KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  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

  Scientific Executioners

  After the war, the physicians behind the KL experiments were often depicted as solitary and mad scientists like Dr. Frankenstein, laboring secretly on macabre schemes.249 The truth is less lurid and more disturbing. Most research was inspired by what passed for mainstream scientific thinking, and many perpetrators were respected members of the medical community. Men like Professor Grawitz and Professor Gebhardt belonged to the German medical elite (as well as to the new SS aristocracy).250 So did Professor Clauberg, who was so well respected as a gynecologist that a senior WVHA officer brought his wife, who had suffered several miscarriages, all the way from Berlin to Auschwitz for an exclusive consultation.251

  Even the men behind the most gruesome experiments were no rank outsiders. Granted, perhaps Dr. Sigmund Rascher was a psychopath, as several historians have contended. But his experiments were driven, at least initially, by Germany’s perceived military needs; hence the eager cooperation of the air force, whose scientists had called for the air pressure, freezing, and seawater experiments in Dachau.252 As for Dr. Josef Mengele, although his crimes seem to speak for themselves—an Auschwitz prisoner doctor later called him a sadistic “subhuman” who was “veritably insane”—his peers saw him in a different light. Unlike Rascher, Mengele was an academic highflier and he remained associated with his venerable teacher Professor Verschuer. Human organs harvested by Mengele were analyzed at Verschuer’s institute, which was part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the elite organization for scientific research in Germany (renamed the Max Planck Society in 1948) that did much to support Nazi racial policy. Mengele also supplied blood samples from “persons of the most diverse racial backgrounds,” as Verschuer put it, for a project on protein funded by the highly respected German Research Association (DFG), which supported several other human experiments in the KL, such as Professor Schilling’s malaria experiments in Dachau.253

  Complicity extended far into the wider German scientific community. The experiments were an open secret, at least in some circles, even if it was considered poor form
to talk about them. Senior medical officers in the German armed forces were especially well informed, thanks to papers at medical congresses. One such meeting in October 1942 brought together more than ninety leading air force doctors and hypothermia specialists in a plush Nuremberg hotel, where they were initiated into the Dachau freezing experiments. The presentation, led by Professor Ernst Holzlöhner from the University of Kiel, included remarks by Dr. Rascher that left no doubt that some prisoners had died during the experiments; not one physician in the audience raised concerns. Some perpetrators even published details about their work in scientific journals and books. While they remained quiet about the abuse of prisoners, one could read between the lines that the experiments must have taken place in the KL; it did not require forensic skills to figure out that trials on “test persons” in “Dachau” had involved prisoners.254

  The German pharmaceutical industry was involved as well. As early as 1941, Dr. Hellmuth Vetter, a Bayer employee (IG Farben) who also served as a Camp SS doctor, was testing a range of sulfonamide drugs on Dachau prisoners. He was delighted to be able to “put our new products to the practical test,” he wrote to his colleagues in the company headquarters, and he assured them that he enjoyed the food, accommodation, and company of the SS: “I feel like I am in paradise here.” Vetter later moved on to other camps, administering potentially lethal drugs (developed by IG Farben) in Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Meanwhile, Buchenwald became a veritable “laboratory of the pharmaceutical industry,” in the words of the historian Ernst Klee, as drug companies vied to test their products on prisoners infected by the SS with typhus.255

  Looking at the enthusiastic participation of physicians in medical torture and murder, it is worth recalling that German doctors were among the most fervent supporters of National Socialism, which promised them a national renewal and a brighter professional future. During the Third Reich, half of all male physicians joined the Nazi Party and seven percent the SS. Nazi biopolitics not only increased the standing of doctors; it also encouraged a shift in medical norms. Measures like mass sterilization made clear from early on that the health of the “national community” was everything and that “community aliens” had no rights.256

  Once the KL experiments were under way, they created their own dynamic, further extending ethical boundaries. Take the case of Professor Gerhard Rose, the head of the department for tropical medicine at the famous Robert Koch Institute. In May 1943, Rose attended a conference during which Dr. Ding from Buchenwald gave a paper on typhus experiments. To everyone’s surprise, Professor Rose openly challenged Ding, attacking his trials as a fundamental break with medical convention. Put on the back foot, Dr. Ding claimed (falsely) that he was only using criminals already sentenced to death. The flustered chairman quickly ended the discussion. But Professor Rose’s principled stance did not last; as human experimentation became more commonplace, he wanted his own research to benefit, too. Just a few months after his attack on Ding, he contacted the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS and proposed a new typhus vaccine for tests in Buchenwald. Himmler agreed to a trial on so-called professional criminals and Dr. Ding was happy to help his erstwhile critic; the experiment took place in Buchenwald in March 1944, killing six prisoners.257

  Forced to defend his experiments at the conference in 1943, Dr. Ding had rightly assumed that many of his colleagues would have few objections to killing selected enemies of the state, especially those who were already doomed. There can be no doubt that the use of KL inmates, whose lives counted for little anyway, helped to ease any misgivings about the experiments. The physicians also stressed the utilitarian nature of their trials. Since invalids were being gassed “in certain chambers” anyway, Sigmund Rascher rhetorically asked in summer 1942 (in a veiled reference to Action 14f13), would it not be better to test “our different chemical warfare agents” on them?258 Similar arguments were heard elsewhere in the Third Reich. State prisoners were abused as “guinea pigs,” too, and one doctor collected the blood of guillotined inmates for transfusions in his local hospital; otherwise, he reasoned at the time, the blood just “flows off without use.”259

  The allure of amoral science even captivated some prisoners. Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, an accomplished forensic pathologist, was deported with other Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz in May 1944. The SS spared his life because he was healthy and spoke fluent German, and thanks to his medical skills he soon became a prisoner doctor at the Birkenau crematoria complex. His superior was none other than Josef Mengele, with Nyiszli serving as his pathology expert; he assisted in murders, dissected twins, wrote up reports, and prepared corpses for skeleton collections. Although he knew all about the depravity of Nazi race science, and was appalled by it, Nyiszli’s passion for science occasionally carried him away. Writing soon after the war, he referred to the “vast possibilities for research” in the camp, and recalled with excitement the “curious” and “extremely interesting” medical phenomena he had uncovered during autopsies, and which he had discussed at length, like any medical colleague would, with Dr. Mengele.260

  As for the victims, a few were saved by the experiments, paradoxically. They were butchered, but escaped certain death at the hands of the SS. The two young Czech brothers Zdenĕk and Jiři Steiner, for example, survived Auschwitz only because Dr. Mengele had claimed them for his experiments. Once, he apparently struck their names from a list of prisoners selected for the gas chamber. “Luckily, Mengele heard about it and saved us,” the brothers testified in 1945, “because he still needed us.”261

  Many more victims, however, were butchered and killed. Overall, the SS targeted more men than women, not only because they were more numerous in the KL, but because the war experiments were meant to benefit German soldiers. Most victims stood near the bottom of the Nazi racial scale, with Poles making up the largest national group of victims. At times, the SS could not agree whom to target. When it came to forcing prisoners to drink seawater, different officials proposed different “guinea pigs.” Richard Glücks from the WVHA wanted to use Jews; Arthur Nebe from the RSHA suggested “asocial half-Gypsies”; both were opposed by SS Reich physician Ernst Robert Grawitz, who argued that the victims had to “racially resemble the European population.” In the end, no inmate groups were safe. After all, Himmler himself had announced in 1942 that one reason for selecting KL prisoners for potentially lethal trials was that they were “deserving of death”—a label that could be applied to pretty much any inmate, as far as the SS was concerned.262

  Not even children were exempt, and from 1943 more and more were targeted. They stood at the center of Mengele’s twin experiments in Auschwitz, as we have seen, and they were also dispatched from there to other concentration camps. In November 1944, for example, the SS sent a group of twenty Jewish children for tuberculosis trials to Neuengamme, where they would meet a terrible fate. Among them was the twelve-year-old Georges Kohn. He had been deported from Drancy in August 1944 together with his father, the director of the Paris Hôpital Baron de Rothschild (the largest Jewish hospital in France), and five other members of his family. By the time the train pulled into Auschwitz, Georges was all alone, except for his eighty-year-old grandmother: an older brother and sister had escaped from the train, his mother and another sister were in Bergen-Belsen, and his father, Armand, was in Buchenwald. His father would be the only one to survive the KL; he returned to Paris after the war, a sick man, and never learned what had happened to his youngest son.263

  Armand Kohn had been among a vast number of Jewish prisoners deported to Buchenwald and other KL inside the old German borders during the later stages of the war. Their arrival marked a major shift in policy. By 1944, the regime’s desire for forced labor had become so all-consuming that it trumped some hallowed principles of Nazi racial thinking. After years of feverish ethnic cleansing had made much of the Reich and its concentration camps “free of Jews,” as Himmler had demanded, the regime reversed this course in a bid to build up its slave labor force.264 The mass influx
of Jewish prisoners far into Nazi Germany was part of a wider transformation of the KL system, which saw the emergence of hundreds of new camps and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of new prisoners. The concentration camps were entering a new phase, which probably began sometime around autumn 1943, when an eerie new camp was set up in the Harz Mountains. Its name was Dora.

  9

  Camps Unbound

  Dust was swirling in the long and narrow tunnel, deep inside the Kohnstein mountain. Through the haze, illuminated by five dim lights, one could make out rows and rows of wooden bunks, four tiers high, crammed together on the slimy ground that was filled with pools of water seeping from the walls. Slumped on the low bunks lay gaunt figures in torn uniforms, some covered with thin blankets, others with empty cement bags; the mattresses were full of lice and filth, as were the masses of prisoners. It was the same scene in three adjacent underground chambers, all of them some 250 to 300 feet long and 40 feet wide. Together, these four tunnels were the sleeping quarters for around ten thousand KL prisoners who toiled in the Dora satellite camp in late 1943.

  Dora assaulted all the senses. The air in the sleeping tunnels was unbearable, a mix of sweat, urine, excrement, vomit, and rotting corpses. During five months inside the Dora tunnels, the Polish inmate Wincenty Hein recalled, he only had three brief showers; some prisoners urinated on their hands to wash the dirt from their faces. There were no toilets anyway, just open petrol drums that added to the stench. Prisoners gasped for breath, and they were also tormented by hunger and thirst, forbidden to touch the underground water pipes. Sleep was almost impossible inside the chambers, not least because of the deafening noise of machines, pickaxes, and explosions coming from other tunnels nearby, which reverberated through the prisoner quarters. Dora never fell silent, as inmates worked in two shifts around the clock, digging, moving machinery, and laying tracks through the maze of tunnels. Roll calls on the outside had long been abandoned and prisoners lost all sense of night and day. “I felt like I was buried alive,” the Dutch prisoner Albert van Dijk later wrote.