-Caveat Lector-
From The Independent (UK)
REVEALED: HOW NAZIS STUBBED OUT SMOKING
WHEN HITLER and Eva Braun committed suicide on 30 April 1945, a little ceremony
was held at the Fuhrerbunker. Liberated at last from the tyrannical house rules,
the residents lit up. Then they poured petrol on the corpses and set fire to
them, too.
Even by his own standards, Hitler's hatred of smoking was extraordinary. Braun,
Joseph Goebbels and the other unfortunate addicts who shared a roof with the
Fuhrer in the last days of the war had to sneak out into the smouldering ruins
of Berlin for a few furtive drags. Braun covered up her guilty secret by chewing
mints.
Half a century later this first smoking ban at a public place seems enlightened,
at least from an American perspective. A US scholar has assembled compelling
evidence to prove that, largely because of Hitler's obsession, not only the
bunker but wartime Germany as a whole was at least 20 years ahead of the rest of
the world in nailing tobacco as the cause of lung cancer and in attempts to curb
the filthy habit.
The implications are enormous. Millions of people puffed on after the war,
oblivious to the dangers. On proper medical advice, some might well have given
up smoking and lived a good few years longer.
A reappraisal of German medical science is also in order. The experiments of
Josef Mengele and his ilk debased the work of an entire generation of German
scientists. It has been assumed no worthwhile work was done by Third Reich
biologists, so tainted were they all by their search for racial purity and
related pseudo-science projects. The Nazis could build rockets - curing human
ailments was not their forte.
The historian Robert Proctor, author of The Nazi War on Cancer, explodes that
myth, only to raise more questions: how did the knowledge gathered in the Third
Reich become lost, and why did it take the medical establishments in Britain two
decades and in the US even longer to rediscover it? Or did they know it all
along?
First, the evidence. It all goes back to the day the young Adolf Hitler chucked
his last packet of cigarettes into the Danube. Smoking, he decided, was bad for
him, and therefore bad for Germans. Tobacco was one of the first things he would
try to wipe off the face of the Earth.
Soon after he reached power, millions of posters proclaiming nicotine as "poison
for the Aryan race" were printed. Measures were promulgated, restricting the
sale of cigarettes to women, cutting soldiers' rations on the Eastern Front and
banning smoking in cars, trains and buildings. Members of the Hitler Youth were
drafted in to spread the message with their inimitable subtlety.
At the same time, money was poured into research. A link between rising
consumption of alcohol and tobacco and the incidence of stomach and lung cancers
had long been suspected. The first breakthrough came in 1939, when a PhD student
at Cologne University demonstrated for the first time a connection between
smoking and lung cancer. In 1942 Hitler helped to set up the Institute for the
Struggle Against the Dangers of Tobacco at Jena with 100,000 Reichsmarks from
his own budget.
A year later the Jena scientists came up with the goods. Two researchers,
Eberhard Schairer and Erich Schoniger, had carried out a statistical analysis of
the correlation between tobacco and lung cancer, using a group of smokers as
well as a control group.
Their study, described by Professor Proctor as the "crown jewel of 20th- century
epidemiology", established that smokers ran an increased risk of lung cancer.
To put this finding into perspective, Britain's Medical Research Council claims
to have been the "first national institution in the world to accept formally the
evidence that tobacco is a major cause of death". The research council took that
leap of faith in 1957.
Germany did not just investigate, it acted on its findings. As early as 1939 the
Nazis convened a congress on the dangers of tobacco, attended by 15,000
scientists. In the same year Hermann Goering forbade soldiers from smoking on
marches, in the streets or on patrol. Cigarettes could not be sold to women,
drivers faced lawsuits for criminal negligence if found smoking at the wheel.
Research continued, with mixed success. Hitler was convinced of tobacco's
lingering genetic effects.
But scientists did not dare to report the results of their fertility studies,
which showed that nicotine was, if anything, making laboratory rats more randy.
Like the rest of German life sciences, much of the tobacco research was
motivated by the Nazis' preoccupation with "racial hygiene" and inevitably ended
up in blind alleys. Stomach cancer also drew a blank. But the rest of their
research has stood the test of time. "If it hadn't been for the war and the fact
that this research had ideological grounding, the Jena study would be considered
a classic early epidemiological work,"
