Dr Horst Schumann, the director of the Euthanasia Centre at Sonnenstein, is one of the members of this commission.
http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/
http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/bearing-witness-to-the-holocaust-children-at-auschwitz/#comment-3988
Nazi scientists were curious about the limits of human endurance as well as bodily reaction to a whole catalogue of remorseless physical insult. At Auschwitz, Dr. Horst Schumann removed the testicles of young men after subjecting the organs to burning X-rays. At the same camp, Dr. Eduard Wirths and gynecology professor Dr. Carl Clauberg studied women’s wombs following injections of toxic chemicals.
These children, liberated from Auschwitz by the Soviet Army, had been subjected to savage “medical” experiments that they were fortunate to survive. Auschwitz doctor Horst Schumann sterilized men, women, and children by exposing them to extreme doses of radiation. He burned most of them so badly that they were deemed unfit for work and sent to the gas chambers. It is uncertain precisely what experiments these children underwent.
Photo: Yad Vashem
Thanks for your e-mail and the news that the Church of England has apologized to Charles Darwin for rejecting evolution. It is better late than never. My sense is that this action is more embarrassing than helpful. Darwin doesn’t need the Church’s apology. His thesis is now accepted academically across the world. Evolution is taught in fourth-grade science books. Medical science assumes its truth and the discovery of DNA took away the last vestige of the suggestion that it was still “an unproved theory.” The fact that there are some benighted souls in the world who believe that quoting the book of Genesis can somehow counter the insights of Charles Darwin, or that it is their Christian duty to resist Darwin, is hardly determinative in the debate.
It is a tragedy that the Church officially resisted Darwin for the last 150 years, but that is quite typical of church leaders’ behavior. Recall that it was in December of 1991 that the Vatican finally admitted that Galileo was correct. This was about 40 years after space travel had begun. If Galileo had not been correct, our spacecraft would have collided with the sky that separated heaven from earth.
I would suggest the leaders of the Church of England must now practice what that apology to Darwin suggests that we believe. For Darwin attacks the basic Christian myth of a perfect creation, the fall into sin, the divine rescue carried out by Jesus and the restoration through faith to our status as those created in the image of God. If we evolved from single cells into complex self-conscious creatures then there was no perfection from which to fall, no fall into sin, no need for a divine rescue and no capacity to be restored to something which we have never been. This means that the whole way of telling the Jesus story must be rethought, and this reformulation will threaten church leaders deeply. Clergy on Sunday mornings can no longer address “fallen sinners.” The mantra that “Jesus died for my sins” will have to be retired. The traditional meaning of the Eucharist will have to be revised. We will have to recognize that we are now addressing not those who need to be rescued from a fall but those who have not yet achieved the status of being fully human. Jesus must then empower us to be fully human; he cannot rescue us from sin.
I’m glad to see the Church of England begin to enter the 20th century. I will be happier when they finally begin to enter the 21st century.
– John Shelby Spon
The “Scholar-Pope” was unable to resist the temptation of quoting a line written in Latin, not from the Bible, but by the Roman poet Ovid 2,000 years ago: “Perfer et obdura: multo graviora tulisti.”
“Endure and resist,” he urged. “In the past you have overcome much more difficult situations.”
Daniel H. Pink is an American writer. He is the author of three books focused on the changing world of work: New York Times best-seller A Whole New Mind, Free Agent Nation, and the first American business book in manga, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. Pink’s articles on business and technology have appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Wired. Pink also speaks to corporations, associations, universities and education conferences about such topics as the shift from the Information Age — with its premium on logical, linear, computer-like abilities — to what he calls “the Conceptual Age,” where “right-brain” qualities like empathy, inventiveness and meaning predominate.
Pink worked previously as Vice President Al Gore’s chief speechwriter from 1995-97, and before that as an aide to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.[1]
Daniel Pink received a BA from Northwestern University and a JD from Yale Law School, although he has never practiced law.
Daniel Pink speaking at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s annual HRD Learning and Development Conference in London.
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