The Theory and Practice of Hell (37 page)

In January 1942, eighty-two of the 7,964 Buchenwald in mates were assigned to the convalescent clinic. In March 1945, with some 30,000 of a total of 82,400 prisoners actually in the base camp, there were 1,542 convalescents—roughly five per cent, as against slightly more than one per cent three years earlier.

Here too a persistent campaign against the SS had resulted in many gains for the prisoners. By way of the convalescent clinic many old camp inmates were able to enjoy a kind of an nual vacation. There was always the danger of a sudden check, of course. It happened at times that substitutes from the wards had to “ stand in” for up to twenty-five per cent of the “ convalescents,” who were not sick at all. As soon as the prisoner grapevine had announced the impending inspection, the nurses would drag out the genuine patients, who had no idea of what was going on and were naturally in great fear. They simply stood in line for the required half hour, while the pseudo-convalescents “ vamoosed.” Camp conditions being what they were, even convalescence was not available to every prisoner who needed it. As a rule it could not be brought off without “ pull.”

Chapter Fourteen SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

Among the most dreaded institutions in the large camps were the isolation wards for so-called scientific experiments. Here human vivisection, practiced without rhyme or reason in the camp hospitals generally, was put on a systematic and pseudo scientific basis. Not that these programs were confined to the isolation wards. The camp hospitals and certain outside in stallations often participated.

The experiments conducted by the SS directly, or by Ger man Air Force scientists and physicians under SS tutelage, were initiated by various central agencies. Not one of them was undertaken without the knowledge and express authorization of Himmler. Some of them he ordered himself, at the suggestion of certain official, semi-official, or private interests, through the Experimental Department V at Leipzig, which developed much initiative in these fields, from the testing of domestic and exotic plant poisons to the develop ment of chemical protectants against burns and the use of ar tificial glands. Other agencies through which Himmler operated were the Institute of Hygiene of the
Waffen SS
in Berlin and even the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office.

Most of the experiments, and by far the worst, were con ducted at Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Ravensbriick and Auschwitz. The co-operating agencies in cluded not only the German armed services, but also great in dustrial corporations like I. G. Farben and the Behring Works, as well as German scientific institutes and individual scientists. Co-operation with the SS might be quite open, or it might be under some form of camouflage. When the par ticipants learned the naked truth—-namely, that the ex periments were to be conducted on concentration-camp prisoners, they were officially advised that the experimental human subjects were arch criminals under sentence of death, and had been especially designated for the purpose by Him mler himself.

I myself, for more than two years, from March 1943 to April 1945, served as a so-called Ward Clerk at Buchenwald, and during this period the secret lists of prisoners selected for these experiments passed through my hands. I know of no single case in which one of these human guinea pigs had been previously sentenced to death by a court of law. I am reliably informed that the situation was no different in the other camps. The official agencies that participated, as well as the individuals, some of them men of standing, never seriously inquired whether the SS was telling the truth or not. In actual practice the human subjects were for years picked by camp . headquarters by methods now familiar. They were generally convicts and homosexuals, with a sprinkling of political prisoners of all nationalities.

After 1944, when the SS in the concentration camps had already reached such a stage of disintegration that it rejected full responsibility for such undertakings, the selection of human experimental subjects was frequently left to the Reich Criminal Police Office in Berlin and its chief, SS Major-General Nebe, already mentioned.1

1 A number of important post-war publications, especially
To the Bitter End
by H. G. Gisevius, and
Germany’s Underground
by Allen Dulles, as well as testimony in the great Nuremberg trials, have described Nebe as one of the most active supporters of the anti-Nazi opposition. He was, indeed, executed after July 20, 1944. In the first German edition of this book, I called him “ the least-known and most pitiless functionary of the SS machine.** I said that “ he later turned opportunist, trying to get off the doomed Nazi bus . . . by joining the conspiracy of July 20, 1944.** So far as the man*s character and motives are

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL 155

It is impossible, within the scope of this book, to give a full report on all the human experiments conducted in the con centration camps. Such documented report would require another full-size book.1 I can convey no more than a barely adequate picture of the chief experiments, merely mentioning a few of the others.

In the late fall of 1941 the Institute of Hygiene of the
Waf fen SS
in Berlin opened a clinical laboratory for its “ Division for Typhus and Virus Research” at Buchenwald. In 1942 this was transferred to Isolation Ward 46, surrounded by double barbed wire.

The installation was established by Dr. Joachim Mrugowsky, then an SS colonel, after consultation with Lieutenant-General Handloser,2 German Army Medical In-

concerned, I now correct this judgment. Almost from the outset, Nebe had serious qualms of conscience. Especially in the later years he sought time and again, by means of flight or suicide, to extricate himself from the foul and mur derous entanglements in which he had become enmeshed. His friends among the Nazi and anti-Nazi opposition always prevailed on him to remain and keep the important resources at his disposal available to them. Thus he played his dual role down to the bitter end at the hands of the executioner. Contrary to the views of many of his friends, I believe that this policy was
inadmissible.
In my own case, I successfully exploited my influence over SS Major Ding-Schuler, chief of the Buchenwald experiment station, time and again to the end of
preventing
important opposition actions from being covered by the
murder
of third persons. No matter how liberally the right of active self-defense against the immediate enemy is interpreted, the life of innocent persons puts an in surmountable limit to our actions. Nebe cannot be exculpated from having taken over command of a special liquidation unit in the east—even though he may have evaded some of its more frightful assignments—nor from having designated human experimental subjects for the concentration-camp laboratories. Such activities cannot be justified by simultaneous opposition work, nor by the avowed purpose of camouflaging such work, nor by the ap parent impossibility of evading the consequences of earlier errors in any other way. I am today convinced, however, despite the light in which I came to see Nebe and his work, that he was by no means merely the pitiless SS functionary and opportunist whom I described in the first edition. His figure is invested with a certain aura of tragedy—insofar as it is possible to speak of tragedy in the case of any votary of so evil a cause. It was not by mere chance, after all, that a man like Nebe ascended to the rank of SS major-general and chief of the Reich Criminal Police Office.

1
Doctors o f Infamy
, by Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke (New York: Henry Schuman, 1949).—
Tr.

2 Mrugowsky and Handloser were defendants in the so-called Nazi Medical Trial before an American Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1947. Both were convicted and hanged.—
Tr.

spector; Reich Health Leader Conti, an SS major-general; the chief of the Reich Health Office, Professor Reiter; and the chief of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin (Reich Institute for the Control of Contagious Diseases), Professor Gildemeister.

On December 29, 1941, a diary entry records the establish ment of the clinic with the following unabashed comment: “ Since animal experiments cannot provide adequate evaluation [of typhus serums], experiments must be con ducted on men.” SS Major Ding-Schuler was charged with the conduct of the experiments. By the end of 1944 there had been twenty-four series of experiments, the number of subjects in each ranging from four to forty, and even sixty—on one oc casion there were 145 in a group. The tests concerned the ef ficacy of typhus serums of different origin: the egg-yolk-sac culture produced by the Behring Works after the process worked out by Cox, Gildemeister and Haagen; the Weigl serum, produced from the entrails of lice by the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research of the Army High Command at Cracow; the Durand-Giroud serum, prepared from rabbit lungs at the Pasteur Institute, Paris; a dog-lung serum by the process developed by Cantacuzino, Bucharest, and a Danish serum from mouse livers, both made available by Professor Rose,1 chief of the Division for Tropical Medicine of the Robert Koch Institute, Berlin; and finally certain drugs, such as nitro-acridine and methylene-blue from I. G. Farben (Professor Lautenschlager2); rutenol from the same firm (a diary entry of April 14, 1944, reports that “ SS Major Ding and detail at I. G. Farben, Hochst, for discussions with Professor Lautenschlager, Dr. Weber, and Dr. Fussganger, concerning the experimental series on acridine granulate and rutenol in the Buchenwald concentration camp” 3); and a drug