Bayer produced Baycol, the statin which killed over 100 people
worldwide, Where did they hone the tactics that allowed them to ignore
and hide the devastating side effects of Baycol until forced to remove
it from market?
"This year, Mr. Rozenkier filed a lawsuit accusing two German
pharmaceutical giants, Bayer and Schering, of providing experts and
drugs to Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors for sterilizations. "What
they did to me is beyond right and wrong," said Mr. Rozenkier, who
lost his parents and four siblings in the Holocaust. "They should be
punished. "
Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn't Enough
New York Times, 19. 11. 03
The medical experiments that Simon Rozenkier says he saw and
experienced in Nazi concentration camps strain the imagination. He saw
a hunchback whose hump had been cut off by Josef Mengele, the infamous
Nazi doctor. He said Dr. Mengele had thrown a Jewish man into a bath
of ice and let him freeze to death, in a study intended to help Nazi
pilots survive when they were shot down over icy seas.
Mr. Rozenkier, a native of Poland who emigrated to New York in 1947,
said he saw Nazi doctors administer intense X-rays to the genitalia of
Jews and Gypsies to sterilize them. And he vividly recalled how a Nazi
doctor, Horst Schumann, had repeatedly injected him with chemicals -
he was told they were vitamin supplements - to sterilize him, all part
of a Nazi effort to perfect ways to keep Jews from reproducing. "They
told me, `These shots will give you muscles to work,' " he said. " `Do
you understand that, you redheaded dog?' "
When Mr. Rozenkier and his wife encountered problems having children
in the early 1950's, he contacted the German consulate in New York.
Officials there sent him to a doctor who determined that he was
sterile, confirming his own doctor's findings.
This year, Mr. Rozenkier filed a lawsuit accusing two German
pharmaceutical giants, Bayer and Schering, of providing experts and
drugs to Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors for sterilizations. "What
they did to me is beyond right and wrong," said Mr. Rozenkier, who
lost his parents and four siblings in the Holocaust. "They should be
punished. "
His lawsuit, in Federal District Court in Newark, has created a legal
and diplomatic tempest because the German government and German
companies insist that there is no place for such litigation now. They
point to a 2000 agreement between the United States and Germany that
created a $5 billion fund to compensate Nazi slave laborers and
victims of medical experiments. German officials and companies say the
fund was created partly to prevent lawsuits like Mr. Rozenkier's,
which are difficult to litigate and which embarrass the Germans with
details about past Nazi horrors.
Mr. Rozenkier, who lives on Staten Island, said that his lawsuit was
warranted despite the agreement because, in his view, the $8,000 that
the fund awarded him was woefully inadequate. The lawsuit does not
seek a specific amount. He further argued that the German foundation
that administers the fund had violated the agreement by capping awards
to the victims of medical experiments and not individually judging how
much each victim should receive.
But Roger Witten, an American lawyer representing Bayer and Schering,
said Mr. Rozenkier's lawsuit should be dismissed. "Everybody feels
sympathy for the plaintiff here," Mr. Witten said. "These are all
people who went through horrible things. " But he said creation of the
fund should have ended these cases in American courts. In the
agreement, the American government promised that in suits brought in
federal court, it would urge the judge to dismiss the cases if there
were valid legal reasons for doing so. The government would do so
without taking a position on the merits of the complaints.
"The U. S. side embraced the idea of legal peace for German
companies," Mr. Witten said. "This was not just in the interests of
German companies and Germany, but also in the foreign policy interests
of the United States for German companies to be able to put this
behind them."
A State Department official said last week that the department would
file a statement recommending that the judge in New Jersey dismiss the
case if there were any valid legal grounds to do so. Mr. Rozenkier's
lawyer, Carey D'Avino, said, "The State Department apparently plans to
file a statement with the court for diplomatic reasons, but the U. S.
shouldn't file such a statement because the Germans have failed to
live up to the letter and spirit of the agreement and failed to live
up to their side of the bargain. "
Experts on Holocaust claims disagree about how the federal courts
should treat Mr. Rozenkier's case. Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former
deputy treasury secretary who had helped negotiate the agreement with
Germany, said the suit should be dismissed. "If the plaintiff were
correct in this case," he said, "it would undercut the entire thrust
of the German settlement, which is to put an overall cap on claims, to
create a quick claims mechanism and to avoid individualized hearings.
" But Lawrence Kill, a New York lawyer who had signed the agreement
after representing former slave laborers who sued Germany, said Mr.
Rozenkier's case should be allowed to go forward because the Germans
had apparently violated the agreement. "A side letter to the agreement
called for individual consideration as to the amount medical victims
are entitled to," Mr. Kill said. "How can we give someone who was
subject to some of the worst kinds of atrocities imaginable the same
as somebody else who might have had a toenail removed in a Nazi
experiment?"
Mr. Rozenkier said the sterilization shots he had received caused his
genitalia to swell and bleed and caused wrenching pain for days. The
shots also caused a more lasting anguish. "After the war," he said,
"when I finally got in touch with my brother, Aaron, who had escaped
to Russia, he said: `I hope you're going to have a big family. Look
what we lost. ' I said, `O. K. , we'll have a family. ' But it never
happened. " He pulled out an old picture of his brother as a
lieutenant in the Soviet Army. Then, choking up, he showed a prewar
picture of three primly dressed sisters and a brother, all under 12 at
the time. All four died in the war.
After immigrating to New York, Mr. Rozenkier served in the Korean War,
earning two Bronze Stars, and then spent 20 years working in
Manhattan's garment district. After the war, he and his wife, Joan,
were often invited to reunions of death camp survivors. "I felt like a
jackass," he said. "I'd go there, and they all had three or four kids
and I didn't have any. I was walking around like an outcast."
Monographs by Nazi doctors and numerous books and treatises have
described the sterilization work at labs run by Dr. Mengele and
others. Chemicals were injected into the uterus of hundreds of Jewish
and Gypsy women, causing blockages in their fallopian tubes that
rendered them sterile. The Nazi doctors also X-rayed male inmates to
sterilize them, but the X-rays often killed the men or caused such
severe burns that they became unfit for work. Mr. Rozenkier said that
this must have led the Nazis to begin experimenting with chemical
sterilization on men.
Mr. Rozenkier was one of several thousand victims who survived the
experiments. "Certainly there was widespread sterilization and
castration, and all this was part of a distorted racial vision that
sought to destroy the capacity to reproduce in ostensibly inferior
races and especially Jews," said Robert Jay Lifton, author of "The
Nazi Doctors. " Mr. Rozenkier was born in Wroclawek, Poland, 75 years
ago. In September 1939, soon after [censored] invaded Poland, German
soldiers pounded on his family's apartment door to arrest Mr.
Rozenkier's father. When his oldest sister, Helena, stepped outside to
protest, a soldier shot her to death. Wroclawek's Jews were sent to a
ghetto on the outskirts of town. Mr. Rozenkier escaped, and for
several months slept in a cemetery next to an aunt's grave. He was
arrested when he was 14 and sent to a work camp. There, he loaded
sand, nearly died of typhus and was eventually assigned the job of
carting away hundreds of Jews who had died of typhus. One day while
transporting the dead he visited a Polish family to beg for potatoes.
German soldiers seized him and planned to hang him, but he was spared
because the commander of a nearby women's work camp put in a good word
for him. Breaking into tears, he said: "My sister, Leah, worked for
that commander. She was his cook. But she sold her body to him to save
my life."
After more than a year in work camps, he was shipped to Auschwitz in a
crammed cattle car. He was tattooed with the number 143511 and
assigned to a nearby work camp that made synthetic rubber. One day, an
associate of Dr. Mengele saw him and had him sent to the nearby
Birkenau camp for experiments. With reddish-blond hair that made him
look less Jewish, Mr. Rozenkier said, he was spared from the gas
chamber because the Nazi doctors thought he had unusual genes. He
said, "They were trying to figure out why this Jew got red hair. " At
Birkenau, while many were starving around him, Mr. Rozenkier was fed
an ample diet of buckwheat to help him survive the experiments.
"Sometimes they even gave us chocolate - can you believe it?
Chocolate," he said. "Mengele didn't give a damn if I live or die," he
continued. "Sometimes he gave people a piece of chocolate, and the
next minute he shoots them in the head. " After Mr. Rozenkier survived
the sterilization shots, a doctor who took a liking to him arranged
for him to work in a coal mine. From there, he joined the infamous
death march to Buchenwald in which the Nazis shot hundreds of
stragglers. He was in Buchenwald when American troops liberated it.
Had he known that he was sterile, he said: "I never would have married
my wife. It's not fair to her. She's entitled to have children. " They
adopted a daughter, Allison, who is now 35. Mr. Rozenkier is seeking
money from Schering and Bayer, which was then a division of I. G.
Farben, because records show that doctors from Schering participated
in the sterilization work at Birkenau and other camps, while drugs
Bayer developed were used in sterilizations. His lawsuit also wants
the companies to disclose which chemicals were injected into him. In
his eyes, the lawsuit is a way to achieve justice. He says he will
donate any money he wins to Israel. Like many Holocaust survivors, Mr.
Rozenkier feels uneasy that he lived while so many family members and
other Jews perished. "I'm the only one who suffers right now because I
should have been with them," he said. "I feel guilty."
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Coalition against BAYER-dangers
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