KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  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.225

  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.226 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.”227

  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.228 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.229 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.230

  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.231

  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.232

  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.233

  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.234 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.235

  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.236 Similar scenes took place in other KL, where the Camp SS assisted do
ctors as they abused and killed prisoners to aid their careers and help Germany win the war.

  Killing for Victory

  On August 14, 1942, Władislawa Karołewska, 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, Karołewska 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 Karołewska 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.”237

  Władislawa Karołewska’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 Karołewska, 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 st
udent, 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