The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  The thought alone [the good doctor wrote the S.S. Fuehrer] that the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized, so that they would be available for work but precluded from propagation, opens up the most far-reaching perspectives.72

  Another German doctor who had “far-reaching perspectives” was Professor August Hirt, head of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Strasbourg. His special field was somewhat different from those of the others and he explained it in a letter at Christmas time of 1941 to S.S. Lieutenant General Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s adjutant.

  We have large collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available … The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material.

  Professor Hirt did not want the skulls of “Jewish-Bolshevik commissars” already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first be measured while they were alive. Then—

  Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it … in a hermetically sealed tin can.

  Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientific measurements.73 Himmler was delighted. He directed that Professor Hirt “be supplied with everything needed for his research work.”

  He was well supplied. The actual supplier was an interesting Nazi individual by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time on the witness stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent “Doctors’ Trial,” in the latter of which he was a defendant.* Sievers, a former bookseller, had risen to be a colonel of the S.S. and executive secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, one of the ridiculous “cultural” organizations established by Himmler to pursue one of his many lunacies. It had, according to Sievers, fifty “research branches,” of which one was called the “Institute for Military Scientific Research,” which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed, Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at Nuremberg he was dubbed the “Nazi Bluebeard,” after the famous French killer. Like so many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulous diary, and this and his correspondence, both of which survived, contributed to his gallows end.

  By June 1943 Sievers had collected at Auschwitz the men and women who were to furnish the skeletons for the “scientific measurements” of Professor Dr. Hirt at the University of Strasbourg. “A total of 115 persons, including 79 Jews, 30 Jewesses, 4 ‘Asiatics’ and 2 Poles were processed,” Sievers reported, requesting the S.S. main office in Berlin for transportation for them from Auschwitz to the Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg. The British cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to the meaning of “processing.”

  “Anthropological measurements,” Sievers replied.

  “Before they were murdered they were anthropologically measured? That was all there was to it, was it?”

  “And casts were taken,” Sievers added.

  What followed was narrated by S.S. Captain Josef Kramer, himself a veteran exterminator from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and other camps and who achieved fleeting fame as the “Beast of Belsen” and was condemned to death by a British court at Lueneburg.

  Professor Hirt of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute told me of the prisoner convoy en route from Auschwitz. He said these persons were to be killed by poison gas in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler camp, their bodies then to be taken to the Anatomical Institute for his disposal. He gave me a bottle containing about half a pint of salts—I think they were cyanide salts—and told me the approximate dosage I would have to use to poison the arriving inmates from Auschwitz.

  Early in August 1943, I received eighty inmates who were to be killed with the gas Hirt had given me. One night I went to the gas chamber in a small car with about fifteen women this first time. I told the women they had to go into the chamber to be disinfected. I did not tell them, however, that they were to be gassed.

  By this time the Nazis had perfected the technique.

  With the help of a few S.S. men [Kramer continued] I stripped the women completely and shoved them into the gas chamber when they were stark naked.

  When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amount of salt through a tube … and observed through a peephole what happened inside the room. The women breathed for about half a minute before they fell to the floor. After I had turned on the ventilation I opened the door. I found the women lying lifeless on the floor and they were covered with excrements.

  Captain Kramer testified that he repeated the performance until all eighty inmates had been killed and turned the bodies over to Professor Hirt, “as requested.” He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding.

  I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you.

  That, by the way, was the way I was trained.74

  Another witness testified as to what happened next. He was Henry Herypierre, a Frenchman who worked in the Anatomical Institute at Strasbourg as Professor Hirt’s laboratory assistant until the Allies arrived.

  The first shipment we received was of the bodies of thirty women … These thirty female bodies arrived still warm. The eyes were wide open and shining. They were red and bloodshot and were popping from their sockets. There were also traces of blood about the nose and mouth. No rigor mortis was evident.

  Herypierre suspected that they had been done to death and secretly copied down their prison numbers which were tattooed on their left arms. Two more shipments of fifty-six men arrived, he said, in exactly the same condition. They were pickled in alcohol under the expert direction of Dr. Hirt. But the professor was a Utile nervous about the whole thing. “Peter,” he said to Herypierre, “if you can’t keep your trap shut, you’ll be one of them.”

  Professor Dr. Hirt went about his work nonetheless. According to the correspondence of Sievers, the professor severed the heads and, as he wrote, “assembled the skeleton collection which was previously nonexistent.” But there were difficulties and after hearing them described by Dr. Hirt—Sievers himself had no expert medical or anatomical knowledge—the chief of the Ahnenerbe reported them to Himmler on September 5, 1944.

  In view of the vast amount of scientific research involved, the job of reducing the corpses has not yet been completed. This requires some time for 80 corpses.

  And time was running out. Advancing American and French troops were nearing Strasbourg. Hirt requested “directives as to what should be done with the collection.”

  The corpses can be stripped of the flesh and thereby rendered unidentifiable [Sievers reported to headquarters on behalf of Dr. Hirt]. This would mean, however, that at least part of the whole work had been done for nothing and that this unique collection would be lost to science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts afterwards.

  The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could be declared as having been left by the French at the time we took over the Anatomical Institute* and would be turned over for cremating. Please advise me which of the following three proposals is to be carried out: 1. The collection as a whole to be preserved; 2. The collection to be dissolved in part; 3. The collection to be completely dissolved.

  “Why were you wanting to deflesh the bodies, witness?” the British prosecutor asked in the stillness of the Nuremberg courtroom. “Why were you suggesting that the blame should be passed on to the French?”

  “As a layman I could have no opinion in this matter,” the “Nazi Bluebeard” replied. “I merely t
ransmitted an inquiry from Professor Hirt. I had nothing to do with the murdering of these people. I simply carried through the function of a mailman.”

  “You were the post office,” the prosecutor rejoined, “another of these distinguished Nazi post offices, were you?”

  It was a leaky defense offered by many a Nazi at the trials and on this occasion, as on others, the prosecution nailed it.75

  The captured S.S. files reveal that on October 26, 1944, Sievers reported that “the collection in Strasbourg has been completely dissolved in accordance with the directive. This arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation.”76

  Herypierre later described the attempt—not altogether successful—to hide the traces.

  In September, 1944, the Allies made an advance on Belfort, and Professor Hirt ordered Bong and Herr Maier to cut up these bodies and have them burned in the crematory … I asked Herr Maier the next day whether he had cut up all the bodies, but Herr Bong replied: “We couldn’t cut up all the bodies, it was too much work. We left a few bodies in the storeroom.”

  They were discovered there by an Allied team when units of the U.S. Seventh Army, with the French 2nd Armored Division in the lead, entered Strasbourg a month later.†77

  Not only skeletons but human skins were collected by the masters of the New Order though in the latter case the pretense could not be made that the cause of scientific research was being served. The skins of concentration camp prisoners, especially executed for this ghoulish purpose, had merely decorative value. They made, it was found, excellent lamp shades, several of which were expressly fitted up for Frau Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and nicknamed by the inmates the “Bitch of Buchenwald.”* Tattooed skins appear to have been the most sought after. A German inmate, Andreas Pfaffenberger, deposed at Nuremberg on this.

  … All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to the dispensary … After the prisoners had been examined the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further. The finished products were turned over to Koch’s wife, who had them fashioned into lamp shades, and other ornamental household articles.78

  One piece of skin which apparently struck Frau Koch’s fancy had the words “Haensel and Gretel” tattooed on it.

  At another camp, Dachau, the demand for such skins often outran the supply. A Czech physician prisoner, Dr. Frank Bláha, testified at Nuremberg as to that.

  Sometimes we would not have enough bodies with good skin and Dr. Rascher would say, “All right, you will get the bodies.” The next day we would receive twenty or thirty bodies of young people. They would have been shot in the neck or struck on the head, so that the skin would be uninjured … The skin had to be from healthy prisoners and free from defects.79

  It was this Dr. Sigmund Rascher who seems to have been responsible for the more sadistic of the medical experiments in the first place. This horrible quack had attracted the attention of Himmler, among whose obsessions was the breeding of more and more superior Nordic offspring, through reports in S.S. circles that Frau Rascher had given birth to three children after passing the age of forty-eight, although in truth the Raschers had simply kidnaped them at suitable intervals from an orphanage.

  In the spring of 1941, Dr. Rascher, who was attending a special medical course at Munich given by the Luftwaffe, had a brain storm. On May 15, 1941, he wrote Himmler about it. He had found to his horror that research on the effect of high altitudes on flyers was at a standstill because “no tests with human material had yet been possible as such experiments are very dangerous and nobody volunteers for them.”

  Can you make available two or three professional criminals for these experiments … The experiments, by which the subjects can of course die, would take place with my co-operation.80

  The S.S. Fuehrer replied within a week that “prisoners will, of course, be made available gladly for the high-flight research.”

  They were, and Dr. Rascher went to work. The results may be seen from his own reports and from those of others, which showed up at Nuremberg and at the subsequent trial of the S.S. doctors.

  Dr. Rascher’s own findings are a model of scientific jargon. For the high-altitude tests he moved the Air Force’s decompression chamber at Munich to the nearby Dachau concentration camp where human guinea pigs were readily available. Air was pumped out of the contraption so that the oxygen and air pressure at high altitudes could be simulated. Dr. Rascher then made his observations, of which the following one is typical.

  The third test was without oxygen at the equivalent of 29,400 feet altitude conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general condition. Respiration continued for 30 minutes. After four minutes the TP [test person] began to perspire and roll his head.

  After five minutes spasms appeared; between the sixth and tenth minute respiration increased in frequency, the TP losing consciousness. From the eleventh to the thirtieth minute respiration slowed down to three inhalations per minute, only to cease entirely at the end of that period … About half an hour after breathing had ceased, an autopsy was begun.81

  An Austrian inmate, Anton Pacholegg, who worked in Dr. Rascher’s office, has described the “experiments” less scientifically.

  I have personally seen through the observation window of the decompression chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungs ruptured … They would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their eardrums. These cases usually ended in the death of the subject.82

  Some two hundred prisoners were subjected to this experiment before Dr. Rascher was finished with it. Of these, according to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial,” about eighty were killed outright and the remainder executed somewhat later so that no tales would be told.

  This particular research project was finished in May 1942, at which time Field Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe conveyed Goering’s “thanks” to Himmler for Dr. Rascher’s pioneer experiments. A little later, on October 10, 1942, Lieutenant General Dr. Hippke, Medical Inspector of the Air Force, tendered to Himmler “in the name of German aviation medicine and research” his “obedient gratitude” for “the Dachau experiments.” However, he thought, there was one omission in them. They had not taken into account the extreme cold which an aviator faces at high altitudes. To rectify this omission the Luftwaffe, he informed Himmler, was building a decompression chamber “equipped with full refrigeration and with a nominal altitude of 100,000 feet. Freezing experiments,” he added, “along different lines are still under way at Dachau.”83

  Indeed they were. And again Dr. Rascher was in the vanguard. But some of his doctor colleagues were having qualms. Was it Christian to do what Dr. Rascher was doing? Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medics were beginning to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he was infuriated and promptly wrote Field Marshal Milch protesting about the difficulties caused by “Christian medical circles” in the Air Force. He begged the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff to release Rascher from the Air Force medical corps so that he could be transferred to the S.S. He suggested that they find a “non-Christian physician, who should be honorable as a scientist,” to pass on Dr. Rascher’s valuable works. In the meantime Himmler emphasized that he

  personally assumed the responsibility for supplying asocial individuals and criminals who deserve only to die from concentration camps for these experiments.

  Dr. Rascher’s “freezing experiments” were of two kinds: first, to see how much cold a human being could endure before he died; and second, to find the best means of rewarming a person who still lived after being exposed to extreme cold. Two methods were selected to fre
eze a man: dumping him into a tank of ice water or leaving him out in the snow, completely naked, overnight during winter. Rascher’s reports to Himmler on his “freezing” and “warming” experiments are voluminous; an example or two will give the tenor. One of the earliest ones was made on September 10, 1942.