Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Rascher’s experiments, nominally undertaken on behalf of the Luftwaffe, took place mainly during 1942 at Dachau, and Rascher sent reports on their outcome to Himmler; the reactions of the men placed in the Luftwaffe’s low-pressure chambers loaned to Dachau were filmed. In all, nearly 200 men were submitted to these experiments, and over seventy died as a result. Both the reports and photographs survive and were used in evidence during the various trials at Nuremberg. Himmler’s direct personal interest in the experiments is proved by his notorious letter to Rascher dated 13 April 1942:

  ‘The latest discoveries made in your experiments have specially interested me… Experiments are to be repeated on other men condemned to death… Considering the long-continued action of the heart, the experiments should be specifically developed so as to determine whether these men can be revived. Should such an experiment succeed, then the person condemned to death shall of course be pardoned and sent to a concentration camp for life.’

  Himmler’s enthusiasm proved in the end, like Rascher’s, to be that of an amateur. The experiments were considered useless in the eyes of doctors more expert than Rascher, including Himmler’s own medical adviser, Professor Gebhardt, who considered the reports ‘completely unscientific’. The low-pressure chamber was eventually withdrawn from Dachau in March 1942 in spite of Rascher’s strenuous opposition. During the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, a doctor who was accused of assisting Rascher in his experiments but found not guilty, was asked whether he had any scruples about them. He replied: ‘I had no scruples on legal grounds. For I knew that the man who had officially authorized these experiments was Himmler… Consequently, I had no scruples of any kind in that direction. In the sphere of what one may call medical ethics it was rather different. It was a wholly new experience for us all to be offered persons to experiment on… I had to get used to the idea.’ He satisfied himself that experiments of this kind had happened abroad, and that sufficed. Rascher, on the other hand, wrote to Himmler: ‘Your active interest in these experiments has a tremendous influence on one’s working capacity and initiative.’

  In August Rascher, under the supervision of a medical specialist began a second series of tests; these concerned the effects of freezing on the human body and they were considered useful because German pilots were often precipitated into the sea. The experiments were supposed to determine how men subjected to extreme cold could be revived. At the Doctors’ Trial, another of the accused who was found not guilty, gave evidence of a conversation he had had with Himmler:

  DEFENCE COUNSEL: Did Himmler say anything more about supercooling experiments at this meeting?

  DEFENDANT: Yes. He began by saying that the experiments were of the greatest importance to the Army, Air Force and Fleet. He talked at great length about such tests and how they should be conducted… He added that country people often knew excellent remedies which had long proved their worth, such as teas brewed from medicinal herbs… Such popular remedies should by no means be overlooked. He said he could also well imagine that a fisherman’s wife might take her half-frozen husband to bed with her after he had been rescued and warm him up that way… He told Rascher he must certainly experiment in that direction as well…

  DEFENCE COUNSEL: Did Himmler add anything more at these discussions?

  DEFENDANT: He said it certainly would not be asking too much to require concentration camp prisoners, who could not be sent on active service on account of the crimes they had committed, to take part in such experiments;… in that way they could rehabilitate themselves…

  DEFENCE COUNSEL: What impression did you receive from these remarks?

  DEFENDANT: They were of a kind you could not be wholly out of sympathy with in the grave emergency of those days.

  Rascher’s reports began to come in by October 1942, and a conference on the subject attended by nearly a hundred medical officers of the Luftwaffe followed in this same month. After this, one supervising specialist declined to take any further part in the experiments in which around 15 men out of the 50 or so used had already died. Rascher then continued the experiments on his own, and the deaths increased to between 80 and 90. The men, either dressed in flying uniform or stripped, were immersed for periods of up to one and a half hours in water kept a few degrees above freezing. Himmler, again taking a personal interest in the experiments, wrote to Rascher on 24 October: ‘I am very anxious as to the experiments with body warmth’ — though Rascher in a report from Dachau dated 15 August had suggested dispensing with these because the reaction of the frozen men was too slow. Himmler also showed his indignation with those who were criticizing Rascher’s use of human beings. ‘I regard as guilty of treason’, he wrote, ‘… people who, even today, reject these experiments on humans and would instead let sturdy German soldiers die… I shall not hesitate to report these men.’

  Four prostitutes were sent from the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück to supply the animal warmth in which Himmler believed, but one of these girls unfortunately turned out to be German. Rascher remonstrated with her, but she said she had volunteered for six months’ brothel duty in order to secure her future release from the camp. ‘It hurts my racial feelings’, wrote Rascher to Himmler on 5 November, ‘to expose as a prostitute to racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who has the appearance of a pure Nordic.’ So the experiment went on without her, and Himmler came to see the results personally at Dachau on 13 November. In the same month, he wrote to a senior officer in the Luftwaffe, asking for Rascher’s release from the Luftwaffe so that his work could be continued solely under the S.S. ‘These researches’, he wrote, ‘… can be performed by us with particular efficiency because I personally assumed the responsibility for supplying from concentration camps for these experiments anti-social elements and criminals who only deserve to die.’ Now, he went on to complain, Christian medical circles were beginning to protest, and the experiments would best be conducted by the S.S. alone, with a ‘non-Christian physician’ acting as liaison officer between the Luftwaffe and the S.S. He singled out a Dr Holzlöhner as the principal troublemaker.

  Rascher was eventually released from the Luftwaffe so that he could maintain his practices in secrecy. His experiments at Dachau continued, and he sent a detailed report dated 12 February 1943, pointing out how the prospects and fulfilment of sexual intercourse between the frozen men and the prostitutes substantially quickened the return of warmth. He then went on to ask Himmler for yet another favour: could he be removed to Auschwitz — ‘the camp itself is so extensive that less attention will be attracted to the work. For the subjects howl so when they freeze!’ Himmler was conducting other experiments at Auschwitz, and Rascher stayed at Dachau until he was arrested with his wife in 1944 for child abduction: the three children whose birth had so impressed their godfather Himmler had all been misappropriated. According to evidence given at Nuremberg, Himmler prevented any investigation of Rascher’s case; he remained under arrest and was shot at Dachau before the arrival of the Americans. According to Gebhardt, his wife was hanged at the same time ‘at Himmler’s suggestion’.

  Although Rascher in the end proved to be a criminal sadist who took particular delight in causing intense suffering under the mask of science, he was only one of many who worked to satisfy Himmler’s obsession with medical experiment. During 1942—4 the work went on in a number of camps. In addition to the experiments with mustard gas and phosgene, which as we have seen began as early as 1939, Professor Gebhardt, Himmler’s personal physician and consultant surgeon of the Waffen S.S., took charge of the sulphonamide tests on women at Ravensbrück, which was only eight miles from his orthopaedic clinic at Hohenlychen. These tests were initiated by Himmler as a response to the Allied use of sulphonamides and penicillin, knowledge of which was reaching the German soldiers and affecting morale. In May 1942 Himmler held a conference at which Gebhardt and the Chief of the S.S. Medical Service were present, and undoubtedly Heydrich’s death in Prague from gangrene influenced the decision
taken by Hitler and Himmler to order the experimental infection of Polish women under sentence of death at Ravensbrück with gas-gangrenous wounds. This work was supervised by the chief of the S.S. Medical Service and Gebhardt, and various sulphonamide preparations were tested on these ‘rabbit girls’, as they were called. Dr Fritz Fischer, one of Gebhardt’s assistants at Hohenlychen and a senior medical man working on these experiments, which inflicted the most fearful pain on the victims, said at the Doctors’ Trial:

  ‘Loyalty to the State appeared to me at that period, when some 1,500 soldiers were falling daily on active service and several hundred people were dying daily behind the lines as a result of war conditions, to be the supreme moral duty. I believed we were offering reasonable chances of survival to the subjects of our experiments, who were living under German law and could not otherwise escape the death penalty… I was not then a doctor in civil life, free to take his own decisions. I was… a medical expert bound to act in exactly the same way as a soldier under discipline.’

  From Himmler’s point of view as expressed at his conference in May, the women were being granted ‘an excellent chance of reprieve’.

  Among the worst experiments in the camps were those that developed from the cruel, clumsy attempts to achieve methods of mass sterilization. These began as early as the autumn of 1941, when it became clear that the extermination of the races in the East could be effected most easily by such means. A scheme for sterilization by drugs was presented to Himmler in October 1941 by a specialist in venereal disease. ‘The thought alone that the three million Bolsheviks at present German prisoners could be sterilized so that they could be used as labourers but be prevented from reproduction, open the most far-reaching perspectives’, he wrote. Himmler was interested and authorized that ‘sterilization experiments should in any case be carried out in the concentration camps’. All experiments in sterilization drugs proved abortive, but Viktor Brack had already, in March 1941, sent Himmler a report on ‘experiments with Röntgen castration’, recommending the use of ‘high X-ray dosages’ which ‘destroy the internal secretion of the ovary, or of the testicles, respectively’. Exposure to the rays, Brack pointed out, would take only two minutes for men and three for women, and could be administered without their knowledge while, for example, they filled in forms at a counter. Severe burns would result, however, within a few days or weeks and ‘other tissues of the body will be injured’. Brack presented his scheme again a year later, in June 1942, stating that ‘castration by X-ray… is not only relatively cheap but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time’.

  The following year the experiments began in Auschwitz and its subsidiary camp at Birkenau, where young Polish Jews were operated upon by X-ray, which caused them great pain in spite of which they were forced to continue at work. Subsequently many of them were castrated by normal means so that their testicles could be examined. These experiments continued until the end of April 1944, when Brack’s successor reported to Himmler that mass sterilization by X-ray could no longer be considered practicable.

  Another experimenter, a professor from Upper Silesia, was given the opportunity to attempt sterilization of women prisoners in Ravensbrück, though Rudolf Brandt wrote to him on 10 July 1943: ‘Before you start your job, the Reichsführer would be interested to learn from you how long it would take to sterilize a thousand Jewesses’. He envisaged checking results by ‘locking up a Jewess and Jew together for a certain period and then seeing what results are achieved’. The professor’s method was to inject inflammatory liquid into the uterus, the results of which could be examined by X-ray. It was administered without anaesthetics, and children were among the victims. The numbers may now never be known who suffered from these cruel and fearful tests. Evidence was given at the Doctors’ Trial by a few survivors.

  In 1943 the experiments were extended to epidemic hepatitis virus research at Sachsenhausen. ‘I approve that eight criminals condemned in Auschwitz [eight Jews of the Polish Resistance Movement condemned to death] should be used for these experiments’, wrote Himmler to a doctor on 16 June 1943. ‘Casualties must be expected’, he had been warned a fortnight earlier. Phlegmon was artificially induced by doctors at Dachau, the subjects chosen in this case being Catholic priests; Gebhardt claimed that he had protested to Himmler about this, but that the Reichsführer S.S., eager to ‘dig up old popular remedies out of the rubbish heap’ as a challenge to the academic medicine which he despised, had refused to have the work stopped.

  Ravensbrück was so conveniently near to Gebhardt’s clinic at Hohenlychen, that he took advantage of experiments in bone transplantation which had been developed in the camp, with the ‘special approval’ of Himmler, to steal the shoulder-blade of a female prisoner and transfer it to one of his private patients.

  In the autumn of 1943 Himmler personally intervened in a dispute about the choice of subjects for the typhus vaccine experiments at the special centre which had been set up in Buchenwald under Grawitz in 1941. Himmler’s instructions were that only persons under sentence of at least ten years’ penal servitude were to be used. Similar experiments were undertaken at Natzweiler camp in 1943 under the initial supervision of a professor of hygiene. In July 1944, Himmler authorized the use of gypsies for testing the possibility of drinking sea-water; since he regarded the gypsies as scarcely human, he added that ‘for checking’ three other, more normal people, should be added to the subject-list.

  Himmler as a standard-bearer at the barricades the November putsch in Munich

  Himmler’s house at Gmuud

  The process of extermination that had begun with the insane in 1940 was continued in the case of many mentally defective and deformed children; Himmler’s orders, as far as defective children in the camps were concerned, were quite explicit; they must be done away with along with other ‘incurables’. In June 1942 Himmler gave consent to the ‘special treatment’ of tubercular Poles. Only in 1943, when the working capacity of all prisoners was regarded as important, was a special order from Himmler circulated to the Camp Commandants that ‘in future only insane prisoners can be selected for Action 14f 13’, the reference number for euthanasia. ‘All other prisoners unfit for work (persons suffering from tuberculosis, bedridden invalids, etc.) are definitely to be excluded from this action. Bedridden prisoners were to be given suitable work which can be performed in bed.’ There is evidence, however, that the extermination of sick and unwanted prisoners did in fact continue.

  In July 1942, as we have seen, an Institute for Practical Research in Military Science was founded by Himmler inside his Ancestral Heritage Community, the Ahnenerbe. This Institute, working in close association with the Reich University of Strasbourg, began to assemble the collection of skeletons and skulls of Jews under the supervision of an expert on anatomy, who on 9 February 1942 had urged Himmler to help his researches by enabling him to procure ‘the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars who personify a repulsive yet characteristic subhumanity’. Himmler formally agreed on 23 February, and by the autumn Sievers, the manager of Ahnenerbe, was able to report to Eichmann in a memorandum headed ‘Assembling of a skeleton collection’ that a consignment of 115 persons, including 30 Jewesses, was to be made available. They were gassed the following year at Oranienburg by Joseph Kramer, who subsequently described under examination, with the cold exactitude of a good technician, precisely how he and his men carried out their tasks. The gas was provided by Hirt, and the bodies were sent direct to the Institute for preservation in tanks. A witness at the Institute described the first delivery, the remains of the thirty murdered Jewesses: ‘The bodies were still warm when they arrived. Their eyes were wide open and glazing. Their eyeballs were bloodshot, red and protuberant. There were also traces of blood about the noses and mouths… There was no sign of rigor mortis.’ Consignments of male bodies followed at intervals.

  Himmler was very proud of the research that he had instituted and his relationship to the Ahnenerbe organization. Giving hi
s evasive evidence during the Doctors’ Trial, Gebhardt said:

  ‘He became, I am now told, President of Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Community. He was the centre of… the so-called Friends of Himmler circle which he founded. It was a dangerous mixture of eccentric individuals and industrialists. From that quarter he obtained both the funds and the encouragement to undertake the thousand and one schemes which he put into operation. I have an idea that the extraordinary, newly-founded Institute where all these scientific friends of his met was in fact the Ancestral Heritage Community. Himmler, in a word, as I have often pointed out, was attached to a crazy, completely false notion of antiquity… The danger lay in the fact that it was always he who made the decisions.’

  Thus Himmler, who was too reserved a man to extend his power over the surface of Germany in the flamboyant manner of Goring, sent his roots deep into the subterranean earth of the camps, creating there a life-in-death for a vast but hidden community that was to absorb and destroy millions of Europeans, and most of all the Jews. This was to become the secret empire of death rejected by the conscience of the German people who, though they were in varying degrees aware of its existence, did so little to oppose it. Himmler, armed with the executive savagery of Heydrich, largely severed himself and his activities from the attention of the other leaders, leaving them to exercise control over the life of Germany and its captured territories while he developed the processes of death in order to purify the race he believed he was born to make paramount. He sank himself deeper and deeper into his racial obsessions and their outward manifestations in the Lebensborn institutions, the researches of the Institute for the Study of Heredity, and the overwhelming task of eliminating the suffocating presence of the Jews and Slavs in Eastern Europe. From the West he was for some while largely excluded because of Hitler’s desire to come to some sort of favourable terms with this area while he crushed opposition in the East through the invasion of Soviet Russia. Only later was Himmler permitted to extend the full measure of his persecution to the resistance movements in the West.