Secular squatters on Biblical land

Jeff Fountain

Human dignity and rights needed to be set free from religious foundations. Only a secular basis can maintain their continued existence free from religious violence and tensions.

At least, that was the learned opinion one of Holland’s best-known atheists as expressed in a seminar last week in The Hague. Dr Margriet Krijtenburg, who spoke in Dublin at a recent State of Europe Forum, was presenting her doctoral thesis on Robert Schuman to an invited audience, and had invited her supervising professor, Paul Cliteur, to be one of her respondents.

As in Dublin, Margriet had described Schuman’s conviction that the Christian faith had a significant role to play in restoring unity in Europe and in Europe’s future. Concepts such as human dignity and solidarity were, in Schuman’s understanding, intrinsically linked with a Christian concept of humanity.

Margriet’s professor agreed that the identification of such values as the freedom of expression, of religion and of assembly had laid foundations for the unique European project. But fortunately, he said, those values had been set free from their religious roots and redefined within a sustainable secular framework. Such a framework protected human dignity from religious intolerance and offered it a tolerant pluriform context.

A few days after attending this seminar, an engagement near Den Bosch gave me the opportunity to visit the former Nazi concentration camp in Vught while in the neighbourhood.

Some 31,000 Jews, political prisoners, resistance fighters, students, Jehovah’s Witnesses, tramps, black marketeers and criminals were thrown together into Kamp Vught, some for short periods, others longer. Almost all of the 12,000 Jewish internees, over a third of the camp population, were later murdered in extermination camps in Poland.

A reconstructed cell remind visitors of the so-called “bunker drama” of January 15, 1944. In response to a protest by prisoners, the camp commandant ordered 74 women to be locked up together in one cell in a space of nine square metres, without ventilation. When the doors were finally opened after 14 hours, ten of the women had died.

Most sobering, however, was a memorial to the 1,800 Jewish children taken away from the camp on June 6 and 7, 1943, to a “special children’s camp” -- or so the parents were told. Some parents were allowed to accompany the children. After a three-day train ride to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, almost every person perished.

The cold metal monument carried those names and ages of 1,269 of the children that are known. I stood there transfixed and emotionally disturbed reading the ages of these little defenceless human beings. I sought out the ages of my own three grandchildren: three months, two years and four years.



At the base of the monument was a sculptured teddy bear, a truck and other toys. In the trunk of my car was a wrapped present for my grandson celebrating his second birthday. What if he had been born 70 years earlier, to Jewish parents?

What was the source of the evil that had led to this vile crime? Was it not a denial of the Biblical truth that the dignity of every human is rooted in the understanding that life is a gift of the Creator? and that each one of us has been created in His image, Imago Dei?

Had not the “freeing from religious foundations”, the rejection of the Biblical view of humanity, by Hitler and his henchmen caused this European tragedy? Was it not this very tragedy that had led Schuman and others to formulate the European Convention on Human Rights, to which every member nation of the Council of Europe had to agree? Was it not their aim to render such “state gangsterism” impossible, to prevent for ever the atrocities of Kamp Vught, Dachau and Auschwitz?

How quickly we are forgetting this most important lesson of modern times! No, Professor, it is not “fortunate” that in the minds of millions of Europeans today human dignity has been freed from its historical and transcendent foundations. For there are no other foundations. We can’t invent foundations or roots. A process of materialistic evolution in which only the fittest survive can never result in protection and rights for the weak and vulnerable.

As (non-believer) John Gray, formerly of the London School of Economics, wrote in his 2007 book Straw Dogs: humanists are simply Christians in disguise. If there is no God, there is no basis for human dignity and human exceptionalism. Humanism is the creed of those who have “given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational belief in humans”.

The truth is, many Europeans are squatters living in a house built on Judeo-Christian foundations -- but they don’t want to pay the rent.

Jeff Fountain and his wife Romkje are the initiators of the Schuman Centre for European Studies in The Netherlands. This article has been republished here with permission from the Centre’s website.

Nazi Criminal Medical Experiments

The German physicians who ran SS and Wehrmacht medical institutions, along with medical personnel at lower levels, participated actively in carrying out Nazi extermination plans. SS physicians assigned to the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, played a special role. They conducted criminal medical experiments on prisoners and committed other acts that violated medical ethics. Having furthered the extermination program in the concentration camps, they have gone down in history as medical criminals.

The SS physicians who carried out pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz included:

Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg

He experimented with sterilization in the camp. Part of Block No. 10 in the Main Camp was put at his disposal. Several hundred Jewish women from various countries lived in two large rooms on the second floor of the building. Clauberg developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization that consisted of introducing into the female reproductive organs a specially prepared chemical irritant that produced sever inflammation. Within several weeks, the fallopian tubes grew shut and were blocked. Clauberg's experiments killed some of his subjects, and others were put to death so that autopsies could be performed.


In June 1943, Clauberg wrote to Himmler:

"The non-surgical method of sterilizing women that I have invented is now almost perfected . . . As for the questions that you have directed to me, sir, I can today answer them in the way that I had anticipated: if the research that I am carrying out continues to yield the sort of results that it has produced so far (and there is no reason to suppose that this shall not be the case), then I shall be able to report in the foreseeable future that one experienced physician, with an appropriately equipped office and the aid of ten auxiliary personnel, will be able to carry out in the course of a single day the sterilization of hundreds, or even 1,000 women."

Dr. Horst Schumann

Like Clauberg, Schumann was searching for a convenient means of mass sterilization that would enable the Third Reich to carry out the biological destruction of conquered nations by "scientific methods"--through depriving people of their reproductive capacity. "X-ray sterilization" equipment was set up for Schumann in one of the barracks at Birkenau. Every so often, several dozen Jewish men and women prisoners were brought in. The sterilization experiments consisted of exposing the women's ovaries and the men's testes to X-rays. Schumann applied various intensities at various intervals in his search for the optimal dose of radiation. The exposure to radiation produced severe burns on the belly, groin, and buttocks areas of the subjects, and festering sores that were resistant to healing. Many subjects died from complications. The results of the X-ray sterilization experiments were unsatisfactory. In an article that he sent to Himmler in April 1944, titled "The Effect of X-Ray Radiation on the human Reproductive Glands," Schumann expressed a preference for surgical castration, as being quicker and more certain.

Dr. Mengele

Josef Mengele held a Ph.D. and a medical doctorate. In close collaboration with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics, he studied the phenomena of twins, as well as the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. He was also interested in people with different-colored irises and in the etiology and treatment of noma ("water cancer" of the cheek). This latter disease, widespread in the Gypsy Camp, had been previously almost unknown in Europe. Mengeles first experimental subjects were Gypsy children. He had a laboratory in the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp." On Mengele's orders, children suffering from noma were put to death in order for pathology investigations to be carried out. Organs and even complete heads of children were preserved and sent in jars to institutions including the Medical Academy in Graz, Austria.


Mengele also began selecting dwarves and persons with physical peculiarities (including inborn disabilities and the developmental defects that appear in dwarfism) from the Jewish transports brought to Birkenau for extermination, from the Jewish "Theresienstadt Family Camp" in Birkenau, and from the so-called Mexico (Sector BIII).


In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele subjected pairs twins and people with physical handicaps to special medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism. Usually painful and exhausting, these examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved, terrified children (for such were the majority of the twins). The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toeprints were taken. As soon as the examinations of a given pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengele ordered them killed by phenol injection so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy. "Scientifically" interesting anatomical specimens were preserved and shipped to the Institute in Berlin-Dahlem for more detailed examination.

Dr Johann Paul Kremer

The killing of prisoners was also accompanied by research into the changes that occur in the human organism as a result of starvation--in particular, liver atrophy ("braune Atrophie"). This research was carried out at Auschwitz Concentration Camp by SS-Obersturmführer Johann Paul Kremer, M.D., Ph.D., professor at the University of Münster, where he lectured on anatomy and human genetics. At the Block No. 28 clinic in the main camp, he carried out assessments of prisoners attempting to gain admission to the hospital. Many of them were at the point of exhaustion, in the "Musselman" state, in the final stages of starvation to death. Kremer ordered most of them killed by phenol injection. Kremer selected prisoners who struck him as particularly good experimental material, and questioned them just before their deaths, as they lay on the autopsy table awaiting injection, about such personal details as their weight before arrest and any medicines they had used recently. In some cases, he ordered these prisoners photographed. Before their bodies were cold, they were subjected to autopsies and slides were made for Kremer of the liver, spleen, and pancreas.

SS physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, and Eduard Wirths

In 1941-1944, SS camp physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, and Eduard Wirths carried out clinical trials of the tolerance and efficacy of new medications and drugs, with such code names as B-1012, B-1O34, B-1O36, 3582, P-111, rutenolu, and peristonu, on Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoners. They did so on commission from IG Farbenindustrie, and particularly from the Bayer firm, which was part of that cartel. These preparations were given to prisoners suffering from contagious diseases, who had in many cases been deliberately infected.

Prof. Dr. August Hirt

In 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Prof. Dr. August Hirt, chairman of the anatomy department at the Reich University in Strassburgu, set about assembling a collection of Jewish skeletons under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe Foundation. To this end, he received permission from Himmler to select the required number of prisoners at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The selection of 115 persons (79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 "Asians"--probably Soviet POWs) and the preliminary preparation, consisting of biometrical measurements and the collection of personal data, were carried out by Hirt's collaborator, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Bruno Beger, who arrived in Auschwitz in the first half of 1943. Berger finished his work by June 15, 1943. After going through quarantine, some of the prisoners whom Berger selected were sent in July and early August to Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, where they were killed in the gas chamber. The victims' corpses were sent to Hirt as material for his skeleton collection, which was intended for use in anthropological studies that would demonstrate the superiority of the Nordic race.

From here.