Mengele was not the head physician at Auschwitz, but he was part of a team of doctors that had to select which people were suitable for work and which had to be gassed right away. With so many subjects to experiment on, he grabbed the opportunity to continue his previous research on genetics. He was particularly interested in twins as twin research was seen at the time to be the ideal way to determine how the environment or human heredity influence the human body. Most of his subjects were children, and he would reportedly do blood transfusions from the one twin to the other, do amputations and try to sew it onto the other twin, stitch two twins together to form Siamese twins, infect one twin with typhus or another disease and many other experiments. More often than not, the twins died during the procedures or he would have them killed afterwards so he can do an autopsy. If one twin died from a disease, he would often kill the other as well to mark the differences between the sick and healthy subjects.
Braunsteiner and Ehlert are good examples because they were among the first female guards and went on to hold senior positions at Majdanek. What led them to a concentration camp? How did they perform their guard duties? What made them remain in the camps for six and a half years? How did the female guards exercise power over the prisoners? What role did physical violence have in the interplay of actors?
SEXCHANGE EXPERIMENT CAMP
As we will show, different forms of violence in the camp arise out of specific situations but also depend on the people who live and work there, their position in the camp, and their place in the hierarchy of guards. It is necessary to situate the various practices of power in their historical specificity and their social asymmetries. Thus this paper focuses on the logic of power in action. It deals with situational socialisation into violence (effects of the social environment supported by gratifications), peer pressure, and the reciprocal influence of all the actors present, whether active or passive.
With the exception of Ravensbrück, all the camps were female enclaves within camps for men (Strebel, 1998). The female guards performed the same supervisory duties as their male colleagues, but did not take part in the process of mass killings. Killing was reserved for SS men. Women did not participate in gassings or mass shootings though they selected victims and guarded prisoners outside the gas chambers.
The total number of female guards who served in Nazi concentration camps from May 1939 to May 1945 can only be estimated. Nazi statistics for January 1945 show 3,508 female camp guards as opposed to 37,674 male SS4. The figures change with the progress of the war and the expansion of the concentration camp system. But the proportions of men and women remain constant throughout the entire period: a few dozen women, but thousands of men. Only at Ravensbrück were female SS employees in the majority.
Braunsteiner arrived at Ravensbrück on 15 August 1939, with the service number 386. Her colleague Herta Ehlerthad trained as a saleswoman, and, by her own account, was running the branch of a shop when she was forcibly recruited through a labour exchange7. Since we have no documentation relating to her appointment on 15 November 1939, this cannot be verified. It is much more likely that she was unemployed and/or applied voluntarily, like the majority of female guards recruited on the opening of the camp.
In order to explore the process of initiation and adaptation of the SS women to the reality of the camps, we propose two lines of enquiry: the power to act, and the experience of power through architecture and the uniform.
Of course concentration camps were institutions where people were imprisoned and supervised, on the basis of criteria that were initially political and subsequently racial. But for the SS personnel, these same camps were also places where they lived and worked, run according to military rules. The architecture of the camp at Ravensbrück, and in particular of the living quarters of the SS, shows the intention of supervising and disciplining the personnel. Life at the camp was a barracks life, if by barracks we understand an enclosed living and working environment, access to which is regulated and supervised. The guards could only go out through an official exit and needed a pass to do so. Their use of time, their space, their movements and their activities were all organised and regulated according to military rules.
It is in this sense that we can understand a letter dated 10 October 1942, sent by a former female guard to the commandant of the Majdanek camp, Sturmbannführer Max Koegel. The woman, who had previously worked at Ravensbrück, and left there in January 1942, now asks to be re-employed in a concentration camp:
The women guards who had been relatively restrained at Ravensbrück became very aggressive at Majdanek. The radicalisation of their behaviour, like that of Braunsteiner, for example, can be explained by the conjunction of several factors. The transfer to Majdanek in October 1942 came as a real shock to the guards. Sanitary conditions were so bad that they were directly affecting supervisory personnel, more than in other camps. Contact with the prisoners (mainly Jews, Poles and Russians), who were in a dreadful physical state, was experienced as particularly unpleasant. For the guards, working conditions had drastically deteriorated. Organisation at Majdanek was in chaos and overcrowding was combined with staff shortage: 17 guards for every 6,000 prisoners on average. At Ravensbrück, the ratio had been 110 supervisors for 5,300 to 6,600 prisoners (Strebel, 2003: 51, 180).
We appreciate the financial support from A*STAR JCO grant (1331A028) and Biospecialties project (1526004161). We also thank Prof Ho Sup Yoon and Dr. Hong Ye at Nanyang Technological University for the NMR experiments and valuable suggestion from Prof. Jamie Vandenberg at Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute for the disease-related mutants.
NEILDEGRASSE TYSON: Sehgal'sexperiments pointed to the mushroom body, a part of the brain found increatures like insects and spiders, but not in humans. Biologists have knownabout the mushroom body for years, but they associated it, not with sleep, butwith something else entirely, an insect's memory.
Wilsonis most interested in mapping the rat's thoughts in a part of its braincalled the hippocampus. Like the fruit fly's mushroom body, thehippocampus of a rat or a human plays an important role in memory, includingour sense of space and location.
MATTHEWWALKER: The hippocampus is replaying theevents of the day. The hippocampus is almost, sort of, reactivating thememories at night and playing them out to the neocortex. It's almost asthough the hippocampus is having a therapy session with the, with theneocortex. And it's almost saying, "Okay, here's what welearned during the day."
Well,a bunch of real scientists have been working for years on one giant experiment,trying to create exotic particles that haven't existed in the universefor 14 billion years, back to the Big Bang itself.
Belowme is the construction site at CERN, a particle physics lab. The new experimentis so big it stretches from the mountains in France, across the border, to theGeneva Airport in Switzerland. That's because the main part consists of acircular tunnel, 16 miles around. The tunnel is home to the world'sbiggest, most powerful particle accelerator ever, called the Large HadronCollider or LHC. Because it's so big, LHC will let us probe deeper intothe stuff of the universe than we've ever gone before.
NEILDEGRASSE TYSON: Just what theliving did to survive horrified everyone who heard the story. Some survivors inthe larger of the two Donner party camps admitted they had cannibalized thebodies of those who had already died.
NEILDEGRASSE TYSON: Thanks to Julie andher team, about half of the Donner party members at the second campsite wereexonerated, correcting the sensationalized stories of the entire Donner partyquickly resorting to cannibalism.
A primary consideration before carrying out an HDXMS experiment for mapping protein-ligand interactions is to determine optimal concentrations of protein and ligand necessary for the HDXMS experiment. A theoretical overview for mapping protein-protein interfaces has been provided previously in great detail [14]. The primary consideration is to ensure high enough concentration of the partner protein or ligand is used under deuterium exchange conditions to ensure that all the target protein is fully bound in the complexed state. To further summarize that study, experimental measurement of deuterium exchange at amides from solvent-excluded interface regions by the observed rate of deuterium exchange (kobs) is an interplay of dissociation rates (koff), association rates (kon) and concentration of the binding protein (Pr-ligand) as described in Eq 1 where kex is the intrinsic rate of exchange. [14]
In scenario 3, the complex reassociates before an H/D exchange event regardless of the estimated value of kex. This analysis is equally relevant to protein-ligand interactions at orthosteric sites. Reporter amides at these sites would be sensitive to changes in H-bonding in the presence of saturating concentrations of ligand. It must be noted that these equations were originally described from deuterium off-exchange experiments [14].
Deuterium exchange is initiated by diluting an aqueous solution of protein in the presence of saturating concentrations of ligand in the equivalent buffer reconstituted in deuterium oxide (D2O). For ligands with known dissociation constants, it is necessary to use concentrations of ligand to ensure close to 100% binding to the target protein under deuterium exchange conditions. An additional factor that also is important is the high concentrations of ligand for kon*[ligand] >> kex (Eq 2). These conditions would facilitate preferential reassociation at the orthosteric binding site over deuterium exchange. Consequently, HDXMS experimental conditions for mapping high affinity inhibitor binding (radicicol (KD = 19 nM) and 17-AAG (KD = 33 nM)) (Table A in S1 Text), used at 20 μM (6: 1 ligand to target protein ratio). For the low affinity fragments, (Fragment 1 (KD = 490 μM) and Fragment 2 (KD = 570 μM), concentrations of fragments under deuterium exchange conditions were maintained at 5 mM ( 1500:1 ligand to target protein ratio). 2ff7e9595c
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