More locations:

Triggerwarning: Human trials, racist violence

Walking east along Kaiserstraße with its many shops, restaurants and cafés, you pass the Bismarck Café on the corner of Bismarckstraße. One street further on, almost at the end of Kaiserstraße, you will find Robert-Koch-Straße on the right, which leads you further along the Ostfriedhof (East Cemetery). Throughout Germany, streets and squares commemorate Robert Koch. Robert-Koch-Straße in Dortmund’s Kaiserviertel is no exception. Robert Koch was a German physician and is still considered the most successful pharmaceutical researcher of the 20th century. In 1905 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the tuberculosis pathogen. He also headed the Institute for Infectious Diseases, today’s Robert Koch Institute.

For the German Empire, medicine and research served to legitimise its own colonial endeavours. Until today, the crimes committed by Germany in the name of science at this time have been little discussed, including the testing of unresearched agents on humans. German scientists, such as Robert Koch, used the colonised territories on the African continent and their inhabitants as an experimental laboratory to conduct unlimited medical tests. In 1906, Robert Koch led a so-called expedition to East Africa, to what is now Tanzania and Uganda, to research the sleeping sickness. This was not his first colonial „expedition“ outside Europe. Previously, he travelled to India to research cholera and to New Guinea to fight malaria. Dangerous experiments on humans became impossible in Germany due to increasingly loud public complaints. In the colonies, however, they could be carried out without controls and protected by the military and police. Drug research on humans was therefore not a rare phenomenon in the colonies.

Sleeping sickness is transmitted by the tsetse fly and initially occurred mainly in West Africa. Through colonial transport development – the construction of passable roads and railway lines to transport raw materials – the tsetse fly was carried further east. As a result, between 1901 and 1905, around a quarter of a million people died of sleeping sickness in East Africa. Research has shown that European colonialism made a decisive contribution to the spread of epidemics. Uganda, which bordered what was then German East Africa, was particularly badly affected by sleeping sickness and although it was part of the British colonies and there was great imperialist competition on the continent, the epidemic was seen as a shared problem and was to be fought together. However, the drive to fight was not a humanitarian one, but rather one of self-interest/paternalism. Epidemics such as sleeping sickness killed large parts of the population that were needed as labour by European powers to pursue economic interests such as the exploitation of local resources. The colonisers profited from the research and treatment of diseases such as malaria, because securing the health of the Europeans also enabled further penetration into the colonial territories and thus the stabilisation of their power.

Robert Koch used atoxyl, also called arsanilic acid, to treat sleeping sickness. He administered this quickly in a high dosage instead of increasing it experimentally with small amounts. This resulted in severe side effects such as nausea, dizziness, colicky* pain, loss of vision and even death. Koch’s records make it clear that the sick people did not come to his treatment voluntarily, but had to be „sought out“. This term could mean a variety of things in the colonies, from attempts at persuasion, to threats of punishment, to forcibly enforced docility. Many people resisted, but their resistance was usually broken by force. The foundation of colonial medical research was formed by racist ideas of superiority as well as domination relations enforced by force. Due to the severe side effects, the high dosage was initially withdrawn and a long list of other medicines was used, which had previously only been tested on animals and which were sometimes deliberately not tested on humans in Germany. Such concerns, however, did not apply in the colonies.

In order to eradicate the tsetse fly as a carrier of sleeping sickness, whole swathes of land were cleared to take away its habitat – in the colonial belief that they could control nature. However, it usually reappeared in another place, which is why they resorted to the resettlement of the population . Many people lost their homes and livelihoods as a result. Between 1912 and 1914, in what is now Cameroon, the Duala were forcibly resettled and dispossessed, legitimised by medical reports that justified this as a measure to prevent epidemics:

„One could proceed to transfer the entire population of contaminated areas to healthy areas; the infected individuals would then, since mortality without treatment was absolute, perish without exception, thus extinguishing the epidemic.“ 

This statement by Koch makes it clear that he was not interested in curing the disease for the local population. 

Another of Koch’s control strategies was to isolate infected people in concentration camps. Koch’s camps, like other sleeping sickness camps later on, served as an experimental field for European medical research. Koch continued to consider Atoxyl the most suitable drug despite the known dangers. In ten camps and six medical posts, only 71 of 3,033 patients were cured, 386 people died. 1010 patients managed to escape from the camps and thus from the life-threatening experiments. The concept of the camps was later used in Togo and Cameroon. More than a dozen preparations and different dosages were experimented on people’s bodies. Of course, the interests of those affected were not taken into account. They were described in the reports and diaries exclusively as objects of research and thus completely dehumanised. Racialising people and turning them into objects is characteristic of colonial medicine. Medicine and healing practices existed before the arrival of the Europeans, of course. Since they did not conform to Eurocentric ideas, they were considered dangerous and banned. Nevertheless, colonial doctors were dependent on local knowledge and relied on it, for example, in the field of medicinal plants or for the description of the spread and symptoms of diseases – without acknowledging the originators of this knowledge. 

After Koch’s research, it took another 20 years until the Bayer company succeeded in developing an effective drug called Suramin. The discovery was used for colonial revisionist* and Nazi propaganda. Although experiments were carried out on forcibly interned people to develop it, it is still often regarded as an achievement of German tropical medicine.

Colonial medicine was never about helping people, but about gaining new knowledge for German science and the pharmaceutical industry and achieving an economic upswing through the colonies. For this purpose, colonial doctors injected people with painful oil and salt solutions for no reason or abandoned them in the desert to see how long they would survive. Nevertheless, even today, the German colonial period is often dismissed with the argument that the Germans were just doing research, but how research was done is rarely discussed.

Since the Corona pandemic, the name Robert Koch has been on everyone’s lips again, thanks to the institute named after him. On its homepage, the RKI itself describes the crimes against humanity committed by Robert Koch and his team as the „darkest chapter of his career“, but does not discuss them further. The text summarising Robert Koch’s work does not critically examine the colonial period in any way. The focus is diverted from the victims of his deeds to his medical results. Thus, the horrors of colonialism and Robert Koch’s perpetration are once again relativised and trivialised. For years and again, there have been demands from civil society to rename the Robert Koch Institute and the streets named after him.

The colonial racist portrayal of the African continent as the „empire of epidemics“ also characterises today.  In media reports about AIDS or malaria, the continent is described as regressive, dangerous and in need of help, while today’s colonial power relations and achievements of science on the continent are disregarded. With the help of this narrative, Europe can continue to present itself as the saviour of non-European societies. A current example is the racist reporting on the Omikron* variant of the coronavirus, which was discovered in South Africa but has been proven not to have originated there. Among others, by the ZDF programm Heute Journal with racist pictures and the RheinPfalz as well as the Welt with racist language.The testimony of the French doctors who suggested testing the Corona vaccine on the African continent first also shows the continuity of the image of the African continent as a testing laboratory.

In 2017, descendants of the Herero and Nama people sued Germany in the US for the genocide committed against them by German troops in 1904-1908. The statement of claim states, among other things, that German doctors carried out medical experiments on living Herero prisoners in concentration camps. Until today, they demand compensation for this, but the US court rejected the genocide lawsuit in 2019.

Between 1909 and 1913, hundreds of people died from smallpox vaccinations that were not properly administered in the at that time German colony of Togo. The smallpox vaccine was already well researched at the time, but when it was shipped from Imperial territory to Togo, the vaccine had deteriorated, so colonial doctors began to grow the live vaccine locally. However, they did not carry out any prescribed efficacy testing. The vaccine they grew was not effective. As people then distrusted the colonial doctors, colonial authorities forced them to vaccinate. 

Even today, drug testing takes place in African countries that do not meet ethical standards. Almost half of all drug tests by US companies are carried out in countries of the global south. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which developed the Corona vaccine together with BioNtech, conducted drug tests with an unapproved drug on children in Nigeria in 1996, resulting in the deaths of eleven children. In 2012, a vaccination campaign against meningitis was carried out in Gouro, Chad, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in which 500 children aged 1-15 were vaccinated. After a short time, three children fell ill and their condition deteriorated. Nevertheless, vaccination continued on the following days. 105 children became ill, 40 of them seriously. Ahmat Hassan, a journalist from Chad, writes about this case, which was never solved and from which no consequences followed. He suspects that the cold chain of the vaccine was interrupted, which led to the cases of illness. He also says that the children have not recovered.

During the 2014/15 Ebola outbreak, researchers, doctors and volunteers flocked to Sierra Leone. In a treatment centre in the capital Freetown, the heart medication Amiodaron was administered, which according to a German laboratory study had also been effective against Ebola. The drug was not approved as an Ebola drug by the WHO or the government of Sierra Leone. The Lakka treatment centre was run by the Italian NGO Emergency. The nurses were volunteers from the UK. The trials were brought to light by them because the injection of high doses caused respiratory illness and inflammation in some patients. The mortality rate was 67%. The tests were then stopped, but again no consequences followed. There were no investigations, court cases or compensation. Chernoh Bah researched the actions of white researchers and doctors on Ebola and wrote a book about it („The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians“) in which he also makes the link to colonial continuity.

These are just a few examples that show the colonial continuity in international health policy today.