Following World War II work was undertaken by a number of psychologists in a bid to understand how the horrors of Nazi Germany came to happen. How was it that such a large percentage of the German population participated in these horrors so willingly? Was it a flaw in the collective German psyche? Could it happen again in a different context?

One of the key players in this research was an American psychologist called Stanley Milgrim. In summary he found that, rather than a flaw in the Germans, it is part of the psychological makeup of all of us. Given the right circumstances most of us could be perpetrators of almost unspeakable horrors. These torturers and murderers were ordinary people like you and me who picked up their brown paper bag lunch, kissed their wife and children good-bye in the morning and took the bus to work. A night they came home, had dinner and enjoyed a happy family life.

Many people find this a very uncomfortable mental image; it is so much easier to imagine them as monsters. The hard fact is that though that, placed in an appropriate situation, most of us are capable of these horrific acts. Think of the ordinary Americans perpetrating torture in Iraq at the moment. They are just ordinary folks doing what they were told to do.

The sorts of experiments that Stanley Milgrim undertook would probably not be allowed to be undertaken today, at least, not in the form that he conducted them. If you feel a little uncomfortable about me suggesting that you might be capable of torture imagine how the participants in the experiments felt. They had it proved that they were capable of these appalling acts. That is a difficult thing to reconcile and some were undoubtedly scarred by the experience of participating.

The fact that we could not/would not conduct the experiments today does not mean, however, that we cannot benefit from the research. This research sheds a valuable light on the human psyche. It is a dilemma that faces German reproductive researchers to this day. Part of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis during WW II was a scientific program called 'Rassenhygiene', known today as eugenics, or the breeding of a master race. Today we view this as completely unacceptable yet that does not mean that there was not valuable information that arose from this form of research. It is, however, a brave researcher that delves into this source of data. No matter how valuable and valid the information is, it is so tainted with the Nazi stain that it risks discrediting any research that is based upon its findings.

This is reflected in the almost complete lack of research in reproductive science that took place in post-war Germany until the early 1980s. It is the topic of a paper by Professor Rolf Winau, director of the centre for humanities and health sciences at the Charite medical school in Berlin to European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. It has also given rise to Germany having some of the most draconian reproductive legislation in the developed world, including the banning of many common reproductive practices including the freezing of embryos, use of surrogate eggs or sperm, and screening for genetic diseases. Perhaps it is time to move on, we should not forget the past but we should not allow it to unnecessarily cripple future science either.

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