as well as Bulgarians and Romanians. Some of them underwent tests to determine whether they had "Negro blood," or traits for sickle cell anemia. Others were given injections of unknown and often lethal chemicals. Many were kept undernourished. The Knesset Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from Yemen, the East and the Balkans was told by Israeli medical professionals that the research was funded by the United States.

But the research involved much more than Negro blood. The Americans also wanted human organs from Israel. The Knesset committee was told that at least 60 hearts from deceased Yemenites were sent to the United States.

This was no longer research but a trade in organs -- in other words big money. Israel authorized hospitals and physicians to demand an autopsy on any deceased person. Knesset legislation to limit autopsies -- which ran to 90 percent of all deaths and violate Jewish law -- were ignored. Israeli critics asserted that the autopsy program was funded by research grants from abroad. In many if not all of the autopsies, vital organs were removed, reserved for transplants whether in Israel or abroad. The profits were immense and autopsies were supported by nearly every level of the medical community. In December 1980, the Knesset formally ended the practice. [9]

The secret organ trade

But Israel never stopped using its citizens for secret or unauthorized medical experiments. By this time, Mengele was long dead; Israel had refused to capture him or ask for his extradition from Brazil. Despite legislation, Israeli authorities continued to harvest organs from bodies throughout the 1990s. They collected corneas, heart valves, skin and bones. To hide the missing corneas, the eyes of the deceased were glued. The country also became known as a global hub for illegal organ trafficking.

"We started to harvest corneas for various hospitals in Israel," Dr. Yehuda Hiss, who for years headed Israel's sole autopsy center, told Israel television in 2000." Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the families." [10]

Ruppin and his buddy Gunther would have certainly smiled.

Notes

1. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture. Etan Bloom. Introduction. Page 413. Brill, 2011

2. ibid. Page 102

3. Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Alan E. Steinweis. Page 8. Harvard Univeresity Press. 2006

4. Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870-1940. Anne Maxwell. Page 153. Sussex. 2008

5. Studying the Jew. Alan E. Steinweis. Page 26

6. Mengele Medicus: Medicine's Nazi Heritage. William E. Seidelman. International Journal of Health Services. Vol. 19. No. 4. 1989

7. Suit Alleges Bayer Role in Holocaust Experiments. Henry Weinstein. LA Times. Feb. 18, 1999

8. An Investigation of Blood Groups and a Search for Sickle-Cell Trait in Yemenite Jews. F. Dreyfuss, Elizabeth W. Ikin. H. Lehmann, A.E. Mourant. D.Phil. The Lancet. Nov. 22, 1952

9. A Post-Mortem on Autopsies. Rabbi Mendel Weinbach. The Jewish Observer. January 1981

10. Israel harvested organs without permission, official say. CNN Dec. 21, 2009. Israel harvested organs without permission, officials say - CNN.com

Below: Yemenite subjects in Israeli experiments in the 1950s.