Science and the Swastika

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 first victim of the 'euthanasia progamme' was a deformed baby.

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.

Looks at how after the Second World War the American military recruited dozens of German scientists. Amongst them was Professor Hubertus Strughold; 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 program may have been tainted by Nazi criminals.

Why did the Germans, the most advanced scientific nation, fail to build a nuclear bomb during the War? 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's friends begged him to leave Germany, knowing he would be asked to work on nuclear research for Hitler but he refused.