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    "ocrText": "- 10 -\nmethods of making sea-water drinkable, for use in air-sea - rescue work.\nThey had a perfectly good method for removing the salt from sea-water, which\nof course made the water drinkable, but this method required large amounts\nof silver, of which Germany was very short. Another technique had been\ndeveloped which did not remove the salt, but only concealed the salty taste.\nOne would have supposed that elementary chemistry would have sufficed to\ndemonstrate that it is the salt and not the taste that makes sea-water\npoisonous to drink. But German medicine had become shipshod in technique,\nand these doctors careloss of human life and insensitive to suffering. So,\nby direction of the Chief of the German Air Force Medical Service, forty\nTRU\nIMAN\nunfortunate concentration camp inmates were tortured within an inch of\na Required to s. ARCHIVES \"NATIONAL SERVICE RECORDS AND\ntheir lives by being made to drink this treated but still salty sea-water\n00 s\nfor 0 week or more, Performance of this brutal and stupid experiment was\ndelayed for even stupider reasons; these doctors, supposedly men of science,\nhad fallen victim to Nazi racial myths and debated endlessly whether Gypsies\nwere enough like German aviators so that they could be used as test subjects.\nIt took much time, effort and staff to carry out this cruel and utterly\nuseless test. Letters had to be written, conferences attended, reports pre-\npared, and physicians, of whom there was a dire shortage in the German armed\nforces, were taken out of hospitals and sent hundreds of miles to obtain an\nanswer to a problem which should have been solved in a few hours of laboratory\nwork. But such waste and inefficiency were the inevitable result of the\ndegradation of German medical standards and ethics under dictatorship. The\nchairs of medicine at many universities had been filled with Nazi Party hacks,\nand medical students had to waste much time in Party activities. The scienti-\nfic spirit was distorted by Nazi racial theories, and medical students' heads\nwere filled with racial mumbo-jumbo. Psychiatry, for example, suffered be-"
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