The Theory and Practice of Hell (36 page)

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requested a transfer from camp duty as soon as possible. SS Captain Hofer volunteered for front-line duty, even when ap pointed only Deputy Camp Medical Officer.

Because of their incompetence, the Medical Officers often

made use of prisoner aides, recalling the employment of Greek slave scholars by Roman upstarts in ancient times.

Hoven, for example, had his doctor’s thesis on the treat ment of silicosis written by two prisoners, Wegerer and Sitte. Three days before the examination, he memorized the paper and then took his doctor’s degree with distinction at Freiburg University. During the last two years I spent in Building SOas medical clerk, Dr. Ciepielowski and I, in solemn contempt for Nazi science, wrote half a dozen medical papers on typhus which Dr. Ding-Schuler published under his name in the
Jour nalfor Infectious Diseases,
the
Journal o f Hygiene,
and other scientific publications. Dr. Ding-Schuler’s own contributions consisted chiefly of the insertion of statistical material which was generally invented from beginning to end. In one in stance—a contribution entitled “ Droplet Infection in Typhus?” —he claimed to have tested ten thousand smears without having found any
Rickettsia Prowazeki.
Not a single slide had been prepared, let alone tested!

In the first years the prisoner medical detail, too, consisted of wholly unskilled men. In the course of time, however, it acquired great practical experience. The first Buchenwald Hospital Capo had been a printer in civilian life. His suc cessor, Walter Kramer, had been a lathe hand. Kramer was a powerful, courageous personality. He was a tireless and gifted organizer. In the course of time he acquired high skill in the treatment of wounds and in surgery.

In every camp the job of Hospital Capo was associated with

unusual influence on camp conditions as a whole. The prisoners, therefore, never filled it with an experienced medical man, even when that would have been possible. They always chose someone who was clearly a representative of the ruling prisoner class in camp. A medical man in the leading prisoner function in the hospital would have inevitable precipitated a crisis. He would simply not have been equal to the far-flung network of intrigue that often had a fatal out come.

In some camps prisoner physicians were admitted to the

hospital staff. By 1945 there were some seventy prisoner physicians of every nationality among the 280 male nurses at Buchenwald. Late in 1944 special Barracks Physicians were actually installed, the result of some careful maneuvering by the prisoner administration.

The prisoner hospital was not merely the place where the sick were ostensibly cared for and cured. It was also an ex periment station for the SS medical officers. These ex periments are dealt with in the next chapter, merely touched on here. Dr. Neumann of the Institute of Hygiene of the Waffen SS, for example, excised sections of liver from the healthy body. All of his victims died in agony. Worst among this type of SS physicians was undoubtedly Dr. Eysele. His ac complishments between 1940 and 1943 probably outdid any of the depravities committed by other SS physicians. He too, in order to “ complete his training,” engaged in human vivisection, subsequently killing his victims. He would abduct them indiscriminately from the camp streets, take them to the out-patients’ clinic, and inject them with apomorphine to gloat over the emetic effect. He performed operations and amputations without the slightest reason. He never used anesthesia. One of the very few surviving witnesses is the Netherlands Jew, Max Nebig, whom Eysele used as a guinea pig to perform a stomach resection.

Deliberate killing of patients in the hospitals on the part of

the SS was even more widespread than experimentation. There were, of course, concentration camps, such as Ausch witz, where this was done systematically. When the number of patients exceeded a certain level, the syringe was resorted to. The patient would be held down by two men and would receive an injection of ten cc. carbolic acid directly into the heart.

The SS was very liberal in its diagnosis of “ disease” that in its opinion forfeited a prisoner’s life. In Auschwitz it often happened that newcomers, questioned as to their health, in nocently reported some ailment in hopes of drawing assign ment to a soft detail. By and by they would be ordered to report to the hospital, where they were poisoned.

Groups of death victims were chosen even from among prisoners still fully capable of work. At evening roll call the order would come: “ Roll up your trouser legs!” A medical

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noncom or even a mere Block Leader would pass down the rows and pick out anyone with swollen legs. These “ patients” were ordered to step forward—“ Column right, march!” —to the hospital. There they were taken straight to the morgue. At the entrance stood another medical noncom with a syringe. As many as a hundred prisoners might be dispatched in this fashion in a single night. At Auschwitz it was Sergeant Klahr, a figure of dread, who had hundreds of prisoners on his con science.

On one occasion, at Buchenwald, Dr. Hoven had finished

off a whole row of prisoners with injections of sodium evipan. He strolled from the operating room, a cigarette in his hand, merrily whistling “ The End of a Perfect Day.”

He plied his trade for about a year and a half and there were weeks when, with the complicity of Dr. Plaza, his assistant and later Camp Medical Officer in Dachau, Nordhausen and Ohrdruf, he dispatched dozens of prisoners in the manner described. Yet at the same time he did a great deal for the camp as a whole and for individual prisoners.

Prisoners slated for “ liquidation” were placed in a special hospital room—for some time Room 7. It held ten beds and their occupants never knew what fate awaited them. The room had barred windows and most of the patients thought they were under some form of detention. When the order came to “ transfer” them, they were taken to the operating room. They invariably landed in the morgue. Only in very rare in stances did the victims include incurable cases. Room 7 was often cleared and restocked three or four times a week in this fashion.

But sixty-year-old Master Sergeant Wilhelm, chief medical noncom, nicknamed “ Old Bill” in the hospital, could also adopt other methods. On one occasion a nurse was taking a patient to the bathroom. Wilhelm saw them and roared at the nurse: “ What’s the idea, bathing a wreck like that? We’ll make soap of him!” He noted down the patient’s serial number. That night the patient was promptly “ transferred.”

Under the conditions described no prisoner in his right mind would have ever voluntarily entered the hospital buildings, had he known what went on. But alas, most of the prisoners did not know what was actually happening. This total ignorance was one of the ghastliest facts in the con

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centration camps. Tens o f thousands of newcomers had not a glimmering of what went on, nor did the old-timers who knew enlighten them.The newcomers were much too naive and inex perienced. As evidenced by many tragic examples, they would merely have repeated the tale, boasting with the name of their informants to buttress it. That meant instant retribution.

There were only four ways o f escaping danger. The first was not to fall ill; the second was to work for the under ground, to represent a political asset in the fight against the SS; the third was to maintain good connections with the right people in camp; and the fourth was to be assigned to the hospital detail. None o f these ways offered any guarantee that the prisoner would be spared, and all four together might not suffice to save him. But immunity increased in proportion to these prerequisites.

In every concentration camp where the political prisoners attained any degree of ascendancy, they turned the prisoner hospital, scene of fearful SS horrors that it was, into a rescue station for countless prisoners. Not only were patients ac tually cured wherever possible; healthy prisoners, in danger of being killed or shipped to a death camp, were smuggled on the sick list to put them beyond the clutches of the SS. In special cases, where there was no other way out, men in danger were nominally permitted to “ die,” living on under the names of prisoners who had actually died. Others were simply marked “ sick” or “ incapable of travel” whenever the Political Department sought to include them in a death ship ment—until they were brought to safety by some means or other.

This, of course, meant evasion of control by the SS physicians, a matter often not too difficult, since the zeal of the Camp Medical Officers usually extended only to killing. Otherwise they were conspicuous by their absence. The tuber culosis wards in particular were suitable hiding places for con cealing prisoners for months, sometimes years. The SS men stood in holy terror of infection.

A whole series of old-time inmates were saved in this way. On three occasions I myself was kept from being shipped to Auschwitz for liquidation only by submerging in the TB ward. In this ward, conversely, patients had to watch out, lest they were slated for liquidation precisely because they were there.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL 151

It was a matter of disappearing in time in the event of an SS visit. In the camp jargon this was called “ being on the wire.”

The so-called convalescent clinic was likewise exploited by the prisoners on their own behalf. Not every camp had such an institution. Where it existed, it was counted as a special labor detail, though assignment to it was in the hands of the hospital. It was meant for patients whose ailments were not serious enough for ward treatment, and for convalescents discharged from the wards. The Camp Medical Officers tried to keep down the number of these patients as much as possible.

A “ convalescent slip” authorized a prisoner to spend several days in the barracks or in a special hospital wing. In the early years, “ convalescence” frequently meant that the patients had to carry wood in any weather. Later the con valescent detail was also assigned to carrying stones, bales of prisoner clothing, and soil for the gardening detail!