KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (83 page)

W
ł
adislawa Karo
ł
ewska’s mutilation was as painful and traumatic as it was incomprehensible. She did not know that it was part of a coordinated series of
experiments across several KL, testing drugs against so-called gas gangrene. Army and SS physicians had debated the usefulness of sulfonamide drugs for the treatment of wound infections since late 1941, as fatalities of German troops on the Eastern Front shot up. Following the death of Reinhard Heydrich in early June 1942 from gas gangrene—the explosion from a hand grenade thrown by one of his assassins
had embedded parts of the car’s upholstery in his body—the issue gained even greater urgency for Himmler, who believed in sulfonamide as a miracle cure.

In Ravensbrück, the experiments began on July 20, 1942, within weeks of Heydrich’s death. SS clinician Professor Karl Gebhardt, who ran a sanatorium and SS hospital in nearby Hohenlychen, supervised the trials. To simulate the symptoms of gas
gangrene, doctors made deep incisions into the thighs of dozens of prisoners, mostly young Polish women like Karo
ł
ewska, and inserted bacteria, earth, wood shavings, and glass fragments. Eventually, Professor Gebhardt determined that sulfonamide drugs had little effect on treating these infections. In fact, Gebhardt had wanted the drugs to fail all along. As the leading SS surgeon, he had a stake
in defending the primacy of frontline surgery. More pressingly, he was fighting accusations that he had bungled Heydrich’s treatment (dispatched by Himmler to attend to his wounded lieutenant in Prague, he had opted against the use of sulfonamides). To prove that he had been right all along, Gebhardt needed the drugs trial in Ravensbrück to come to nothing. Several women died after the ensuing
operations, and the others bore the physical and mental scars for the rest of their often short lives.
238

Like Dr. Rascher’s murderous high altitude and freezing trials in Dachau, the mutilation of Ravensbrück prisoners was part of the war experiments, ostensibly designed to help save German troops from fatal injuries. In several other KL, too, prisoners were deliberately wounded and killed for
this purpose. In Natzweiler, for instance, a Professor Otto Bickenbach supervised lethal trials with phosgene, a toxic gas used during chemical warfare in the First World War. To study its effects, and to test a drug meant to protect German troops, well over one hundred prisoners were forced into the small Natzweiler gas chamber in 1943–44. Within minutes, one survivor recalled, he felt such pain
he could barely breathe: “It felt like someone was piercing my lungs with needles.” Many prisoners suffocated. Others died a long, lingering death over the coming days, coughing up blood and the remains of their lungs.
239

Another series of war experiments aimed to safeguard German troops from infectious diseases, such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, and, above all, typhus.
240
The German authorities
regarded typhus, frequently contracted by German soldiers in occupied eastern Europe, as a grave threat, not only to the troops but also to the population back home. The most extensive efforts to find a vaccine came in Buchenwald. Here, some twenty-four different trials were carried out in a permanent research station under SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Erwin Ding (also known as Ding-Schuler), an inept
young physician from the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS. His deputy was the Buchenwald SS doctor Waldemar Hoven, a dropout from a respectable family who had drifted around the world—including a spell as an extra on the film sets of Hollywood—before opting for medicine and joining the Camp SS, after less than five years of studies (Hoven was so incompetent he asked prisoners to write his thesis
for him). The flawed setup of the Buchenwald experiments rendered them largely futile, scientifically speaking. The most tangible result was suffering. During one trial in summer 1943, which tested two drugs developed by the firm Hoechst, twenty-one out of thirty-nine prisoners died; most survivors developed high fevers, swollen faces and eyes, delusions, and tremors. In all, the doctors are said
to have experimented on well over 1,500 subjects between 1942 and 1944; more than 200 prisoners did not survive the Buchenwald typhus research station.
241

A final series of war experiments was designed to boost the performance of German troops, rather than their protection. Physicians carried out several trials along these lines with Sachsenhausen prisoners. In November 1944, a navy doctor administered
high doses of stimulants, including cocaine, in the search for drugs that would allow the deployment of submarine crews for days on end. The Camp SS let him loose on one of the most exhausting labor details, where inmates walked in a circle for up to twenty-five miles a day, shouldering heavy sand bags, to test the design of new footwear. The twenty-year-old Günther Lehmann was among the
prisoners selected for the experiments. During the four-day trial with cocaine he slept no more than a few hours, forever stumbling along the test track, with a rucksack weighing twenty-five pounds on his back. Lehmann survived his ordeal, unlike so many other victims of the Nazis’ human experiments.
242

Auschwitz and Nazi Racial Science

SS Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz
at the end of May 1943, aged thirty-two, after spending most of the previous two years on the Eastern Front, as an SS battalion medical officer. During his first year in the camp, he was the main SS doctor in the so-called Gypsy enclosure; later he took over the infirmary sector and became the senior SS physician in Birkenau. Just like the other Auschwitz doctors, Mengele performed a range of murderous
duties. He supervised prisoner executions and gassings, and became known among the SS staff for his lethal approach to epidemics. Mengele was also a frequent presence during selections of Jews at the ramp, conspicuous by his elegant looks, high spirits, and theatrical manner, dividing prisoners like a conductor into separate groups. In summer 1944, the chief SS physician in Auschwitz, Eduard
Wirths, praised the “prudence, perseverance, and energy” Mengele brought to the job. In addition, Wirths was struck by Mengele’s zealous use of his spare time, “utilizing the scientific material at his disposal” to make a “valuable contribution in his work on anthropological science.”
243
What Wirths pictured here as a sideline was Mengele’s chief obsession: the torture of prisoners in the name
of Nazi racial science, which formed part of a second area of KL research, different from the war experiments and clustered around Auschwitz in particular.

Dr. Mengele was a disciple of racial biology, putting his faith in science to purify the body of the nation by identifying and removing supposedly inferior races. Although his beliefs were very much in line with Nazi thinking, Mengele (like
Dr. Rascher) was no early Nazi fanatic. He came from an affluent national-conservative family and only applied to join the NSDAP and SS in his midtwenties (in 1937 and 1938 respectively). His main calling was racial science. As an eager student, gaining not one but two doctorates, Mengele had specialized early in racial genetics and anthropology. The diligent young scientist was quickly taken under
the wing of Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, one of the doyens of German racial hygiene, who later headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. Mengele became one of his assistants and continued to work with him after joining the SS full-time.

Auschwitz during the Holocaust was a dream for a striving and amoral racial biologist like Mengele.
He was free to test any hypothesis he wanted, however repugnant, and there was always a ready supply of “scientific material.” Prisoners he claimed for his experiments received special status. Isolated from the others, they were at his personal disposal; their bodies, dead and alive, belonged to Mengele.
244
Among his victims were those with stunted growth and other unusual features, with Mengele
and his assistants eagerly taking photographs, measurements, and X-rays. He was particularly excited in May 1944, when a family of acrobats with diminutive stature arrived from Hungary. Mengele hoped to experiment on them for years and lost no time in getting started, submitting his victims to injections, bloodletting, eye drops, and bone marrow extraction. One of the acrobats, Elisabeth Ovici,
later recalled that “we often felt sick and miserable and had to throw up.” She escaped the worst, though, for Mengele had many prisoners with physical abnormalities murdered; after meticulous autopsies, their bones were dispatched to the skeleton collection of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Specially prepared eyeballs were couriered to the same address, as Mengele supplied one of Verschuer’s other
assistants, Dr. Karin Magnussen, who was researching Gypsies with different-colored eyes.
245

The specialty of Dr. Mengele was the torture of twins. Racial genetics in Germany and abroad had long focused on twins, piquing Mengele’s interest early in his academic studies. After his posting to Auschwitz, he systematically scoured the camp for victims on whom he hoped to build his career. In all,
he probably selected more than one thousand twins for experiments. Most of them were boys and girls between the ages of two and sixteen, among them some siblings who had passed themselves off as twins to escape the gas chambers. Mengele subjected them to a battery of tests. First came the obsessive collection of anthropological data, as Mengele, always a pedant, believed that enough facts would inevitably
yield important insights; for each twin, a form with ninety-six different sections had to be completed. “Examined, measured, and weighed a hundred times,” is how Eva Herskovits later described her ordeal at Mengele’s hands. The SS took so many blood samples that some children died of anemia.

Then came the experiments. To change the twins’ eye color, apparently, Mengele and his staff injected
liquid into their eyes, causing swelling and burns. The SS also infected them with illnesses to test their reactions. In addition, Mengele carried out grotesque surgical experiments, often without anesthetic, to compare the children’s susceptibility to pain. Once, two boys, no more than three or four years old, were stitched together like Siamese twins; they screamed night and day before they died.
Death offered Mengele yet another opportunity for his research, and he often set lethal injections himself.
246

Given the magnitude of Mengele’s crimes, it is easy to see why he has become the most infamous of all Auschwitz perpetrators. But his notoriety has obscured the deeds of other doctors. Mengele was not a loner. He operated in an environment where medical murders of prisoners were normal.
Dozens of physicians carried out racial experiments in Auschwitz, not just other Camp SS doctors like Dr. Wirths, but SS, army, and civilian researchers from outside, as well. As the concentration camp with the largest prisoner population, among them many Jews, Auschwitz proved even more attractive than Dachau for physicians searching for human “guinea pigs,” and no other camp would claim more
victims.

Among the physicians lured to the east were two rival doctors, Professor Carl Clauberg and Dr. Horst Schumann, who experimented with fast and cheap mass sterilizations. Keen to eliminate unwanted population groups in occupied eastern Europe, Himmler gave the go-ahead for trials in summer 1942. This triggered a macabre race between the two physicians to find the most effective method.
In all, they butchered many hundreds of Auschwitz prisoners (overwhelmingly Jews), in the largest series of experiments in the camp.

The first doctor, Professor Clauberg, who discussed his plans for sterilizing Jewish women with Himmler and Glücks over lunch one day in July 1942, injected a chemical substance into the cervix to cause sterility by closing off the fallopian tubes. The procedure
caused excruciating pain and numerous women died from complications; others were murdered so that Clauberg could examine their organs. One survivor, Chana Chopfenberg, later recalled that Clauberg had treated them all “like animals.” During the injections, she had been blindfolded; she was also threatened with execution if she dared to scream. Unrepentant, Dr. Clauberg claimed after the war that
his experiments had been scientifically valuable and saved many women from extermination (he died of a stroke in a German remand prison in 1957).

His rival Dr. Schumann was feverishly working nearby, using extremely high doses of radiation in a careless, hit-and-miss manner (he had no specialist training as a radiologist). The immediate results were deep burns of the sexual organs, serious infections,
and many deaths. Unlike his competitor, Dr. Schumann mainly chose male prisoners for his experiments. One of the men, Chaim Balitzki, broke down in tears after the war when he testified about his ordeal. “Worst of all,” he said, “I no longer have a future.” Undeterred by the human cost, Schumann pressed ahead, but eventually had to admit that surgical procedures were more effective than
his X-rays. Professor Clauberg claimed victory. In June 1943, he informed Himmler that his trials were close to completion. With the right equipment and support, he claimed, he would soon be able to sterilize up to one thousand women a day. He was not yet done with his experiments, though, carrying out further trials with chemical injections in Ravensbrück in 1944.
247

Nazi doctors even selected
Auschwitz prisoners for lethal procedures in other KL. The most notorious case involved the skeleton collection at the Reich University of Strasbourg, a hotbed of Nazi race science established in 1941. In February 1942, Himmler received a report from Professor August Hirt, the leading physician of the Ahnenerbe and recently appointed as professor of anatomy in Strasbourg. Hirt’s report included
a proposal for killing “Jewish-Bolshevik commissars” to fill gaps in existing “skull collections.” Himmler agreed, and the plan soon expanded: by murdering selected prisoners in Auschwitz, an entire racial-anthropological skeleton collection would be created. Eventually, three Ahnenerbe officials visited Auschwitz in June 1943. They picked out prisoners from different countries, who were measured,
photographed, and filmed. One of them was Menachem Taffel, aged forty-two, who had been born in Galicia and later worked as a milkman in Berlin, from where he had been deported to Auschwitz in March 1943 (his wife and fourteen-year-old daughter were gassed on arrival). In late July 1943, the SS deported Taffel, together with eighty-six other Jewish prisoners, to Natzweiler, where the SS drove them
into the new gas chamber (except for one woman who was shot for resisting); Commandant Josef Kramer then personally inserted prussic acid and watched the prisoners die. The corpses were sent to the Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg, about forty miles away. As the Allies approached Alsace in autumn 1944, Hirt and his colleagues tried to cover their tracks. But they failed to destroy all the evidence
and when the soldiers entered the basement of the Strasbourg institute, they found vats full of corpses, sawn-off legs, and torsos, which had been preserved for Hirt’s skeleton collection.
248