Vivien Spitz

Imagine yourself a 22-year-old woman on a military transport plane en route to Nuremberg in 1946. A whiz at manual and machine shorthand, you’ve been selected by the War Department to assist in creating what some will call the “record that will never forget,” of the trials of Nazi war criminals. The experience would likely change your life. It did with my Aunt Vivien. The harrowing testimony on behalf of victims of Nazi medical experiments and the chilling attitude of the doctors in the dock would especially sear her soul. “I would spend the rest of my life trying to recover from what I had heard and written,” she wrote decades later in her book, “Doctors from Hell.” “From that point on, I would no longer tolerate any bigotry.” Vivien Spitz died this week in Houston after a long life of accomplishment, including a lengthy stint in the Denver district courts and another as “chief reporter” in the U.S. House of Representatives — the first woman in that position — leading a group that compiles the Congressional Record. But it was her memories of the doctors’ trial that in a sense came to define her — and to prod her, unexpectedly, when she was already in her 60s, into a personal quest as a witness to history. “The cocoon burst wide open in 1987,” she wrote, “when I read in The Denver Post that a German language arts teacher at a high school in my Denver suburb of Aurora referred to the Holocaust as the ‘Holohoax’ to her students.” “Some say Holocaust,” the teacher reportedly declared. “Some say Holohoax.” Vivien was so livid that she “hauled out my transcripts, material, and original press photographs that I had brought from Nuremberg and stored away in boxes all these years.” She put together a presentation that she would take on the road to groups across the country — and even abroad — that reached and moved tens of thousands of people. Vivien never had an agent and never advertised, but one person would tell another who would tell another, and before long the list of venues she’d appeared at — schools, churches, hospitals, civic organizations, veterans groups, bar associations — itself could fill a book. Eventually she would find herself being interviewed by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. She would tell those gathered — or remind them if they were camp survivors — of the macabre depravity into which men of science were capable of descending. These were doctors who infected prisoners with typhus and other diseases, lathered captives’ arms with a phosphorus mixture and ignited it, immersed them in ice water to see how long they survived, forced them to drink sea water for days on end, doused them with mustard gas, or tortured them with low-oxygen, high-altitude simulations. “One of the most savage, sadistic and inhumane experiments,” Vivien recalled, involved “bone, muscle and nerve regeneration and” — incredibly — “bone transplantation.” And let us not forget the doctors’ assistance in compiling what one described in a 1942 letter to a colleague as a “complete collection of skulls of all races and peoples at our disposal,” along with careful instructions on how to transport the heads of “Jewish-Boshevik Commissars,” whose skeletons he particularly prized despite his belief that they were a “repulsive, but characteristic subhuman” group. It is fitting that Vivien died so close to the Days of Remembrance that begin later this month. She had been delighted, she said, at “Colorado’s first civic ceremony of the Days of Remembrance” under Gov. Richard Lamm, in 1982. Shortly before the war in Europe officially ended, Dwight Eisenhower toured a German internment camp and described the evidence of “starvation, cruelty and bestiality” as “so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.” “In one room,” he added, “where there were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ ” That was Vivien’s mission, too.