The soldier's body in gas warfare: Trauma, illness, Rentennot, 1915-1933

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Abstract

The paper describes medical and psychological aspects of gas warfare 1915-1918. It is shown that exact knowledge such as lethal dosages and the type and extent of injuries had been observed in cases of accident long before the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, detailed toxicological research was carried out in the toxicological department of Fritz Haber's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. War itself offered the opportunity for deadly field experiments. The soldiers suffered not only from physical injuries (chest pain, breathlessness, coughing, bloody sputum, multiple organ failure) but also from fear and traumatization. Given the enormous fear caused by the idea of a supposed poisoning even without symptoms, distinguishing the real and actual from the simulated in such cases must have been problematic and caused a permanent threat of being accused of malingering or even simulating. From there it was only a small step to psychic and political stigmatization as "Rentenbetrüger" (pension fraud- sters) or being mentally ill in the late Weimar Republic and especially under National Socialism. Whereas the nation was forever grateful to the war-wounded and disabled veterans, the stigmatized were seen as being mentally ill, were ster- ilized, and sometimes even murdered.

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APA

Eckart, W. U. (2017). The soldier’s body in gas warfare: Trauma, illness, Rentennot, 1915-1933. In One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences (pp. 213–227). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51664-6_12

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