KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (82 page)

Probably the first such experiments took place in the Sachsenhausen infirmary, where two Camp SS doctors poisoned
dozens of prisoners with mustard gas between October and December 1939. The order had come from Himmler, gripped by widespread hysteria about possible chemical attacks on German troops, which awakened traumatic memories from the Great War. To determine the effectiveness of two potential remedies, the Sachsenhausen doctors applied mustard gas onto the arms of prisoners, causing burns that spread all
the way up to the neck; in some cases, the doctors infected the wounds with bacteria. In the end, the drugs they tested turned out to be useless. The doctors conceded as much in their final reports, forwarded to Himmler by SS Reich physician Ernst Robert Grawitz, who had personally observed the trials.
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Many more experiments followed over the coming years, above all during the second half of
World War II. In all, doctors abused more than twenty thousand prisoners from over a dozen KL during the war; several thousand of them died.
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As the number of victims swelled, WVHA managers became concerned about the possible impact on forced labor and asked individual camps in late 1942 how many workers were being lost to the experiments.
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The doctors, meanwhile, covered their tracks, describing
the deliberate infection of prisoners with viruses and poison as “vaccinations.”
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Occasionally they slipped up, however, and spoke their minds, calling their victims “guinea pigs” and “rabbits”—terms appropriated, with gallows humor, by some of the victims themselves.
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Heinrich Himmler presided over these experiments, probably with Hitler’s backing.
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Although this was no centrally coordinated
program, with many of the most radical initiatives coming from below, Himmler held the keys to the “guinea pigs” and insisted that no KL experiments go ahead without his say-so.
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Scientists with personal connections like Sigmund Rascher, whose wife was a close acquaintance of Himmler, could appeal to him directly.
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Another route led via the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s pseudoscientific research institute.
Originally set up to uncover the mythical roots of the Germanic race, it drifted into military research during the war, and facilitated the supply of KL prisoners for various experiments.
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A third path went through SS Reich physician Grawitz, who became a more influential figure during the war and took control of all SS medical services in 1943. Despite Himmler’s repeated attacks on the professionalism
of his chief physician, Grawitz proved himself no less enthusiastic about experiments in the camps than his boss, for whom he evaluated applications from scientists.
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Himmler was an obsessive micromanager of medical torture, devouring reports and suggesting bizarre new treatments. He was dazzled by science and easily captivated by radical schemes of supposed experts, especially when they chimed
with his own worldview. The sacrifice of worthless subhumans in the KL would save the lives of German soldiers, he argued, and anyone who objected to this was a traitor. In Himmler’s mind, war justified any means, and he opened the door to many lethal experiments, with Dachau emerging as one of the main centers.
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Himmler’s Favorite Doctor

The history of human experiments in Dachau is closely
linked to Dr. Sigmund Rascher, whose murders in the air pressure cabin were the first in a series of often deadly trials. Born into an affluent family in Munich (his father was a doctor, too), he had qualified in 1936 and served as a physician in the air force from 1939. His rapid rise thereafter owed little to his political activism (he only joined the SS in 1939), and even less to his abilities
as a physician. Rather, Rascher was propelled by his ambition and his equally determined wife, who made the most of her contacts with Himmler. With the patronage of the Reichsführer SS, who always had time for young firebrands promising scientific breakthroughs by unorthodox means, he became the doyen of human experimentation in Dachau.

Not everyone was taken in by the brash upstart. Professor
Karl Gebhardt, the leading clinician in the Waffen SS and a former assistant to Germany’s most famous surgeon, Professor Sauerbruch, dismissed Rascher as a quack. Tellingly, his charge was not that Rascher’s work was inhumane—Gebhardt himself carried out experiments in Ravensbrück—but that it was useless. Reviewing one of Rascher’s reports, Gebhardt told him to his face that if a first-year undergraduate
had handed it in, he would have thrown him out of his office. Rascher’s superiors in the air force also grew wary. Grateful that he had initiated aviation experiments in Dachau, they became frustrated with the way Rascher used his direct line to Himmler to go over their heads. On Himmler’s wishes, Rascher was eventually discharged from the air force in 1943 and now butchered and killed solely
for the SS (with the rank of Hauptsturmführer), running an experimental station in Dachau bearing his own name.
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As long as he had Himmler’s backing, Rascher kept busy. After the air pressure trials ended in May 1942, Rascher and some colleagues quickly moved on to the next experiment, suspending prisoners in icy water. Again, the trials were driven by military considerations. In view of the
growing number of German pilots who crashed in the British channel, the air force wanted to learn more about lengthy exposure to water. During the tests, prisoners had to climb into a freezing tank, with pieces of ice floating inside. Some victims wore full pilots’ outfits; others were naked. One young Polish prisoner begged his tormentors to stop, over and over in broken German: “Nothing more water,
nothing more water.” Another Polish prisoner, the priest Leo Michalowski, later testified at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial about his ordeal, the only survivor to do so: “I was freezing badly in this water, my feet became stiff as iron, my hands too, I was breathing very shallowly. I started again to tremble badly, and cold sweat ran down my head. I felt like I was about to die. And then I pleaded
once more to be pulled out, because I could not bear the water any longer.”

After several hours, most prisoners were finally dragged out, unconscious, and the doctors then tried drugs, massages, and electric blankets to revive them. Michalowski was saved, but many more succumbed. Others were deliberately left to die in the tank, so that Rascher could study more closely their cause of death. In
all, some two to three hundred Dachau prisoners were tortured in the water tank. Many dozens of them died, mostly under Rascher’s sole supervision: after the trials were officially called off in October 1942, because the air force had gathered sufficient data, Rascher himself continued, eager to further his career; and just as he had done during the air pressure experiments, he pushed for ever more
extreme setups.
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Following the German catastrophe at Stalingrad in early 1943, he even extended his freezing experiments to dry land. To study extreme frostbite, Dachau prisoners were left to the elements during the winter nights; they were given a sedative to silence their screams. Rascher’s ambition, one former Dachau Kapo recalled, literally made him “walk over corpses.”
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So fascinated
was Heinrich Himmler by Rascher’s freezing experiments that he became personally involved once more. The most promising way of reanimating prisoners suspended in icy water, he suggested, was human warmth; to test his hypothesis, he asked Rascher to make naked women fondle the unconscious men.
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Himmler’s suggestion was patently pointless. Even if “animal warmth” (as he called it) had made any
difference, which it did not, no one, not even Himmler, would have suggested stationing prostitutes on German navy vessels just in case they fished out a downed pilot.
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But Himmler’s word was sacrosanct in the SS. Ravensbrück duly dispatched four women in October 1942—the first female prisoners to arrive at Dachau—and the experiments could begin. Before long, Rascher’s sordid sideshow had become
a magnet for the local Camp SS and other interested parties.
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The voyeur-in-chief was none other than the sexually repressed Reichsführer SS himself. Himmler felt “great curiosity” about the trials and made sure to see for himself, arriving in Rascher’s Dachau station on the morning of November 13, 1942. Himmler watched everything close-up. A naked male prisoner thrown into the water; Rascher
pressing him under as he struggled to get out; the man being pulled out unconscious; his frozen body placed in a large bed; two naked women trying to have sex with him. Himmler was satisfied, except for a minor complaint he passed on to Pohl: he felt that one of the women, a young German prisoner, could still be saved for the Nazi national community and should not be used anymore as a sex slave.
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Everything seemed to be going right for Dr. Sigmund Rascher. With Himmler’s help, he had made a name for himself and by early 1944, he was closing in on his ultimate dream, a professorship. Meanwhile, he continued his human experiments. He was particularly interested in a hemostatic drug called Polygal and ordered the execution of several Dachau prisoners to test its effectiveness. The drug had
been developed by a Jewish chemist imprisoned in Dachau, and Rascher planned to make a fortune with it, preparing to manufacture it in a factory of his own. Rascher’s professional and financial future appeared rosy, and there was good news in his private life, too. His wife—who generated additional income by blackmailing released prisoners, threatening to have them taken back to Dachau—announced
that she was pregnant with their fourth child.
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But all was not as it seemed. Following a child-snatching incident in Munich, the criminal police discovered that the Raschers’ picture-book family life—which had brought them gifts and goodwill from Himmler—was built on crime and deception. They had no children of their own; Frau Rascher had taken all her boys from other women, with her husband’s
complicity. The ensuing police investigation also uncovered evidence of her husband’s corrupt deals in the camp. The arrogant Rascher had made plenty of enemies among the local Camp SS, and his bright prospects unraveled spectacularly. He was placed into custody in May 1944, and the SS shot him in the Dachau bunker just before liberation, not far from the sites where he had conducted his murderous
trials. Around the same time, his wife, who had repeatedly tried to escape, was hanged in Ravensbrück.
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The SS experiments in Dachau did not stop with Rascher’s fall, however. He may have been the most prominent medical torturer in the camp, but he was not the only one. Since 1942, several other physicians worked on their own trials, infecting prisoners with bacteria to test drugs against blood
poisoning and festering wounds, and forcing them to drink seawater to test a substance said to improve its taste.
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In fact, Dachau was the site of one of the largest KL trials, at the malaria research station run by Professor Claus Schilling, a pupil of the legendary bacteriologist Robert Koch (1843–1910). Schilling was already in his seventies and had spent his long career searching in vain
for a vaccine. Given his paltry record, his proposal for human trials in the camps promised little success. Undeterred, Himmler—keen to find a drug to protect troops from malaria in the occupied east—gave him permission to proceed. The experiments began in February 1942 and Schilling, who moved to Dachau, continued until the camp fell apart in spring 1945. In all, around 1,100 prisoners, some already
too weak to walk, were infected through injections or mosquito bites, to allow Schilling and his men to test a range of drugs. The prisoners suffered swollen extremities, the loss of nails and hair, high fevers, paralysis, and more. Numerous victims died through drug overdoses, while survivors often endured further experiments.
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The Dachau Camp SS participated in these trials, just as it did
in others. When Professor Schilling needed new victims, a list of inmates was drawn up in the office of the Dachau camp doctor. This list was sent to the SS labor office; all registered prisoners had to be accounted for, after all, and prisoners held in the experimental stations were officially classified as employed (their job being tortured as a “guinea pig”). Then, the list of names went to the
camp compound leader, who often made a few alterations. Finally, it landed on the desk of the commandant for his signature. Only then were the unfortunate prisoners dragged away to Schilling’s malaria station.
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Similar scenes took place in other KL, where the Camp SS assisted doctors as they abused and killed prisoners to aid their careers and help Germany win the war.

Killing for Victory

On August 14, 1942, W
ł
adislawa Karo
ł
ewska, a young and slight teacher who had been part of the resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland, was ordered to report to the Ravensbrück infirmary, together with several other Polish prisoners. Here she was given an injection in her leg, which made her vomit. Then she was carted into the operating room, where she received another injection; pretty much the last
thing she saw before she lost consciousness was an SS doctor wearing surgical gloves. When she awoke, her leg was throbbing: “I realized that my leg was in a cast, from the ankle to the knee.” After three days, running a high fever and with fluid oozing from her swollen leg, Karo
ł
ewska was set upon once more by the same doctor. “I felt great pain,” she testified after the war, “and I had the impression
that something was being cut out of my leg.” After Karo
ł
ewska lay for two weeks in a room filled with the stench of excretions, together with the other Polish women who had suffered a similar fate, her bandages were finally taken off and she saw her leg for the first time: “The cut was so deep that I could see the bone itself.” After another week, the SS released her to her barrack, even though
pus was still running from her leg and she could not walk. Soon she was back in the infirmary, where the SS doctor operated once more; her leg immediately swelled up again. “After this operation I felt even worse and I was unable to move.”
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